Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial 9042019956, 9789042019959

Citation preview

Cheeky Fictions

91

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Cheeky Fictions Laughter and the Postcolonial

Edited by

Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 90-420-1995-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgements Thank you to our contributors for their enthusiasm and dedication to Cheeky Fictions. We would also like to express our gratitude to Manfred Pfister, who welcomed this volume into the IFAVL-series. At Rodopi we would like to thank Marieke Schilling and Fred van der Zee. We are also indebted to Jessica Walter, Nilüfer Caglayan, Jonathan Sharp, and Bryan David Aja for their help with indexing, formatting, and copy-editing and to Stefan Ehricke, who designed the cover. The cover design, based on an idea by Barbara Becker, shows a sculpture by an anonymous Zimbabwean artist.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

SUSANNE REICHL/MARK STEIN: Introduction

1

I. Laughter’s double vision – Humour and cultural ambiguity ULRIKE ERICHSEN: Smiling in the face of adversity: How to use humour to defuse cultural conflict

27

ANTHONY ILONA: ‘Laughing through the tears’: Mockery and self-representation in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance

43

VIRGINIA RICHTER: Laughter and aggression: Desire and derision in a postcolonial context

61

HELGA RAMSEY-KURZ: Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi

73

II. Traditions and transgressions – Writing back and forth HEINZ ANTOR: Postcolonial laughter in Canada: Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk

89

SUSAN LEVER: The colonizer’s gift of cursing: Satire in David Foster’s Moonlite

107

MICHAEL MEYER: Swift and Sterne revisited: Postcolonial parodies in Rushdie and Singh-Toor

117

DETLEF GOHRBANDT: After-laughter, or the comedy of decline: Ronald Searle’s critique of postwar Englishness in The Rake’s Progress 131 III. Ethnic cabaret – A license to laugh? MITA BANERJEE: Queer laughter: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and the normative as comic

149

VIII ASTRID FELLNER/KLAUS HEISSENBERGER: ‘I was born in East L.A.’: Humour and the displacement of nationality and ethnicity

161

CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE: ‘The sketch’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the audience’: Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies in Britain, the United States, and Germany

177

IV. The language of humour – The humour of language MARGIT OZVALDA: Worlds apart: Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

193

SUSANNE PICHLER: Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet

207

SUSANNE MÜHLEISEN: What makes an accent funny, and why? Black British Englishes and humour televised

225

V. Laughing it off – Does therapeutic humour work? MAGGIE ANN BOWERS: ‘Ethnic glue’: Humour in Native American literatures

247

ANNIE GAGIANO: Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy: Three unusual African English novels

257

GISELA FEURLE: Madam & Eve – Ten Wonderful Years: A cartoon strip and its role in post-apartheid South Africa

271

WENDY WOODWARD: Laughing back at the kingfisher: Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and postcolonial humour

287

INDEX

301

CONTRIBUTORS

311

SUSANNE REICHL AND MARK STEIN

Introduction

I must warn you, reader, that it is not the purpose of this book to make you laugh. As you know, nothing kills the laugh quicker than to explain a joke. I intend to explain all jokes, and the proper and logical outcome will be, not only that you will not laugh now, but that you will never laugh again. So prepare for the descending gloom. – Eastman (1937) Laughter itself cannot be rationally located; its ridicula, too, resist the grip of those categories which presuppose meaning. – Köhler (1997, our translation)

F

rom V.S. Naipaul to Meera Syal, from Mordecai Richler to Zakes Mda: laughter is a central element, humour a key feature, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial cultural practice. Samuel Selvon’s subtle comedy, Salman Rushdie’s hilarious verbal exploits, Zadie Smith’s multicultural ‘lip’: by different means and to various ends they all provoke laughter. Although the humorous qualities of many postcolonial texts are not to be doubted, so far no sustained attempt to analyse these features and their significance has been undertaken. Opening up further this wide and promising field of research is the remit of this collection of essays. This book brings together essays commissioned from an international group of specialists in postcolonial studies, whose analyses of anglophone postcolonial cultural production raise questions about the strategic use of what can loosely be termed ‘laughter’ – in all its manifestations. Here, laughter is not considered a cultural attribute of a specific postcolonial space or a marker of an inherent Otherness; laughter is rather considered a device

2

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

which is self-consciously employed and strategically positioned in textual constructions – or an effect elicited by these constructions. Whilst marketing departments acknowledge and exploit laughter in postcolonial cultural production – with dust jackets featuring tags such as ‘lorry load[s] of laughs as East meets West,’1 cultural criticism, in stark opposition to such simplifications, has remained virtually silent on the multifarious connections between laughter and the postcolonial. Literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a curious reluctance – a restraint verging on the pious – towards the functions of laughter. Occasionally, individual terms and concepts are mentioned,2 but more sustained critical engagement with laughter and humour is strikingly rare. Why is humour such an uneasy bedfellow, why laughter – apparently – an abomination to postcolonial studies? The problem seems to lie with a basic misconceptualisation of the nature of laughter, which is often seen as either slighting a serious subject matter or simply indicating light-hearted entertainment. By contrast, postcolonial critique is concerned with the frequently grave consequences of colonialism and its aftermath. Are we therefore dealing with opposed and even irreconcilable areas? One of our contributors points out that laughter and literature go back a long way, sharing an ‘age-old conjunction between humorous laughter on the one hand and seriousness of purpose on the other’ (Antor 89, below). Laughter has to be taken seriously indeed, and this is what we are doing in this collection. Quite predictably, what little work on humour exists can be subsumed under an interventionist stance – for postcolonial critique is concerned with theorizing engagement, with analysing agency for the marginalized and, in some quarters, even with creating agency.3 We are joining ranks, then, with some few scholars who have worked on the subversive or satiric side of humour and laughter in postcolonial literature.4 But we are at the same time 1 2

3

4

This quotation is taken from the cover of Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996). There are no book-length studies of laughter and the postcolonial that go beyond a narrow, interventionist stance. Benson and Connolly’s Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2005) contains entries on ‘hoaxes and jokes’ and ‘humour and satire,’ the latter differentiated into various postcolonial regions. These entries support our view that not enough theoretical work has been done and that there is a great deal of disagreement as to what should be categorised as humour. Other postcolonial scholars deal with irony (such as Castle: 518) or the carnivalesque (Goldberg and Quayson: 360), but in the major panoptic texts and collections of recent years, the issue is absent (as, for instance, in Boehmer; Walder; Hawley; Ashcroft et al. 1998; Thieme; McLeod; and Young 2003). Frequently postcolonial critique is idealistically conceptualised as an enterprise creating agency for marginalised peoples or groups; whilst a desirable aim, this can hardly be considered a defining feature of this (or any other) academic subfield. For a critique of this ‘postcolonial imperative’ see Stein. John Clement Ball’s study on the postcolonial satire of 2003 is an example.

Introduction

3

trying to enlarge the scope of postcolonial studies by including in our analyses what lies beyond the interventionist stance. In this way, this book not only works towards closing some methodological and conceptual gaps; it also adds new facets to postcolonial studies and humour theory.

Theorizing laughter and the postcolonial Theories of laughter abound. They are as mottled and date back almost as far as the object they seek to define; nevertheless, they present an unruly and discordant range, with plenty of contradiction and disagreement. Therefore, writing an introduction such as this one is an exercise fraught with heightened self-consciousness: on the one hand, there are a number of points that we need to state clearly, but on the other, some of them have been propounded again and again in similar introductions so that their reiteration in our context might seem a mere finger-exercise. What is more, in researching humour theory we are faced not only with those who meticulously account for humour and laughter, proceeding with scientific rigour, whilst at the other end of the spectrum we encounter ‘humor agnostics’ – the term is Max Eastman’s – who feel that humour cannot or even must not be analysed theoretically (Eastman 1921: 130-5). But even such fervent disclaimers are now a standard device in the rhetorics of humour studies. Writing on comedy and laughter derives from Greek antiquity; and no matter how far back one travels in the history of laughter criticism, the terminology has always been problematic and remains so in more recent texts in English, French, Italian, and German. In 1900, Henri Bergson, in an essay entitled Le Rire (published in English as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic), turned his inability to define humour into a virtue by claiming ‘we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, a living thing’ (Bergson: 2). About ten years later, in 1908, Luigi Pirandello starts his terminological investigation in L’umorismo with the following remark: What is humor? If we should take into account all the answers that have been given to this question, all the definitions attempted by writers and critics, we could fill many pages and probably at that point, confused by so many differing opinions, we could do nothing more than to repeat the question: But what, in short, is humor? (Pirandello: 107)

A more recent investigation into comic literary practice, Richard Keller Simon’s The Labyrinth of the Comic, applies Bergson’s metaphor of ‘le labyrinthe du comique’ to the discordant terminology: Anyone who enters a university library looking for simple answers to basic questions about comedy and laughter finds a labyrinth of contradictory explanation and a morass of terminology from which there is no escape. Like the reader of Tom Jones or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, he wanders through an almost perfect symmetry of binary

4

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein oppositions, of mirrored and inverted arguments, and of flawed and unreliable guides. (Simon: 239)

The terminology that has been developed is at once mind-bogglingly extensive and still insufficient: One woman’s humour is another’s laughter; one man’s wit is another’s joke. Other truisms about humour and laughter that are being circulated are: there is wide disagreement in the critical literature as to what humour and laughter are; it would be simplistic to reduce humour to the stimulus and laughter to the physiological response; laughter is highly subjective; and humour theorists have all but given up on trying to arrive at a grand récit, instead treating individual texts with micro-theories. It is not only literary critics who are somewhat disheartened at the situation. Psychologist Jon E. Roeckelein, in what is the most recent comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview on the psychology of humour, summarises terminological disagreements from areas as diverse as literature, musicology, developmental psychology, phenomenology, philosophy, linguistics, physiology, cognitive sciences, and behavioural sciences, in a chapter of more than seventy pages (Roeckelein: 9-86). These terminological problems seem to lie in the polysemy especially of the term humour, which can refer to ‘a stimulus, a response or a disposition’ (Chapman and Foot: 3).5 However, ‘laughter’ is different from ‘humour,’ and ‘the comic’ is also a rather vague notion. Just referring the reader to other theorists who have fretted over intractable terminology does not seem a legitimate solution to this dilemma. In this volume, it is mainly the complex stimulus- and the response-functions of humour and laughter, and not so much the disposition (‘a sense of humour’), which are being investigated. Laughter is thus regarded as the response to a stimulus but also as an effect that is deliberately pursued by a text. Laughter can be elicited by many triggers, and research shows that laughter is indeed frequently a response to a humour stimulus – but there are other stimuli: [I]f laughter were indeed an exact yardstick with which to measure humor experiences, we might have solved many of the riddles of humor long ago. Unfortunately, for science anyway, laughter is only a gross indicator which may accompany humor experiences. One can be amused and not laugh, especially if alone. […] And to attempt a listing of what can give rise to laughter [and is non-humorous] is a hazardous undertaking, since man apparently laughs at just about everything. […] At any rate, defining the essence of laughter is not nearly so simple as describing its behavioral components or linking it indiscriminately with humor. (Keith-Spiegel: 17-8)

5

For the full quotation, see Ulrike Erichsen’s essay in this volume.

Introduction

5

By referring to the subjectivity of laughter, Patricia Keith-Spiegel introduces another aspect of humour theory: laughter and humour are essentially subjective and whether we find something humorous, funny, comic, whether we laugh at it heartily or don’t even manage a smile, depends on a variety of factors, among them our cultural background and identity, our politics and aesthetics, and our location and current state of mind. From early enquiries into laughter to more contemporary interdisciplinary approaches, humour theorists have always felt the need to critically redefine their subject, indeed to question the whole notion of the comic. Ordinary situations, such as listening to or telling a joke, may also require such a metaperspective: Tellers of jokes sometimes need to explain why their joke is funny and are occasionally disparaged for having told it in the first place. Thus in everyday situations we are often required to rationalize our own laughter – if not to define our own understanding of humour. If theorizing laughter seems to be an exercise in regurgitating uncomfortable research results, we find ourselves similarly pre-empted when it comes to the postcolonial. Terry Eagleton has mockingly commented upon the trouble of defining postcolonialism: ‘There must surely be in existence somewhere a secret handbook for aspiring postcolonial theorists, whose second rule reads: “Begin your essay by calling into question the whole notion of postcolonialism”’ (24). One of the central conundrums of postcolonial studies is its polysemic prefix: Is it a marker of temporality, signifying after the onset of colonialism, if not, conversely, after the end of colonialism? Or does ‘post’ signal an oppositional stance, against colonialism? Often the term is understood in the latter sense. But usages denoting either a body of cultural production from sites historically linked with and informed by colonialism, or denoting a theoretical and ideological position from which any text, any socio-cultural or political discussion can be approached, have maintained currency. On this and many other levels, as this collection will amply demonstrate, postcolonial theory and humour theory share conceptual and theoretical problems of approach: both terms have a history of redefinition, both terms are polysemic. It would, therefore, not be productive to impose terminological and conceptual agreement on individual analyses within a collection like this. On the contrary, one of the strengths of this volume is its refraining from developing an overarching theory of postcolonial laughter, instead setting into dialogue specific contributions to the field. And yet we hope that the total of this collection is greater than the sum of its parts, for it not only features a variety of approaches but also promotes the eclectic blending and productive transformation of critical methodology.

6

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Master theories and micro-analyses The work done by humour theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was characterised by a struggle to account for diverse phenomena with an overarching theory. Richard Keller Simon, in an attempt to reverse the diversification which marked twentieth-century humour research, names writers as diverse as Fielding, Thackeray, Kierkegaard, Darwin, and Freud as ‘generalists,’ who investigated ‘the fundamental connections between the different aspects of the comic […] in detail’ (2). Simon is an exception, though, in contemporary humour research; today most theorists no longer attempt to arrive at comprehensive models in order to account for the wider phenomenon of humour in all its aspects. No all-embracing theory of humour and/or laughter has yet gained widespread acceptance and possibly no general theory will ever be successfully applied to the human race as a whole when its members exhibit such vast individual differences with respect to their humour responsiveness. The paradox associated with humour is almost certainly a function of its being incorrectly viewed as a unitary process. (Chapman and Foot: 4)

Our own understanding of humour and laughter fully agrees with this latter notion. As Paul Lewis claims in Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature, ‘the last thing humor criticism needs is another reductive and too-broad theory’ (Lewis: x). Such reluctance and / or inability to devise a master narrative accounting for laughter seems to be a more general reflection of current modes of theoretical research in the humanities and the social sciences alike. Today, in many fields of research, we observe a turn to detailed examinations in place of grand narratives, to specific analyses in preference to universalising generalisation. Michael Freeman, in a preface to John Parkin’s Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century (1997), has defined the situation for humour theorists like this: There are still theories of humour, but it has been said that we are now in a period of mini-theories, where individual contributions are solving individual problems without there being a macro-theory to which they can all in the end be referred. (Michael Freeman, in Parkin: x)

For someone writing on laughter or humour today this leaves two options: either restricting oneself to ‘mini-theories’ and being content with addressing rather specific cases, or attempting the impossible, risking gross overgeneralisation and simplification. In this volume, we are opting for the former of the two possibilities: instead of drawing up either a postcolonial theory of laughter or a theory of postcolonial laughter, this study combines a number of contributions tackling individual instances of laughter and humour in postcolonial cultural

Introduction

7

production. The variety of the collected essays, the range of sources and theories drawn upon, as well as the innovative vistas opened up are what this collection offers – not any undue generalisation of these phenomena. The micro-theories available come from various areas of research, the broadest among them being literary studies and psychology. Literary studies on comedy are nearly as old as comedy itself, and throughout the centuries, critics and creative writers have commented on the art of producing humorous fiction and drama.6 Psychological studies of humour were largely carried out in the twentieth century, almost always with reference to Freud’s foundational text Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious of 1905. So great has been Freud’s influence that Paul Lewis, reviewing research into humour, criticises scholars for largely ignoring the empirical psychological work that has been conducted since Freud: ‘[I]t is no longer necessary for critics to settle for intuition in areas that are increasingly accessible to empirical research’ (Lewis: 7). Postcolonial theory cannot possibly compete with the range of humour theory, as it is a considerably younger sub-discipline. However, even at the danger of overemphasising the parallels, we would argue that a similar move from general to more specific research objectives has taken place in postcolonial studies. Whereas earlier texts, such as Said’s Orientalism (1978) or Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989; 2002), attempted to introduce a comprehensive analysis of wider socio-cultural phenomena (which is already conveyed by their titles), recent writing is more concerned with distinguishing between specific postcolonial cultural practices, experiences and histories. The move from the general to the specific can certainly be seen in both areas and testifies to the dynamics (and the diversity) of theoretical work in either.

Connectedness across difference For a long time now, postcolonial theory has been concerned with the association between the (seemingly) homogenising umbrella term it brandishes and the heterogeneity it betokens. We would stress the potential of the combination of recognizing discrete time frames, cultural locations, and cultural products with an awareness of a wider socio-cultural and political condition. This balance is eminently suitable for an investigation into laughter in postcolonial fiction and film, and we find this best expressed as ‘connectedness across difference.’ The key term characterising our approach to laughter and the postcolonial, then, is the concept of difference. As the title indicates, this collection 6

Among them are Luigi Pirandello, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, P.G. Wodehouse, George Meredith, W.H. Auden, Mordecai Richler, John Updike.

8

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

deals with laughter and the postcolonial; i.e. ‘postcolonial’ does not function as an adjective to modify laughter. There is no ‘postcolonial laughter’ in the singular in the first place. It has been amply remarked that ‘the postcolonial’ cannot easily be reduced to a uniform concept but that it must be respected in its variety. The following two sections will deal with this question in more detail. For us, the concept of the postcolonial is a term of convenience that marks historical, political, economical, and cultural conditions which obtain or did obtain – in some cases, long ago, and in others even today – but whose impact can, in any case, still be perceived today. The postcolonial therefore is characterised by multiple differentiations, indeed it depends for its very definition on recognition of ethnic, local, and historical difference.7 Likewise, as we point out above, both laughter and humour require multi-dimensional conceptualisation, and accordingly have been treated in theoretical works with respect to their variability. It is thus obvious that a combination of two areas which have long been characterised by a dynamics of connectedness across difference should not be (and indeed cannot be productively) translated into a monolithic whole. Laughter and the postcolonial, at their various points of intersection, produce novel and eminently fruitful areas of investigation. One of the challenges of postcolonial perspectives on laughter is the dynamics between universalism and specificity: Laughter, as comparative humorologists have pointed out,8 is a universal phenomenon; every society brings forth cultural products that express a comic vision.9 The specificities of this vision, though, are what divide individual societies. Hence our focus on specific manifestations. This understanding of the dynamics of laughter coincides with our understanding of the postcolonial: both, laughter and the postcolonial, are umbrella terms, both cover phenomena that derive from a confluence of specific socio-cultural situations and a repertory of widely applicable strategies and techniques.

The empire laughs back Given their heterogeneous nature and blurred boundaries, what happens when laughter and the postcolonial are brought together? Can we distil any common theoretical denominators between laughter and the postcolonial? And are there overlaps in the praxes of laughter and the postcolonial? There are, indeed, a number of arguments that suggest a commensurability of 7 8 9

This view is expressed well in McLeod (257-8) and Robert Young (2001: 57-8). See Galigan (23). The notion of universals in literature is a contested subject, especially in the context of postcolonial studies, as it has often been used as a pretext for Eurocentrism; see Ramraj for a summary of the debate.

Introduction

9

postcolonial approaches with theories of laughter, and this commensurability can be based upon the one psychological explanation of laughter that persistently recurs in the canon of humour theory,10 despite variation in detail and terminology: laughter has always been seen as arising out of some kind of incompatibility or some incongruity. Arthur Koestler’s theory of humour, first sketched as an appendix to Insight and Outlook (1949) and later formulated fully in The Act of Creation (1964), is based upon the idea that an incongruity between matrix A and matrix B is a precondition for humour. Koestler developed further an idea that goes back as far as James Beattie’s ‘On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’ of 1776, and seems to be the one common denominator of all humour theorists. Manfred Pfister, in our sister volume A History of English Laughter, puts it as follows: [L]aughter is always caught up in the kinds of distinctions between centre and margins every society employs to establish and stabilise its identity: in one society, the predominant form of laughter can be that which aims from the site of the ideological or power centre at what is to be marginalised or excluded altogether; in another, the most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins, challenging and subverting the established orthodoxies, authorities and hierarchies. (Pfister: vi-vii)

Although not explicitly directed at it, this discerning description also holds for a postcolonial context. By no means does any given ‘incongruity’ result by default in laughter or permit resolution through humour; and whilst power differentials were of course a crucial precondition for the imperial project, historically it has entailed dissent and opposition. The relationship between the former coloniser and the former colonised is therefore an example of a fundamentally non-humorous disparity. Here, the matrices of power and powerlessness, centre and margin, ruler and ruled, meet in a relationship that is fundamentally inequitable. Ball, in his study on postcolonial satire, refers to this common characteristic of humour and postcolonial models as ‘nonaccommodating power dynamics’ (4), i.e. as a fundamental power imbalance. While the complex postcolonial relationships between centre and margin (or centres and margins) are far from humorous, the specific settings, however diverse, regularly include conditions in which laughter and humour can release some of the tension and relieve some of the potential aggression. The concrete manifestations of laughter arising from such a constellation range from subversive laughter, carnivalesque exhilarations, wry smiles, selfdeprecation, gallows humour, or black humour, to more conciliatory and healing humour, or to the wild and eerie laughter of the otherwise silenced ‘madwoman in the attic.’ All these reflect a struggle for agency, an imbalance of power, and a need, a desire, for release. 10

See, among others, the work of Bergson, Freud, and Koestler.

10

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

This aspect lends itself to comparison with other, similarly unequal power relations that are sometimes addressed and sometimes resolved by laughter: Most famously, Hélène Cixous in her ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (1975) has analysed the space that female laughter can map out in a patriarchal world.11 Histories of groups which have suffered from power imbalance and addressed it (but not structurally resolved it) via laughter come to mind: from Freud’s analysis of Jewish jokes to Obrdlik’s study of Czech humour during Nazi occupation (Martineau: 104) – the first sociological study of jokes – to Jaeger’s criticism of conciliatory GDR-humour (42-3) and Boskin’s work on ethnic humour in the US (38-9).

But seriously: Does laughter promote agency? One uninterrupted debate in the history of humour studies is whether laughter actually makes a difference to the incongruity from which it arises, or whether it in fact ultimately buttresses and thereby upholds the power imbalance. This raises the question whether laughter – in postcolonial cultural production – lends agency or whether it, in fact, prevents opposition and dissent by relieving some of the tension. Does the laughter in or induced by postcolonial fiction gesture towards a new world order? Or does postcolonial laughter uphold the order of the day? The earliest example of humour theory available to us, contained in Plato’s Republic, is largely concerned with the corruptive powers that laughter wields against the state, which indeed suggests that laughter has an effect upon the society within which it is employed (Provine: 13). Freud’s understanding of the joke as a socially acceptable form of attack (cf. Parkin: 166) also implies its significance within stratified communities. The most affirming evaluation of the potential of laughter for political and social transformation comes from the above-mentioned Cixous: For her, the triumphant laugh of the Medusa is liberating, joyful, and redeeming: Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our songs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. (Cixous: 349)

Women’s laughter, according to Cixous, is meant to ‘to break up the “truth” with laughter’ (357), and this power of a woman writer in some respect corresponds to that of the postcolonial writer.12 Writing on feminist humour, Gail Finney finds that ‘a sense of power is central to the creation of humor, which is in turn empowering’ (3). It has been argued that cultural production 11 12

We will deal with Cixous in more detail in the following section. This link between postcolonial and feminist writing is explored in more detail in Virginia Richter’s contribution in this volume.

Introduction

11

plays a key role in the relations between coloniser and colonised (Bhabha 1994, Ashcroft et al. 2002), and the use of laughter and strategies of unsettling humour contribute to the empowerment of the (post)colonised. From a physiological point of view it has been claimed that laughter ‘achieves nothing in itself other than working off the excess energy which for obscure psychological reasons is catalysed by certain types of incongruity’ (Parkin: 136). More sociologically, it has been affirmed that humour can be used effectively to perform serious work only within reasonably well defined social contexts. However, within such contexts, humour normally comes to be used to conserve the dominant pattern of social relationships. Humour can be used to challenge existing patterns, as we saw in the case of the women’s movement – but only when it is given meaning in a relation to criticism and confrontation that is already under way within the serious realm. (Mulkay: 177)

This raises the question whether, in a transcultural postcolonial situation, which is less clearly defined than Mulkay asks for, or rather, not defined by homogeneity, these functions of humour are plausible. In turn, this gives rise to more general questions about the role of cultural production and agency as such, questions that have been raised in postcolonial studies before and which would by far transcend the scope of our project (e.g. Parry 1987): These questions are directly concerned with the actual power that cultural production, especially literature, has in ‘real life,’ and are linked with problems of education and reading in general. Within the scope of this volume it is sufficient to point out that the power wielded by laughter over its objects depends on contextual circumstance determined by culture(s), language(s), histories, and on the socio-political situation in which laughter is engendered. Especially the contributions in section five address this question in more detail. Once again we are faced with the indeterminacy of humour, but rather than resign ourselves to the impossibility of resolving this, we see it as yet another characteristic that makes humour a challenge to investigate. Joseph Boskin, writing on humour as a form of rebellion against unbearable social conditions, corroborates our opinion: Humor’s peculiarity lies in its elastic polarity: it can operate for and against, deny or affirm, oppress or liberate. On the one hand, it reinforces pejorative images; on the other, it facilitates the inversion of such stereotypes. Just as it has been utilized as a weapon of insult and persecution, so, too, has humor been implemented as a device of subversion and protest. In the absence of cosmological affirmation, humor fills a void. (Boskin: 38)

12

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Laughing back and beyond The above arguments suggest that while there is no specific brand of postcolonial laughter, laughter seems to thrive in a situation of power imbalance and even oppression. It would be simplistic, however, to reduce the laughter in postcolonial texts to an act of ‘laughing back’ at the coloniser, just as it has been amply suggested that the ‘writing back’-paradigm is limiting if applied indiscriminately to all modes postcolonial of literary production. Often regarded as the first study to attempt a synthesizing account of postcolonial literatures, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989; 2002) postulated the centre-margin dynamics as a key characteristic of postcolonial cultural production. This tenet, however, was the cause of much criticism and debate,13 mainly based on the reproach that the ‘writing back’-idea corroborated the coloniser’s position of centrality or power and thus nolens-volens entailed a reinscription and continuation of an unequal power dynamics. Similarly, a ‘laughing-back’-paradigm in the analysis of postcolonial laughter would mean affirming the former coloniser’s position as central if and when they are laughed about, laughed at, or even laughed with. In practice, of course, laughter occurs in a variety of functions and is not necessarily directed at or even involved with the (former) colonial power. We hold that, despite the indisputable importance of satire and subversion in many postcolonial texts, laughter goes beyond the function of addressing the (erstwhile) colonial power. First, laughter is not always used as weapon; it can perform a conciliatory function, constitute an intellectual stimulus, express linguistic finesse, or imply a slightly nostalgic notion, in Marx’s sense of passing cheerfully from the past (‘heiter von der Vergangenheit scheiden,’ Marx: 382). Secondly, even if subversiveness is detected in laughter, its targets are varied so that it can be directed at colonisers or colonised; it can be self-deprecating or stereotyping; it might be read as an empowering move or a resigned comment on a status quo; it might trigger Medusa’s triumphant laughter or merely elicit a tired smile. But it will always raise the complex question ‘Who laughs at whom?’ And here the subjectivity of laughter disallows limiting it to a onedimensional function. Whether we read laughter or humour in a particular text as subversive or not, in fact, whether we identify it as laughter or humour in the first place, is largely a consequence of the way we read, the way we understand postcolonial literatures, and the way in which we know and view the world. 13

McLeod sums up the criticism, especially by Arun Mukherjee and Mishra and Hodge, that followed the publication of The Empire Writes Back (27-9). See also Schulze-Engler.

Introduction

13

Sharing the joke: Communities of laughter The above argument, coupled with our repeated insistence upon the subjectivity of both laughter and humour, could easily be mistaken to suggest that laughter and humour are primarily highly subjective – and not much else. This would render the analyses in this collection idiosyncratic ponderings by individual minds with little wider significance. What, in our view, keeps them from being just that, is what, borrowing from both Stanley Fish and Benedict Anderson, we call ‘communities of laughter.’ Fish has introduced the notion of an interpretive community as one which shares ‘interpretive strategies’ which in turn ‘determine the shape of what is read’ (14). Laughter, too, presupposes shared worlds, shared codes, and shared values. Therefore it is characterised by both subjectivity and intersubjectivity: Understanding humor – especially its social and psychological functions, its value as an indicator of both cultural and personal identity – requires this sense of its radical subjectivity, a sense easily confirmed in the experience of telling a joke to an unamused audience. The extent to which we can share humour is based on a common world view, and one way of distinguishing individuals is by noting when they are amused and with whom. (Lewis: 12-3)

Laughter relies upon ‘a shared matrix of references’ (Slemon: 165) as a prerequisite, and, as a consequence, fulfils an important function in establishing, maintaining, and adjusting in-group ties and group borders. Nothing is laughable in itself: the laughable borrows its special quality from some persons or group of persons who happen to laugh at it, and, unless you happen also to know a good deal about this person or group of persons you cannot by any means guarantee the laugh beforehand. (Greig: 71; qtd. in Raskin: 17)

The specifics of humour, the laughter that is shared among an in-group, are particularly interesting for postcolonial analyses. The socialising function of laughter has been remarked upon in connection with feminist humour – Cixous claims that the power of the Medusa is one of solidarity, by deriding and thus excluding masculinity. The same argument can be found in discussions of ethnic jokes and in developmental psychology.14 During processes of identification, laughter that is shared by in-group members wields cohesive powers. The laughter at someone outside the community strengthens the ties within. In this context we would like to stress that the distinction between cultural insiders and outsiders for us does not hold entirely. Cultures are not mono14

See for instance, Martineau’s discussion of African-American humour in the 1960s (112), and also Olbrechts-Tyteca qtd. in Gutwirth (39).

14

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

lithic but dynamic; cultural production and its reception cannot be contained in stable categories. Neither place of birth nor geographical location constitute the sole condition for membership in a community of laughter. We conceptualize communities of laughter after Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities; their cohesive laughter does not presuppose co-presence; nor can these communities be certain of the identities of their individual members (Anderson: 5-7). If we do not share the requisite cultural references, a joke or pun might be lost on us. Laughter in a Shakespearean play, for example, is not always conclusive to a contemporary audience, and many ‘original’ puns might be lost. However, postcolonial literatures, just like Shakespeare’s dramas, speak not only to local but also to international readerships, which often find cues in the texts that enable access to their comic potential. Laughter and humour are therefore ‘test cases’ not for cultural belonging, but for transcultural competence.

The scope of Cheeky Fictions The first of five sections of this volume, entitled ‘Laughter’s double vision – Humour and cultural ambiguity,’ deals with the ambiguity created by the question of who is actually being laughed at. Four essays examine the legitimacy of laughter and its cultural location; they concur that it is the cultural location of laughter that is decisive for the function that humour has in each case. Ulrike Erichsen opens our volume by delving deeper into some of the theoretical issues that have been raised in our introduction, such as the confusion around terminology, and provides an overview of the most common humour theories and functions of humour. Her theoretical considerations are supported by readings of texts by Meera Syal, Erna Brodber, and Sam Selvon, novels in which humour derives from the uncertainty of whose cultural values are being ridiculed, and whose position is being laughed at. Erichsen’s readings show that the functions of humour cannot be generalised without difficulty. Humour, she contends, cannot actually solve questions of cultural conflict but it can bridge gaps by diffusing the opposition between self and other. Anthony Ilona, too, is concerned with the impossibility of generalisation. Caribbean interpretations of selfhood are shown to be questioned by ironic textual modes by Trinidadian novelists V.S. Naipaul and Earl Lovelace. Ilona draws both on the Bakhtinian principle of the Carnivalesque and on humour traditions local to the Caribbean, such as calypso and picong, in order to formalise the mockery in A House for Mr Biswas and The Dragon Can’t Dance as a project of enlarging the space for Caribbean self-representation. For Ilona it is unsettling forms of humour, such as derision and mockery, which lend these

Introduction

15

texts their transformative force. Virginia Richter refers to psychoanalytical theories of humour to address the issue of humour’s agency. She reassesses Freud’s and Cixous’s work through a contemporary critical lens, finding both wanting due to their focus on either the element of aggression or that of liberation as inherent in laughter. Bhabha’s theory of the stereotype seems to resolve this opposition as it integrates both empowerment and powerlessness. The subsequent analysis of Joe Penhall’s play Blue / Orange allows Richter to point out that postcolonial humour, like stereotypes, cannot easily be interpreted as either liberating or disempowering, but constitutes a complex and context-bound phenomenon. Focussing on the figure of the terrorist Muslim, Helga Ramsey-Kurz also addresses ambiguity in postcolonial writing. She reads texts predating the events of September 11, 2001 against the knowledge of the socio-political implications that this date has brought along, and comes to the conclusion that humour offers an opportunity for postcolonial writers to side with rebellious characters without being accused of political and / or religious fanaticism themselves. She bases her essay on novels by Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi, and, although the terrorist figures are vastly divergent, she isolates a common representational strategy: whilst terrorist characters are ridiculed, humour is established as anti-dogmatic. In this way, the suppleness of humour is seen to provide space for alternative concepts whilst terrorism is associated with rigidity and closure. The four essays in the second section, ‘Traditions and transgressions – Writing back and forth,’ all look at various traditions of humour as points of orientation in an attempt to subvert the coloniser or former coloniser. While the ‘writing back’-principle is acknowledged in all the contributions, it is also clear that it is transcended, mainly through the use of self-directed humour. Thus, it is not only the coloniser that is sent up, but also the subverters themselves, who are mocked and ridiculed. In Heinz Antor’s contribution on Mordecai Richler’s Atuk it is the Canadian Dream and various forms of colonisation that are being satirised. Antor locates postcolonial satire not so much in the aggressive Juvenal tradition as in the more benevolent satire of Horace and Fielding. He links the national quest for identity in 1960s Canada with the multi-layered satire of Atuk. The essay demonstrates how Richler performs a ‘semiosis of derision’ in portraying a chain of continuing exploitation between Canadian business corporations and Inuit communities, in which each participant is revealed as both villain and fool, each being laughed at equally. Susan Lever’s contribution similarly links the object of her investigation, David Foster’s Moonlite, to the satirical tradition of Fielding, Swift, Pope, and Sterne, and later on Evelyn Waugh, but detects a clear postcolonial critique of British colonial history in it. The colonisation of

16

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Australia mirrored by that of a tiny island in the Hebrides shows how the colonial project renders the colonised people helpless and failing. Lever also considers language use, investigating the varieties of English that Foster employs and their potential for humour. Similar to Antor’s analysis of Canadian identity, Lever diagnoses the search for a post-independence identity as fraught with nostalgia for the former coloniser. Michael Meyer’s analysis of postcolonial parodies has as its basis two short stories that explicitly refer to their canonised antecedents: Matthew Singh-Toor’s ‘Samhadrarow and the Partial Exchange’ is a parody of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Salman Rushdie’s ‘Yorick’ already in its title makes obvious the intertextual connection to Shakespeare’s Hamlet via Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In how far are postcolonial and postmodern texts indebted to their British antecedents, in how far do they transcend their humour for ‘postcolonial purposes,’ Meyer asks. Both texts are shown to criticise the coloniser-colonised relationship, but also mock the very basis of this critique, the writing-back strategy and the cultural iconicity of the texts on which these parodies are based. Detlef Gohrbandt turns to visual art for a close analysis: Ronald Searle’s The Rake’s Progress, originally published in Punch in the 1950s, is presented as a satire on the British nation at the end of Empire. Searle’s gallery of representative English types in (hopeless) search of fame and success traces types and manners, and chronicles a period rather than showing interest in individuals, and it is this that leads Gohrbandt to point out connections with Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress of 1735, but also, again, to Fielding. It is especially colonial heroes that Searle shows as having failed, and their individual failure stands metonymically for the failure of the society of which they are part. Gohrbandt reads the drawings against the background of the socio-political situation at the end of the British Empire and demonstrates how Searle’s humour does not offer an escape from inevitable failure: acceptance as well as rejection or bypassing of established institutions such as the BBC or the literary establishment all lead to failure. The three contributions of the third section, ‘Ethnic cabaret – A license to laugh,’ focus upon the ambiguous relationships between the various participants in the act of laughing: those laughed at and those laughing, within a text or between the text and its audience or readership. The term ‘ethnic cabaret’ is Mark Terkessidis’s via Mita Banerjee, and expresses laughter that is directed at the audience itself, but ambiguously so, leaving the question open as to who it is that is being laughed at. Mita Banerjee’s essay applies the theoretical observations of Mark Terkessidis on Turkish-German ‘Kabarett’ to Sri Lankan novelist Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy. Laughter here results from the ambiguity of the implied reader’s position towards the identity positions of the protagonist, a homosexual Tamil, whose identity is

Introduction

17

being challenged a number of times in the novel. Linking ethnic and queer studies, Banerjee identifies the novel’s concerns with ethnic and sexual identities as a non-normative mission, which still leaves the reader ambivalent as to the identity of the implied reader. Similarly, the contribution by Astrid Fellner and Klaus Heissenberger, which focuses on Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin’s film I Was Born in East L.A., draws upon a variety of identities to perform a critique of preconceived ideas of national and ethnic identities. Questioning the nature of stable boundaries, the film mocks any essentialist notions of Chicano, Mexican, or American identity, and the laughter is on the Chicano as well as the American for expecting a clear-cut notion of nationality, and this includes the film’s audience. Fellner and Heissenberger give an illuminating interpretation of the film through the lens of Chicano/a Studies, but also by analysing the frequent references to the American icon Bruce Springsteen and by illustrating how the film succeeds in its subversion of ‘Americanness.’ Christiane Schlote’s contribution, like the above, points up the necessity of stereotypes in comedy, and investigates parallel developments in American, British, and German ethnic comedy TV programmes: All-American Girl, Goodness Gracious Me, and Was Guckst Du? While on the one hand it can be read as a good sign that TV comedy is catching up with demographic change, none of the programmes were received uncontroversially. Each program resulted in debates on the responsibilities of the artist to present the ethnic group concerned in a favourable light, to avoid stereotyping, and to bear the burden of representation of a heterogeneous community, while at the same time being funny. Schlote identifies the strategy of ‘humour appeasement,’ i.e. an attempt at accommodating the sensitivities of both assumed audience(s) and the communities represented. All three contributions of section four, ‘The Language of Humour – The Humour of Language,’ centre on how language evokes laughter and explore how it can both help or hinder the bridging of cultural gaps between characters in a text or between writer and readership. Margit Ozvalda’s contribution on schools in postcolonial fiction investigates the language used in the representation of teachers and pupils. In a postcolonial context, the nexus of school and the colonial education system have been the object of much criticism; Ozvalda focuses on the role humour plays in this. She establishes intertextual connections between eighteenth-century satire, the nineteenth-century realist novel, and the satirical treatment of schools and teachers in contemporary fiction by Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Meera Syal, and Zadie Smith. Mainly relying upon Salvatore Attardo’s linguistic theories of humour, Ozvalda approaches these texts from a corpus linguistic perspective and bases her results upon a concordance programme. Susanne

18

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Pichler takes up the specificity of laughter and its cross-cultural (in)accessibility. Gauging the ‘translatability of laughter’ in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet (1982), she considers whether laughter is used as a ‘critical weapon’ and probes the preconditions of Western readers’ ability to identify and appreciate humorous language and its referents. Pichler discusses crosslinguistic misunderstandings within the novels that are resolved with laughter and questions the possibilities for readers to identify the humour in culturespecific situations. Susanne Mühleisen, in her sociolinguistic contribution, investigates the changing ways in which the language varieties of West Indian immigrants – Caribbean Creoles and British Black Englishes – have been employed for humorous effect in a number of TV productions from the 1970s to date. Mühleisen suggests that there has been a discernible move away from a very careful treatment of the language of ethnic minority groups (as, for instance, in Empire Road or Desmond’s) towards a less restrained caricaturing of London Jamaican (as in Ali G), a development which, for her, testifies to the fact that London Jamaican has become another of London’s many varieties that is no longer ethnically specific. The four contributions of the concluding section, ‘Laughing it off – Does therapeutic humour work?’, all probe the therapeutic potential of humour and critically assess its value for various postcolonial settings. While some essays come to the conclusion that humour successfully defuses conflicts in a postcolonial situation, others show clearly how in some cases laughter mainly serves to underscore calamity. Maggie Ann Bowers’s contribution on Native American humour takes a critical look at the claim that humour empowers the colonised and subverts their situation of powerlessness. Bowers especially highlights the difference between the celebratory humour and joyful trickster tales by writers such as Thomas King, Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie, and the pessimistic stance that W.P. Kinsella takes in his darkly comic tales. Kinsella’s humour seems to offer no alternative to the bleak life in the reservations, and, rather than offering relief through catharsis, acknowledges defeat, not survival. Reading three novels by Nuruddin Farah, Dambudzo Marechera, and Meja Mwangi, Annie Gagiano likewise finds humour an inept tool for protection from or insulation against pain and suffering. Gagiano emphasises the ancient link between the comic and the tragic, and highlights how in these three novels a sense of the tragedy of a community is conveyed by resorting to the strategy of ‘comic understanding.’ The comic vision balances the grief in each novel, and in doing so it only serves to emphasise the grief and the tragedy involved. Gisela Feurle introduces us to the world of Madam & Eve, the post-apartheid South African cartoon strip, which has at its heart relationships dating back to apartheid times. Feurle explains the success of the cartoon strip by reading its

Introduction

19

protagonists as iconic of the changing socio-political climate in South Africa, which allows its readers to identify with each in turn. Thus, the laughter evoked by Madam & Eve is directed at the characters involved, but also at the South African audience, who see themselves represented. While the cartoon strip is often advertised as uniting South Africa in laughter, Feurle warns against misunderstanding it as a unified vision that is shared by all South Africans alike. Wendy Woodward’s essay on Zake Mda’s Heart of Redness suitably rounds off this section, and the collection itself, by discovering a middle ground for the therapeutic potential of humour: Woodward finds in Mda a kind of rehabilitative humour, which speaks out against the oppositional thinking that has had a long history in South African culture. Mda rehabilitates amaXhosa history by reconsidering the cattlekilling movement of the 1850s through a mix of social comedy and the grotesque, achieved through a focus on the materiality of the body. Analysing the feminist and ecological aspects of Mda’s humour, Woodward comes to the conclusion that a novel containing a more reconciliatory humour, such as this one, is no less valid a vehicle for socio-cultural transformation than one that resorts to a harsher and more scathing humour. While it has been claimed again and again that analysing humour is an entirely cheerless exercise, devoid of the laughter it seeks to analyse (see also our epigraph, taken from Max Eastman), we do hope that apart from stimulating the reader’s critical faculties, it might also, every now and then, provoke the odd smile, grin, or chuckle.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 1991. Atwood, Margaret. ‘What’s so Funny? Notes on Canadian Humour.’ Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. By Margaret Atwood. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. 175-89. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. –––. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.

20

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Ball, John Clement. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel. V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. New York: Routledge, 2003. Beattie, James. Essays. On Poetry and Music, As They Affect the Mind. On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition. On the Utility of Classical Learning. William Creech: Edinburgh, 1776. Benson, Eugene, and L.W. Conolly, eds. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. 1900. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1991. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Boskin, Joseph. Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1997. Breton, André. Anthology of Black Humor. 1939. Trans. Mark Polizotti. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 1997. Castle, Gregory, ed. Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Chapman, Antony J., and Hugh C. Foot, eds. Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. London: John Wiley, 1976. Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ 1975. Trans. Keith and Paul Cohen. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997. 347-62. Durant, John, and Jonathan Miller, eds. Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humour. Harlow: Longman, 1988. Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Laughter. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937. Eastman, Max. The Sense of Humor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Postcolonialism and “Postcolonialism.”’ Interventions 1.1 (1998): 24-6. Finney, Gail. ‘Unity in Difference? An Introduction.’ Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy. Ed. Gail Finney. Davis, CA: Gordon and Breach, 1994. Freeman, Michael. Preface. Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century. By John Parkin. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997. ix-xii. Freud, Sigmund. Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften. 1923. Studienausgabe III. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001. –––. Der Humor. 1927. Studienausgabe IV. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001. –––. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. 1905. Studienausgabe IV. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001.

Introduction

21

Galligan, Edward L. The Comic Vision in Literature. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1984. Goldberg, Theo, and Ato Quayson, eds. Relocating Postcolonialism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Grimm, Reinhold, and Jost Hermand, eds. Laughter Unlimited: Essays on Humor, Satire, and the Comic. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. Gutwirth, Marcel. Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Hawley, John C., ed. Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Jaeger, Joachim W. Humor und Satire in der DDR: Ein Versuch zur Theorie. Frankfurt/Main: R.G. Fischer, 1984. Jäkel, Siegfried, and Asko Timonen, eds. Laughter Down the Centuries. Vols. 1-3. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994-96. Jones, Dorothy, and Barry Andrews. ‘Australian Humour.’ The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ed. Laurie Hergenhan. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988. 60-76. Keith-Spiegel, Patricia. ‘Early Conceptions of Humor: Varieties and Issues.’ The Psychology of Humour: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. Ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee. New York: Academic Press, 1972. 4-39. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Köhler, Stefanie. Differentes Lachen: Funktion, Präsentation und Genderspezifik der Ridicula im zeitgenössischen englischen Roman. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997. Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1989. Martineau, William H. ‘A Model of the Social Functions of Humor.’ The Psychology of Humour: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. Ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee. New York: Academic Press, 1972. 101-25. Marx, Karl. ‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie.’ In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Werke. Berlin: Dietz, 1976. 378-91. McGhee, Paul E. Humor: Its Origin and Development. San Francisco, CA: Freeman and Co., 1979. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Meredith, George. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit. 1897. Ed. Lane Cooper. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. Mulkay, Michael. On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

22

Susanne Reichl / Mark Stein

Oring, Elliott, ed. Humor and the Individual. Spec. issue of Western Folklore 43.1 (1984). Parkin, John. Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997. Parry, Benita. ‘Problems in Current Discourse Theory.’ Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27-58. Pfister, Manfred, ed. A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Pirandello, Luigi. On Humor. 1908. Trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa. Chapel Hill, N.C.: U of North Carolina P, 1960. Provine, Robert R. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. London: Faber, 2000. Ramraj, Victor J. ‘Universalism.’ In Hawley 2001. 445-7. Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston, MA: D. Reidel, 1985. Richler, Mordecai, ed. The Best of Modern Humour. London: Allen Lane, 1983. Roeckelein, Jon E. The Psychology of Humor: A Reference Guide and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Schulze-Engler, Frank. ‘Universalism with a Difference: The Politics of Postcolonial Theory.’ Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. 41-6. Sherwood, Scott Cutler. Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy. Amherst, MA: U of Mass P, 1986. Simon, Richard Keller. The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State UP, 1985. Slemon, Stephen. ‘Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23.1 (1988): 157-68. Spalding, Henry D., ed. Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor. Rev. ed. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1978. Stein, Mark. ‘Ironic Interventions? Chris Ofili’s and Bernadine Evaristo’s Praxes of Transgression.’ Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold. Ed. Renate Brosch and Rüdiger Kunow. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2005. 115-25. Thieme, John. Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary. London: Arnold, 2003. Updike, John. Humor in Fiction. Northridge, CA: Lord John, 2000. Walder, Dennis. Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Wickberg, Daniel. The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.

Introduction

23

Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2003. –––. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

This page intentionally left blank

I. Laughter’s double vision – Humour and cultural ambiguity

This page intentionally left blank

ULRIKE ERICHSEN

Smiling in the face of adversity How to use humour to defuse cultural conflict

A

nalysing humour is like dissecting a frog: nobody enjoys it. This statement, purporting to be a short definition of what it means to analyse humour, is itself an example and illustration of how a certain kind of (rather weak) humour works. The statement brings together two areas of investigative research, that of humour analysis and that of zoological experiments, and claims a similarity between them. The second half of the sentence pretends to explain the stated similarity by claiming that nobody enjoys doing either. Clearly, this pseudo-definition is not a serious attempt at a definition or explanation (leaving aside the fact that biologists might not agree at all), yet it expresses a rather common prejudice about the desirability of humour analysis in bringing a whiff of the unsavoury, if not indecent, to analysing humour. Most of us enjoy humour in its diverse appearances as witty or comic expressions, jokes, parodies, ironic asides, sarcastic remarks and so on. We enjoy the experience but see little need for further analysis or explanation as such explanation would – this seems the general consensus – be counter-productive to the intended humorous effect. Nevertheless, in this paper I shall argue that an analytical approach to humour, and paying closer attention to its diverse functions, can enhance our enjoyment as well as our understanding of humour. Before I start developing my argument, some general remarks with regard to the terminology used in this paper seem appropriate. Chapman and Foot have pointed to a general problem with regard to definitions of the terms ‘humour’ and ‘laughter.’

28

Ulrike Erichsen One obvious problem that bedevils definitions of humour is whether it is to be viewed as a stimulus, a response or a disposition. The Penguin English Dictionary allows all three possibilities: humour may refer to that which causes ‘good-tempered laughter’ (stimulus); or ‘cheerful and good-tempered amusement’ (response); or ‘the capacity for seeing the funny side of things’ (disposition). While no-one would dispute that laughter is generally a response, it is just as much a response to non-humorous stimuli as it is to humour stimuli. [...] No all-embracing theory of humour and /or laughter has yet gained widespread acceptance and possibly no general theory will ever be successfully applied to the human race as a whole when its members exhibit such vast individual differences with respect to their humour responsiveness. The paradox associated with humour is almost certainly a function of its being incorrectly viewed as a unitary process. Humour plays a myriad of roles and serves a number of quite different functions. (Chapman and Foot, Introduction: 3f.)

For the purpose of this paper, I am using the term humour in a rather general sense, ranging from subtle amusement to loud laughter.1 One problem in talking about humour is that what we regard as funny or humorous or how we respond to a humorous situation can differ quite considerably from one person to the next. My focus is not so much on analysing why we laugh or explaining the ways in which laughter is elicited in a given situation; I am interested in the various functions, sometimes contradictory, that humour may serve in selected postcolonial narratives on the textual level as well as in the reader-text communication. I shall restrict my discussion to two aspects important to postcolonial texts: comic relief and the use of humour to indicate cultural differences and uncover cultural stereotypes.

Theories of humour and their relevance to the postcolonial context There are a great number of theories and models which try to analyse humour in its various forms and appearances. The most common approaches are: 1) superiority theories (also referred to as derision or disparagement theories), which focus on the relationship between the producer and the recipient or target of a comic or humorous situation and explain laughter as a result of feeling superior to somebody else;2 2) release / relief theories (also referred to as pain and removal theories), which focus on the recipient of the comic stimulus and his or her social and psychological context and explain laughter as some kind of release helping the person to regain his or her social and

1 2

Similarly, I am using the terms ‘humorous,’ ‘funny’ and ‘comic(al)’ as more or less synonymous disregarding their differences with respect to context or register. References are to Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson, who emphasise the difference between eminence and infirmity or superiority and inferiority to account for the significance of laughter. Victor Raskin points out that although Hobbes is generally seen as the origin of superiority-theories, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero also give similar explanations for human laughter (see Raskin: 36ff.).

Smiling in the face of adversity

29

emotional equilibrium;3 and 3) incongruity theories, which focus on the structural principle of comic or humorous communication and explain the comic as the result of ‘the perceiving of a situation or event in two selfconsistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’ (Koestler: 35).4 Whereas the first two approaches investigate the emotional side of the problem, incongruity theories emphasize a cognitive perspective on humour. Susan C. Vogel sums up the central questions: Does humour draw on man’s (positive) ability to create startling mental juxtapositions, or is it a (negative) reflection of man’s joy in triumphing over others? [...] why do we enjoy humour? Do we get a kick out of solving puzzles, or do we get a kick out of kicking others? And, if both, how are the two related to one another? (Vogel: 12f.)

Victor Raskin sees the different theoretical approaches as complementary rather than contradictory; he argues: The three approaches actually characterize the complex phenomenon of humor from very different angles and do not at all contradict each other – rather they seem to supplement each other quite nicely. In our terms, the incongruity-based theories make a statement about the stimulus; the superiority theories characterize the relations or attitudes between the speaker and the hearer; and the release / relief theories comment 5 on the feelings and psychology of the hearer only. (Raskin: 40, emphases in original)

Even this rather brief description of the various attempts to analyse humour and human laughter suggests that theories of humour have much to offer for the understanding of typical concerns and contexts in postcolonial writing.6 It is the deliberate ambiguity which ‘underlies much, if not all, of verbal humour’ (Raskin: 13) that provides the nexus to the analysis of postcolonial writing. A large number of postcolonial texts, explicitly or implicitly, bring

3

4 5

6

References are mainly to Sigmund Freud and his Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (1905, Engl. Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, Trans. James Strachey, 1960). Raskin sees Freud’s model as ‘the best known theory of this kind’ (Raskin: 38). See also Raskin: 31ff. for further references. Raskin proposes a script-based semantic theory of humour which ‘is designed as neutral with respect to all of [the abovementioned, U.E.] theories and is, in fact, easily compatible with most, if not all of them, which is, of course, another way of saying that its goals, premises and terms are rather dramatically different from theirs’ (Raskin: 40f.). Raskin aims for ‘the application of modern linguistic theory to the study of humor [...]. The goal of the theory is to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms for a text to be funny’ (Raskin. Preface: xiii). I am using the term ‘postcolonial’ in a very wide sense here including not only writing from previously colonised territories or texts focusing on the tension between former colony and former colonising power but also texts that deal with the migrant experience.

30

Ulrike Erichsen

together two frames of reference.7 Many such texts foreground the problems of differing cultural norms and values, exploiting the emotional as well as social and cognitive aspects of such double-coding, often with a critical rather than humorous or comic intention in the narrow sense. Much of literary research on humour and laughter, especially research based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, emphasises the critical and subversive function of humour. In Bakhtin’s definition of the novel, the carnivalesque and laughter are vital features of the novelistic genre and are primarily seen as liberating reactions to official traditions or ossified ideologies.8 In this context then, laughter becomes an ‘antiforce, and thus begins to display antinomian traits. Bakhtin authorizes the novel to play the same role in literature that carnival is alleged to play in the real life of cultures’ (Morson and Emerson: 441f.). It is, I think, obvious why a Bakhtinian approach, with its emphasis on the subversion of an official ideology, can have a certain appeal to postcolonial studies. Rather than focus on the subversive aspect of humour, however, I would like to stress another feature of humour’s transgressive potential, namely the ‘productive’ potential of humour and laughter. As far as the inner-textual level is concerned, I will argue that humour can be used as a means to defuse cultural conflicts by offering a strictly limited context for such conflict. Many cultural conflicts stem from differences in cultural values and norms, or are related to superiority / inferiority problems, real or assumed. In such cases, humour can have a socially regulatory function, providing an outlet for criticism without aggravating the initial conflict. In addition, as far as the reader-text interaction is concerned, humour can be used to highlight a doubly-coded situation. It can function as a means to alert the reader to cultural barriers that need to be overcome in order to fully understand the text, and thus can encourage intercultural communication and understanding.

7

8

Obvious examples are texts that operate within the ‘writing back’-paradigm in a narrow sense. Ashcroft et al. define postcolonial literatures as literatures that ‘emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre’ (Ashcroft et al.: 2). Another group of texts that employ two frames of reference are novels of migration that focus on culture contact in the former colonising country. Attempting to arrive at a brief and conclusive definition of what Bakhtin understands by ‘laughter’ or ‘the carnivalesque’ is difficult, as he often uses these terms to define generic features of the novel in contrast to other genres. Moreover, his understanding of ‘laughter’ and ‘the carnivalesque’ seems to undergo some subtle changes as far as the four essays in The Dialogic Imagination are concerned; Rabelais and his World shifts the focus to a much more pronounced emphasis on carnival than the preceding texts. However, these nuances cannot be pursued in this context.

Smiling in the face of adversity

31

Functions of humour In general, humour seems to serve a variety of different functions on all levels of verbal utterances, first of all, perhaps, that of expressing a certain emotion. In a postcolonial context, however, humour is often used to camouflage rather than express emotions, for instance to cover up aggression or the pain of being an outsider or of being considered inferior. In his introductory remarks to The Book of Negro Humor, Langston Hughes gives a description of humour that emphasises this particular aspect: Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it. Of course, you laugh by proxy. You’re really laughing at the other guy’s lack, not your own. That’s what makes it funny – the fact that you don’t know you’re laughing at yourself. Humor is when the joke is on you but hits the other fellow first – before it boomerangs. Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. (Hughes: vii)

Hughes’s comments suggest an awareness of a discrepancy, a lack of balance, and that humour is a way of dealing with such a discrepancy. Humour is also used in communicating the value of an established relation (Jakobson’s phatic function) through sharing a certain sense of humour (Kotthoff: 355-7). The phatic function is closely related to the conative function of communicating values within the group and / or establishing, maintaining and testing group boundaries (in intra- and inter-group relations). Sharing a sense of humour implies sharing a culture, as humour is a group- or culture-specific expression.9 According to Kotthoff, social and cultural ambiguities seem far more important in eliciting laughter than semantic ambiguities (Kotthoff: 360). Thus, intersubjective agreement between speaker and listener (or speaker and reader) is more important to evoke a humorous reaction than the semantic creativity of the speaker. Werner Sollors goes even further in arguing that ‘the community of laughter itself is an ethnicizing phenomenon, as we develop a sense of we-ness in laughing with others’ (Sollors, qtd. in Walker: 114). This means that humour is a way of expressing being part of a specific group or community as well as a means of creating, as Sollors puts it, a sense of belonging or ‘we-ness.’ To specify the cognitive or referential function of humour in a general way is difficult as 9

One of the Indian female narrators of Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) stresses this point rather forcefully: ‘I’d had one boyfriend before, a brief fling in my first term with a guy from Southampton reading French, but I got bored with having to explain stuff all the time. How come my parents came over here? What did korma actually mean in my language? What was that dot on the forehead? Why was my skin so beautiful? I felt like his social worker, not his girlfriend. I knew then this wasn’t what I wanted or needed. I needed someone I could have cultural shorthand with, someone who would get my jokes’ (Syal: 86).

32

Ulrike Erichsen

it is context-bound. The deliberate ambiguity of humour points to the existence of two frames of reference which are often also indicated through code-switching and / or specific metalingual statements. This double-focus of humorous utterances forces the reader or listener to switch between two perspectives and two frames of reference.

Using humour to defuse cultural conflict A great many postcolonial texts employ humour on various levels to emphasise the double perspective inscribed in cultural encounters. In the following examples I would like to point to what I regard as some of the productive rather than subversive uses of humour.10 I shall begin with a rather straightforward example from Meera Syal’s novel Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999). Having described an Indian marriage ceremony in the first chapter, the narrator sums up the reactions of the guests, Indian and English, to the happy day: Deepak [the groom, U.E.] stood in the centre of this circle of grief, the lone male in an ocean of heaving female flesh. The other men had regrouped in awkward clumps, giving the women space to grieve, exchanging rueful glances, scuffing their shoes guiltily in the melting slush. For hadn’t they all done this once, pretend cavemen for a day, dragging their women away by the hair, parping their victory on their car horns. Deepak’s face was a mask of calm, almost ennobled by the task ahead of him, to protect and nurture this weeping woman. [...] Tissue clutching matriarchs reattached themselves to harrumphing husbands, reaffirming their bonds to each other and the watching world. [...] The few English guests stood in a confused huddle, wondering why such a splendid day, replete with aching colours, mountainous piles of delicious food [...], embarrassing hospitality, ear-splitting music, wild and strange folk dancing (a bit like jive this Indian business, once you get the footwork going), inhibitions peeled off with second-best jackets, had to end with such a tragic performance. They all had got through the occasion without making an awful faux pas. Now what were they supposed to say to Chila’s [the bride, U.E.] slumped and tear-stained family? Thank you for a lovely day? [...] For everyone else, it had been, despite the weather, a lovely day. A perfect day because rituals had been observed, old footsteps retraced, threads running unbroken, families joined, futures secured. (Syal: 24-6)

The heterodiegetic narrator11 functions as a cultural mediator in this passage, providing insight into the reactions of the Indian as well as the English guests at the wedding. The rather exaggerated descriptions (‘lone male in an ocean of heaving female flesh,’ ‘cavemen [...] dragging their women away,’ ‘a bit like jive this Indian business, once you get the footwork going’) highlight a situation that can be read in accordance with two different cultural codes: to

10 11

The distinction is one of emphasis rather than kind. A heterodiegetic narrator is a narrator who does not participate in the story, who tells a story not about him-/ herself.

Smiling in the face of adversity

33

the English guests at the wedding who watch in a ‘confused huddle,’ the collective female weeping at the end of the day comes across as a ‘tragic performance’ while the Indian guests expect this to happen as part of a wellknown ritual. The narrator’s use of hyperbole indicates the intimate knowledge of the cultural insider as well as a certain ironical distance and an awareness of how things might appear to the cultural outsider.12 The humorous presentation points to a difference, a gap in cultural knowledge with part of the humour resulting from a structural inversion: in spite of the fact that the wedding takes place in England it is the English who feel at a loss in this cultural context. In contrast to the textual level, where characters huddle in confusion in the face of events that cannot be explained within their frame of reference, the narrative mediation provides hermeneutic guidance through pointing to the existence of two frames of reference: it facilitates understanding for the non-Indian reader through explaining a certain ritual and accounts for the confusion of the English guests (cultural outsiders as far as the marriage ceremony is concerned) to the Indian reader. Such a passage alerts readers from different cultural backgrounds to the fact that behaviour is culture-coded and can be interpreted in very different ways according to the cultural frame employed. Moreover, it adds to their cultural knowledge and increases awareness for culture-related misunderstanding. A more complex example is taken from Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988). The context is that Mrs Maydene Brassington, the white wife of the English-educated, mixed-parentage parson of a black Jamaican community, comes to see Mrs Amy Holness, the black wife of the black headmaster of the community school, to enquire about a mixed-parentage girl (Ella O’Grady, daughter of Mary Riley), who she would like to help educate. The novel is set at the beginning, the first two decades, of the last century. Amy knew she was right. She was taking the left turn. She was coming to her, not to her husband at school and the cursing began to circle in her head: ‘This blasted white pillow case with a string tied in the middle. These white people just wan tek people pickney fi practice upon. Want Mary good-good pickney fi pasture out to her two red-face son. Is pumpkin belly dem wan send this one back home with too?’ But since Amy Holness was the headmaster’s wife and Maydene Brassington the parson’s wife, there was no way what was in her head could be expressed in that way. It stayed there circling. Instead she said when Maydene began to ascend her steps: ‘Why Mrs Brassington how nice to see you. What a coincidence. Someone just called your name to me. They say you are wanting to take Mary’s child into your house.’ [...] Amy Holness continued

12

It is, of course, problematic if not impossible to define ‘cultural insider’ and ‘cultural outsider’ in absolute terms because cultures as well as relations between cultures change and develop. In a similar way, what is considered ‘funny’ in an intercultural context also changes. I am using the terms as heuristic tools to describe different degrees of understanding cultural practices as a result of belonging to a cultural community.

34

Ulrike Erichsen ‘My, your boys will love her. She will fit so well into the family. They are expected home soon, aren’t they. Such lovely gentlemen!’ Maydene Brassington was not fooled by the translation. She knew that Mrs Holness was saying ‘You interfering white slob: Why don’t you go and do your dirty work yourself and leave me to my business?’ ‘And that’s another thing’, she thought, ‘that William [her husband, the parson, U.E.] refuses to deal with. That there are classes everywhere and that those below must hate those above and must devise some way of communicating this without seeming too obviously rude. He refuses to participate in “silly linguistic rituals.”[...]’ Maydene was in no hurry to go. [...] Nothing that God made was going to frighten her. So if Mrs Holness thought that just because she was black, was a couple rungs below her socially, she could roll this into a weapon with which to distance her, she would have to think again. (Brodber: 20-1)

Brodber’s novel depicts a situation that, in terms of its social conventions and expectations, is doubly coded: Not only is Maydene Brassington the wife of the parson, thus within the social hierarchy of the community above the teacher’s wife, she is also white and English and therefore a representative and agent of the colonising power. As such she is recognized as a threat by Amy Holness who suspects that the parson’s wife plans to use Ella O’Grady for the sexual initiation of her sons. (‘These white people just wan tek people pickney fi practice upon.’) The passage makes it quite clear that this has happened before and that the implicit threat is real enough. The comic element in the situation lies not so much in the way the two women communicate with each other but in the discrepancy between appearance and reality, in this case between utterance and thought. This can only be deciphered by the reader who is also party to the thoughts of the two women. The passage illustrates the working of asymmetrical relationships, typical of the colonial situation, through providing a double-focus on the characters’ thoughts as well as utterances. This is particularly obvious with regard to Amy Holness’s behaviour. Her assessment of Maydene Brassington’s plans is very critical, and she fears that Ella O’Grady might be used and sexually exploited. However, convention forbids that she utters her assumptions directly or explicitly; she must find a more circumstantial way of expressing her view. The humorous effect for the reader results from the fact that he or she knows about Mrs Holman’s opinion, yet sees it presented in a much weaker form and a different language, Standard English in contrast to Jamaican Patois, to Mrs Brassington. The contrast between ‘her two red-face son’ and ‘your boys will love her. [...] Such lovely gentlemen’ could not be more obvious, especially as Mrs Holman fears exactly what she says, namely that the boys will love, that is make love to, that is have sex with the girl she wants to protect. The parson’s wife can ‘translate’ these utterances because she can see through what her husband calls ‘silly linguistic rituals,’ and she is aware of the fact that such linguistic rituals are not only an expression of but also perform an important function in asymmetrical relationships. Yet

Smiling in the face of adversity

35

Maydene Brassington is not prepared to go along with the role that such linguistic ritual assigns to her. Moreover, her focalizing of the situation points out to the reader that she is aware of the fact that Amy Holness, in terms of the social hierarchy the less influential character, is using politeness as a weapon to stop the parson’s wife from interfering. This is how the situation develops: Maydene settled in and tried to look comfortable on the little bentwood chair handed her, though to tell the truth her fat hips were drooping over the sides like a Friday evening hamper on a donkey’s back. She knew how ridiculous she looked and she knew how uncomfortable she felt but she peeped into the drawing room and admired the ruffles and the tatting on the centre table aloud and said to herself, above her discomfiture, ‘She doesn’t know it yet, but we are going to be friends and she is going to teach me to make all those delicious things they make with coconuts.’ Then she proceeded to smile into space. Her silence was off-putting. [...] And Maydene pushed her advantage even further to dictate the level and the tone of the conversation. The matter on the floor was of course the exploitation of people’s natural god-given gifts – their selves or those of the beings they made. Amy had accused her of stealing her people and exploiting their bodies. The accusation was too oblique to force a direct response. Maydene would side step that, take another tack and throw her slightly. She looked at the floor which was incredibly shine. [...] Mrs Holness – she said – How do you manage to grow up children and keep your floor so shine? – She did know that Mrs Holness had no children. Amy broke. (Brodber: 21-2)

What comes across as an expert’s linguistic manipulation in this particular passage, and thus seems to reinforce all stereotypes about the exploitative relationship between coloniser and colonised, must be seen in the larger context of the novel as a whole. Maydene Brassington uses her linguistic expertise and her insight into the reasons for the ‘silly linguistic rituals’ to show people that communication is possible even between people who seem to be on different sides.13 The obvious but superficial markers of a humorous situation employed here, calling somebody names or referring to aspects of the outward appearance, draw the reader’s attention to the situation and, ideally, make him or her reflect more deeply about it. Humour, thus, can be used to make a point on the cognitive or referential level while at the same time providing relief on the emotional and social level of the communication. 13

The chapter provides another example of ‘linguistic ritual’ and how it is undermined and put to positive use by the two women: ‘One truth deserves some others and Maydene admitted it. – [...] You do know that my husband is not Jamaican. – Amy knew that she meant ‘not full white’ and at another time would have feigned surprise, “But Mrs Brassington, how extraordinary.” Today she was silent and Maydene went on. – There are things about him that I therefore cannot easily understand. When I saw that child I saw him. [...] What I am only now beginning to see is the enormous size of the pain my husband must have lived through as a child. [...] – And she too was silent. There on the little verandah, Adam and Eve looked away from each other for they had eaten the forbidden fruit’ (Brodber: 23).

36

Ulrike Erichsen

The ending of the situation described above functions in a similar way: ‘There on the little verandah, Adam and Eve looked away from each other for they had eaten the forbidden fruit’ (Brodber: 23). The biblical reference that, at first glance, seems incongruous, as we have listened to a conversation between two women, forces the reader to think about an application to the given situation that will make sense. In spite of the fact that Adam and Eve, read Mrs Brassington and Mrs Holness, look away from each other they have learnt something significant about each other: it is in this sense that they have eaten from the tree of knowledge. Here, the humour is employed to uncover the complex social and linguistic negotiations necessary in asymmetrical relationships typical of the colonial context. On the referential level, the passage raises a rather critical issue, the sexual exploitation of colonised people, but it does so in a way that also provides comic relief to the reader in spite of the serious topic. Mrs Holness uses what is called ‘silly linguistic ritual’ in the novel to express her criticism of certain practices under the colonial system. Translating her utterances and exposing the difference between appearance (Mrs Holness’ polite remarks) and reality (her real opinion as expressed in Jamaican Patois) to the reader produces a comic effect while at the same time encouraging the reader to think about the issue. The incongruity expressed functions as a humorous as well as an intellectual stimulant. The narration in the passages given does not aim for essentialising or resolving the conflict but presents different perceptions and strategies of negotiating such differences. The humorous presentation emphasises that there is room for manoeuvre and negotiation even in a very constricted social setting. Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975) is the last and perhaps the most complex of my examples. Selvon’s novel, a sequel to his novel of migration The Lonely Londoners (1956), confronts the reader with a group of Caribbean immigrants in London, many of whom the reader already knows from The Lonely Londoners. In the later novel, the characters are more or less settled and see themselves less as immigrants than as part of a changing Britain. Moses, the eponymous narrator, dreams of becoming a landlord in order to mark his personal development as well as social rise: After all these years paying rent, I had the ambition to own my own property in London, no matter how ruinous or dilapidated it was. If you are a tenant, you catch your arse forever, but if you are a landlord, it is a horse of a different colour. [...] I would 14 naturally of preferred a mansion in Belgravia or a penthouse in Mayfair, without too 14

As Selvon transcribes the peculiarities of his narrator’s speech into written language, they sometimes may suggest grammatical errors if measured against Standard English. As these peculiarities relate to the intention of conveying the oral / aural quality of Trinidadian English speech I shall abstain from marking them with [sic].

Smiling in the face of adversity

37

many black people around, but I had the feeling that if I didn’t make the move now, I would be doomed to the basement brigade for the rest of my life. (Selvon, 1984 [1975]: 2-3)

The comment about ‘too many black people around’ serves a double function in this context. On the one hand, it reflects Moses’s experience as a black immigrant with white landlords; on the other hand, it also signifies his identification with a certain social class as well as his aspiration to be recognised by this class as their equal. From the very beginning, the narrator positions himself between two frames of reference, the Caribbean immigrant set in London, and the white upper middle-class to which he aspires. Thus, to the reader, especially the non-immigrant reader, Moses becomes a mediator between two worlds in a very concrete sense. He acquaints the reader with a great number of prejudices from which Caribbean immigrants had to suffer when they first came to England, for instance the fact that coloured people seem to look alike to Europeans. When asking one of his Pakistani tenants about his experiences in Britain, Moses admits that he does not know any Pakistani immigrants: ‘“I don’t know any Pakis,” I say conversationally, “although there are a lot in the country. Have you been here long?”’ (Selvon 1984 [1975]: 46). During a second interview, it turns out that Moses’ primary motivation in talking to his tenant is the fact that he is collecting information for a book he intends to write: ‘What I really want is your view on current affairs. How does the Pakistani community react to Black Power? What trials and tribulations do they have to overcome? What about that story I read about, how chaps who ride motor-bikes got to take off their turbans and wear crash helmets?’ ‘That’s the Sikhs.’ ‘Well whatever you call them.’ I wave it aside. I wasn’t going to divide up the Asian races, research or no research. Besides, I know that English people so stupid that the whole lot of Orientals and Blacks is the same kettle of fish as far as they are concerned. (Selvon 1984 [1975]: 51)

In a slightly changed context, Moses behaves towards his tenant as the English behaved towards him and his Caribbean friends when he first arrived. Faizull, the Pakistani tenant, plays on this attitude when he invents another Pakistani, Farouk, who supposedly bears responsibility for the illegal immigration operation that Faizull runs and who is said to share his room yet who is always out or at work whenever Moses wants to talk to him. Despite complaining that the immigration operation is illegal, Moses is happy to accept a bribe of twenty Pounds for every immigrant staying in his house (cp. Selvon 1984 [1975]: 67). Moses’ attitude towards the Asian community mirrors the mixture of apprehension and condescension that he himself experienced at the hands of the white English population with whom he now identifies. Selvon’s novel uncovers stereotypes as functional rather than

38

Ulrike Erichsen

essential features through the slippage that invests Moses with the same characteristic behaviour that he used to criticise in the English. The nightmare was now happening for true. It is hard enough to try and fathom one or two [Asians, U.E.] with their dark, scowling faces, piercing resentful eyes, and their general inscrutable miens and bearings. When you are faced with a dozen [...]; when it is not only men but woman too [...]. Can you blame me if I saw this cluster of beings as in a blur unable to distinguish one from the other? (Selvon 1984 [1975]: 72)

Similarly, the inversion of the Crusoe-Friday relationship between Moses and his ‘man Friday, a white immigrant name Bob from somewhere in the Midlands who came to seek his fortunes in London’ (Selvon 1984 [1975]: 4), functions as an ironic reminder that the implied superiority / inferiority in the positions of employer and employee, master and servant, is a function of social role and position rather than a natural characteristic. Moses’ description of Bob illustrates his knowledge of the literary inter-text as well as his awareness of the influence of social position on behaviour and the evaluation of behaviour: He was a willing worker eager to learn the ways of the Black man. [...] The only thing I didn’t like about him was he went out most evenings and come back pissed, drunk like a lord. As we became good friends, or rather Master and Servant, I try to convert him from the evils of alcohol, but it was no use. [...] And whilst I was indoctrinating him, I also learn a lesson my self, which is that Black and White could live in harmony, for he was loyal and true, and never listened to all that shit you hear about black people. Afterwards he tell me he used to believe it, but since coming under my employ he realize that black people is human too. I decided to teach him the Bible when I could make the time. (Selvon 1984 [1975]: 4-5)

Selvon’s reversal of the master-servant relation, with the black character as master and the white as servant, and his exaggerated use of common stereotypes enable him to make a point about notions of superiority in colonial as well as neo-colonial relationships without explicitly referring to a specific context. The humorous effect partly derives from the reader’s knowledge of the novel’s inter-text and its contrast with the new perspective presented in Moses Ascending. The use of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as an inter-text and implicit (although often rather explicit) reference continually forces the reader to compare text and inter-text,15 thus undermining the seemingly ‘natural’ relation of (knowledgeable and white) master and (ignorant and black) servant. The structural reversal exposes these roles as stereotypes based on essentialising assumptions. Moreover, through syntactically paral-

15

In his introduction to Moses Ascending, Mervyn Morris gives a number of examples for inter-textual relations between Selvon’s novel and Robinson Crusoe (cp. Selvon 1984 [1975]: xiv f.).

Smiling in the face of adversity

39

leling and semantically equating contradictory notions like ‘As we became good friends, or rather Master and Servant’ or different registers like ‘come back pissed, drunk as a lord,’ Selvon’s narrator points to the fact that the evaluation of a situation or relation is very much a matter of interest, power, and the chosen frame of reference. Rather than compare individual cultural frames of reference, thereby emphasising the relative stability and reenforcing the ‘us versus them’-dichotomy, Selvon’s novel illustrates that cultural judgements are not only historically variable but also contextdependent and therefore far from ‘natural’ or ‘given.’

Conclusion Many postcolonial texts address the problem of differing cultural norms and values. The deliberate ambiguity, be it verbal or structural, on which much humour relies offers an opportunity to acknowledge and highlight such differences in a non-conflictual way (example 1). Theories of humour can provide a sharper focus for the understanding and enjoyment of humorous situations by alerting the reader to the fact that humour works on different levels and can fulfil different functions simultaneously. A critical issue can be raised on the referential or cognitive level while a humorous episode can provide (comic) relief on the emotional or social level (example 2). Such an effect can be achieved at the textual level as well as in the reader-textcommunication. Undermining well-known and seemingly ‘natural’ frames of evaluation through structural reversal or parodistic reference (example 3) forces the reader to engage with new or different perspectives. This multifunctionality makes humour a perfect means to, on the one hand, strengthen group cohesion while at the same time transgressing group boundaries and entering new territories.16 Thus, humour can work as a stabilizing as well as de-stabilizing phenomenon. Trying to solve cultural conflicts often involves comparative evaluations. The cultural frames of reference themselves provoke discussion. Thus, initially minor differences can turn into full-blown debates about the relative merits of different norms and values. Humour in postcolonial texts can be employed as a means to defuse such cultural conflict by pointing out cultural differences without the need to ‘solve’ the potential conflict or to decide which frame of reference is more appropriate. Humorous descriptions of 16

Jason Stearns sees this as an important function of humour: ‘So humor can be the locus of subversion and also the place where, in Bhabha’s terms, “newness enters the world.” This occurs where there is a breakdown in the semantic determinacy of a sign, […] where the meaning of text or a sign changes and humour is definitely such a venue.’ Jason Stearns, ‘Postcolonial Cinema’ (11 December 1997) at http://www.mytholyoke.edu/~aamkpa/ Problems.Stearns.html (12.07.02).

40

Ulrike Erichsen

cultural differences, as the examples selected here illustrate, leave the different frames of reference intact, encouraging the reader to switch between two perspectives rather than foregrounding one at the expense of the other. Thus, humour can fulfil a mediating function: indicating differences in cultural practices but also bridging gaps in cultural knowledge.

Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981. Brodber, Erna. Myal. London: New Beacon Books, 1988. Chapman, Antony J., and Hugh C. Foot. Introduction. Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. Ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1976. Hughes, Langston. ‘A Note on Humor.’ The Book of Negro Humor. Ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. Jakobson, Roman. ‘Linguistics and Poetics.’ Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetics. Ed. Stephen Rudy. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1981. 18-51. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Kotthoff, Helga. Spaß verstehen: Zur Pragmatik von konversationellem Humor. Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 196. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humour. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. 1956. Longman Caribbean Writers Series. Harlow: Longman, 1985. –––. Moses Ascending. 1975. Caribbean Writers Series. Oxford: Heinemann, 1984. Stearns, Jason. ‘Postcolonial Cinema.’ 11 Dec. 1997. 12 July 02 . Syal, Meera. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. 1999. London: Doubleday, 2000. Vogel, Susan C. Humor: A Semiogenetic Approach. Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics, BPX 9. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1989.

Smiling in the face of adversity

41

Walker, Nancy A. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988

This page intentionally left blank

ANTHONY ILONA

‘Laughing through the tears’ Mockery and self-representation in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance

Any image […] suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to speak, will be laughable. – Henri Bergson (1911) Something of the Carnival lunacy touches all these islands […]. – V. S. Naipaul (1970) Tell Desperadoes when you reach the hill, I decompose, but I composing still. – Derek Walcott (1982)

T

owards the end of V. S. Naipaul’s reputed third novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), the titular protagonist, on his deathbed, imagines the kind of headline his former employer at the Trinidad Sentinel newspaper might reserve for him in his wake. ‘ROVING REPORTER PASSES ON,’ Mr Biswas speculates. The posthumous headline, however, denies Biswas even the flattery of an adjective; ‘JOURNALIST DIES SUDDENLY,’ it reads (589). In a similar turn, the opening paragraph of Earl Lovelace’s novel, The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) renders one man’s attempt to symbolize the plight of his community through a live re-enactment of the crucifixion. Bombarded with heavy stones by members of his own clan he, Taffy, resigns with the words ‘who is I to die for people’ (9).

44

Anthony Ilona

The ego-deflation rendered in these two episodes signals a key concern within the boundaries of characterisation in Caribbean fiction. It is a concern often expressed in terms of a peculiar tension between the effort to capture individuality in a single representative voice and the contrasting diversity of local perspectives on the matter. This concern highlights a faultline in attempts to render Caribbean identity as a composite and unique self-hood unchallenged by the diverse cultural influences and differentiated points of view that inhabit the region. Such concern sees the problem as evident in the most discrete acts of self-representation. As such, it ruminates on the recurrent sign of representational failure in a region where standard or received forms of discursive signification – whether derived from the conventions of journalistic reportage, religious iconography or elsewhere – remain insufficiently pliant in their articulation of, say, the dual meaning of an historic Caribbean event or the polyphony encased in the utterance of a single Caribbean phrase. As it is manifested in the region’s fiction, such preoccupation with the limits of representation finds ways – perhaps in the creative spirit of Derek Walcott’s already dead poet in the epigraph above, writing via the veil of his ghostly absence – to work through such restraints. Deliberate use of the complicating devices of mimicry and masquerade – both figuratively demonstrated in the actions of the mocked heroes, Mr Biswas and Taffy – provide writers of the Caribbean with ways of unfixing unilateral interpretations of self-hood by re-directing textuality towards more flexible, ironic modes of expression. At the very least, these devices allow writers the double vision of constructing composite, received notions of identity while, in a spirit of creative levity, throwing mocking stones at the narrow premises of their constitution. Such concern with the undoing of singularity and definition in self-representation is understandable when the disparity that informs the Caribbean region is taken into account.

Conflicting gravities In a region that is geographically dispersed and whose composition is often figured in the iconography of the archetypal ‘melting pot,’ a unified invocation of character is not so easily forthcoming or sustained. Encompassing as it does such large-scale demographic ingress from Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Caribbean remains an unequivocal site of cultural and social heterogeneity. As such, it is a site of multiple identities and multiple fractures. The intermingling of African, South Asian and Spanish-derived sounds and words within the anglophone vernacular of Trinidad alone proves this point. All this via the interjection, over centuries, of migration, slavery, colonialism, indenture and, more latterly, nationalism, tourism, and satellite television. Nothing less than a polychromatic kaleidoscope can illustrate the

‘Laughing through the tears’

45

distinctive cultural imprint left by recurrent territorial contest in the region’s past. Only then would the composition of a region forged out of what Wilson Harris terms ‘adversarial contexts’ – contexts of conquest, genocide, resistance, exile, alienation and more – come into view (Harris 1985). Suffice it to say that such context informs the modern Caribbean and emerges in the tensions that circulate between the convergent forces of cultural and social intermixture (creolization) and the polarizing forces of ideological difference (tradition-modernity, colonizer-colonized, elite-masses).1 This evolved complexity defines the particularity of the region and by extension its literature. It also renders each attempt at individuation to be, in the words of Roberto Marquez, ‘a dramatic tension between alienation and opportunity, irresolution and resolve, defeat and victory’ (Marquez: 293). With these ‘conflicting gravities’ (Marquez: 294) in mind, this essay seeks to utilize the examples set by two regionally specific texts, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, to show how Anglo-Trinidadian writing opens up a space for the project of Caribbean self-representation. Both texts respectively emerge from the pre- and post-independent eras in Trinidad, a chronology that invites a critical perception of growing textual alertness among writers to the problems of representation in the Caribbean region. The argument here is that these two novels thematize the issue of self-representation in their design. They identify and re-direct instances of failure in attempts at composed, singular self-assertion in their narratives. In so doing, I argue, Naipaul and Lovelace generate a conception of unilateral notions of subjectivity as a necessary illusion or bad faith; one that is, in their narratives, metonymically associated with the stasis and containment of traditionalist, colonialist and nationalist indoctrination and so inappropriate to the historically changeable and plural character of the Caribbean. The aim here is to show how these two authors use a disruptive form of humour in their texts to erode inimical categories of subject constitution. Exposing mimicry and masquerade in their Trinidadian settings, these texts prise open the concepts of subjective flexibility and multiple point of view. I propose that there is a deliberate deflationary strategy of what is here termed mock-signification in Biswas and Dragon. This is a strategy of representation that is itself rooted in Trinidadian creole culture. In the playful pantomime of the picong – a Spanish derived term for an ironic, ego-bashing verbal encounter between mutual adversaries. It is a strategy that unsettles and 1

I paraphrase Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer’s view that, ‘[a]t all levels of Caribbean societies tensions operate between the centrifugal tendencies of state policies and ideals and the centripetal forces of beliefs, family and kin’ (Knight & Palmer 1989: 16-7, my emphases).

46

Anthony Ilona

diverts the perception of representational failure and, instead, privileges representational possibility. This is ultimately manifested in a conceptual shift away from social stasis and towards an emphasis on change and multiplicity. Much of this will take hold in closer attention to the novels at hand. For now it is enough, perhaps, to keep alive the possibility that Mr Biswas and Taffy are always already the architects of their own self-perception over and above the moment of violent interjection by script and stone.

The mock-sign The key device used in Biswas and Dragon to engage with the problem of self-representation is, I claim, mockery. The verb ‘to mock’ means to engage in ‘a derisive action’ (OED). To deride is to laugh at in such a way as to disparage or ridicule. As such mockery – which encompasses derision – conjures images of corrosion, deliberate degradation, even subversion; thus, ‘to laugh at in contempt, to make sport of’ (OED). Prior to his uncelebrated departure at the hands of the Trinidad Sentinel above, Mr Biswas notes of the loiterers in Port-of-Spain’s central landmark, Woodford Square, that, ‘[e]ven about the beggars there was an air of establishment […] one or two were reputed to be millionaires’ (317). Thus he mocks their much-cherished status on the bottom rung of society. By suggesting that their life-long penury has made them financially viable, Biswas makes sport of their claims to charity and derides the credibility of their status as vagrants. In turn, the narrative mocks Mr Biswas’ own life-long effort at self-improvement, his ambition to ‘paddle his own canoe’ (107), by posing these vagrants in a position of economic advantage in relation to the disillusioned protagonist. At both the level of narrative point of view and character point of view, then, the strategic use of mockery has, here, the capacity to render a subversion of established ideals of self-perception. In his book Rabelais and His World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin discusses mockery in terms of the folk humour prominent in the work of the earlyModern French writer, Francois Rabelais. In Bakhtin’s oft-quoted introduction to this book, mockery is associated with the oral and literary indulgences of the medieval European folk at festival time. Here mockery emanates from such cultural enclaves as carnival, popular literature and music, and the marketplace. In its capacity to reduce and subvert, mockery is seen by Bakhtin in universalist terms as expressing ‘the point of view of the whole world’ and is directed at ‘all and everyone’ because it sees the ‘entire world in its droll aspect’ (Bakhtin: 11-2). Bakhtin also sees folk humour and its corollary, mockery, as essentially physical. The explosive, emotive force of the laughter that mockery can provoke enables, in Bakhtin’s view, strategies of spontaneous interruption, disruption, and subversion. This is in

‘Laughing through the tears’

47

contrast to the satirist who, in opposition to the thing he seeks to deride, ‘places himself above the object of his mockery’ (Bakhtin: 12). The satirist, in Bakhtin’s eyes, can only offer an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. In the atmosphere of levity that defines the festival experience for Bakhtin, and for his subject Rabelais, mockery has an ambivalent meaning. Acts of derision and comic debasement are ‘always the other side of praise and celebration.’ Divisions are derided and vaunted in a sort of ‘gay relativity,’ a ‘continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings’ (Bakhtin: 11). These Rabelaisian features of ambivalence and recalcitrance are useful to the definition of mockery I wish to adopt here. However, the term must be recovered from the somewhat axiomatic vagaries of Bakhtin’s folk-centred perspective. Though this view foregrounds individual and collective human agency in the act of representational resistance, it tends to fix subversive potential within the generalised and reversible terms of high social status versus low social status. This remains inappropriate to the discursive context in which mockery is to be used here. The claim I want to make for the subversive use of mockery in Biswas and Dragon is specific to the arena of creolization in the Caribbean where what is being attacked is less the selfdeceptive seriousness and formality of some fixed, external, upper-class social stratum and more the self-deception involved in the process of assimilating its identity, mimicking its authority and performing its mannerisms without self-awareness. The latter places more emphasis on mockery as contemplative self-critique and favours the slow-burning subtleties of posture, gesture, and attitude over the immediacy of oral disruption. None of this is to deny the influence in Caribbean culture of the enlightened humanistic concerns Bakhtin privileges in his reading of Rabelais. Indeed, it is well documented that the perennial spectacle and masquerade of the carnival festival popular in Trinidad and other territories of the Caribbean is a genealogical heirloom, so to speak, of Rabelais’ own post-medieval France.2 As such, much of Bakhtin’s theory remains useful to any assessment of Caribbean folk culture. That said, there is another way in which the term mockery might be seen as viable. Alongside the oral form of mockery defined above, is the concept of the mock-sign. The mock-sign is defined not so much as an act but, rather, a gesture, ‘a derisive gesture’ (OED). The power of the mock-sign to deride lies not in oral presentation but in a mimed re-presentation to or of the object of derision. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche renders some 2

Errol Hill discusses the colonial background of carnival in the Caribbean in his The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre.

48

Anthony Ilona

sense of the imagistic force of the mock-sign in his discussion of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The famous play-within-a-play segment ‘The Mousetrap’ is aimed at the treacherous King of Denmark and staged, partly without words, by the King’s discontented nephew, Hamlet. The mimed segment is Nietzsche’s point of reference here: The structure of the scenes and the visible images reveal a deeper wisdom than [Hamlet] himself can convey in words and concepts […] so that the lesson of Hamlet […] is to be found not in words themselves but in a profound contemplation and survey of the play as a whole. (Nietzsche: 81)

The mock drama staged by Hamlet, then, defers the immediate and spontaneous shock-value of plain, oral mockery and instead creates a procession of meaningful signs or gestures in its place. The mock-sign is therefore a mediated or concealed kind of derision, one that intensifies its subversive effects through visual gesture. The act of generating such masked, non-verbal signs of derision might be termed mock-signification; this being the deliberate, performed process of making derisive meaning. As with the play staged by Shakespeare’s brooding hero, mock-signification is evaluative in its effect. As Hamlet himself is noted to say, ‘[t]he play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ (Shakespeare: 669). In this sense, mock-signification responds to oppressive forms of authority and to the monolithic ideals of established orthodoxy through this performative semiotics of derision. As such imitation is the prime strategic gesture of mock-signification. It presents an imitation of the well-known or familiar styles of the authority / orthodoxy it seeks to deride. Earl Lovelace’s narrator perhaps makes derisive comment on the pseudo-colonial influence of American culture in Trinidad and its effect on self-representation in his depiction of the procession of postures assumed by the Port-of-Spain street gangs in Dragon: And these walls […] on which they have scrawled their own names and that of their gangs, Marabuntas, Apple-Jackers, Brimstone, Shane – hard names derived from the movies which on some nights they slip off the walls to see, Western movies of the gun talk and the quick draw and the slow crawl, smooth grand gestures which they imitate so exquisitely as if these gestures were their own borrowed to the movie stars for them to later reclaim as proper to their person. (11-2)

The imitative, cowboy Western gestures of the gang members here convey the sense of a pageant or parade in which mimicry and masquerade is the main representational style. In their ennobling yet, from the narrator’s point of view, ridiculous function, these gestures of mimicry and masquerade are the mock signifiers of representative failure as well as representative possibility.

‘Laughing through the tears’

49

It may be judicious at this point to reiterate the initial claim that mocksignification is the key device used in the fictional thematic of representation concerning notions of Caribbean selfhood. As a strategy of representation that both uses and derides imitation for its effect, mock-signification cannot be considered a cohesive form in itself. This is because its expression relies so heavily on familiarity with the referent or form it imitates. Unlike Bakhtin’s subversive, Dionysian image of the body, mock-signification does not ‘negate’ its object in the process of renewal. Nor does it resolve itself in a notion of representational unity external to the thing it derides. It is not, as Derek Walcott has phrased it, ‘an exchange of Gods’ (Walcott 1993: 38). Rather, mock-signification simply diverts consciousness of its effects towards a notion of the flexible, changeable, simultaneous, and plural nature of identity formation and meaning. This is what Wilson Harris means when he speaks of the potential for the heterogeneous experience of the creole Caribbean subject to ‘implode’ biased categories and precepts (Harris 1967: 50). This, in a ‘play of values […] through and beyond what is given to us and what we accept […] as objective appearances’ (Harris 1981: 65). Note, for example, how Lovelace’s narrator above shifts the motives of the streetgang poseurs to imply that they themselves are the source of the seductive image of machismo that is, now, a second-hand on-screen imitation by the very American actors they revere. This humorous turn echoes the subversive function of mockery privileged by Bakhtin in its ‘comic crowning and uncrowning.’ It also signals a deliberate narrative refusal of the notion of subjective sovereignty. In its misdirection, Lovelace’s mock-signifyin’3 here refuses and relativizes the concept of a fixed, unified and transcendent (‘movie star’) subject position. Instead, and without resolution, it re-directs the reader’s attention toward the playful masquerade involved in all notions of subject constitution and identity – assumed by film stars and street urchins alike.

Picong There is a long tradition of playful mockery in Trinidadian culture. It informs the reputation Trinidad has for its humour. This is a humour noted for being able to ‘humble’ and ‘brutalize’ as well as ‘heighten enjoyment’ and ‘educate’ (Jones & Liverpool: 259). A cursory glance at some of its features may illuminate the subsequent reading of its use as a representational strategy in Biswas and Dragon.

3

The tradition of mock-signification in African American male oral culture must be acknowledged here for its comparable phenomenon of heroic self-identification (see Gates, Jr. 1988).

50

Anthony Ilona

Mock-signification resembles the ‘picong’ element of the Trinidad-based musical form of the calypso. The word picong is itself derived from the Spanish adjective picόn (meaning mocking or huffing) and, in Trinidad, is often used in its adverbial sense (Allsopp & Allsopp: 439). To give or take picong is to be embroiled in a sustained taunt, derision, ridicule, or insult. In the festive context of the Trinidadian calypso, picong refers to a spontaneous and highly competitive verbal contest between two or more calypso performers (‘calypsonians’). It describes the silver-tongued alacrity of their lyrical warfare as they playfully ridicule each other in the hope of winning the ‘calypso crown’ on offer each year (Jones & Liverpool: 283). All this occurs within the heightened atmosphere of the carnival season and so gives the picong a certain folk-popularity alongside the calypso’s reputation as ‘the music of the masses of Trinidad’ (Rohlehr 1970: 87). Within the bounds of the calypso’s attractive, syncopated musical rhythms and the additional propensity for the calypsonian to comment – often through double entendre – on the socio-political climate and popular icons of the day, the picong is an established genre within the diverse oral tradition of creole Caribbean culture. This tradition also encompasses (dub-)poetry, chants, hymns, riddles, fables, jokes, word-games and so on. However, there is a strong element of the gestural in the picong. This stems from its more dramatic confrontational resonance, particularly in relation to the performance of calypso warfare and from its perennial use by the calypsonian as a vehicle for social protest. As such, ‘[t]he calypsonian’s pose is normally one of a stylised, melodramatic defiance’ (Rohlehr 1970: 96). A particularly idiosyncratic and, on first sight, humorous manifestation of such performative defiance is the custom of aggrandized epithets, stage names, given to the calypsonian. The names of the legendary calypsonians, ‘Atilla the Hun,’ ‘Lord Executer,’ ‘Roaring Lion,’ ‘Lord Kitchener,’ ‘The Mighty Stalin,’ and ‘The Mighty Duke’ resemble the mock-movie titles of Earl Lovelace’s street-gangs above in their grandeur. The calypsonian’s eponymic reference to figures – mainly from European continental history and heritage – collectively implies an overcompensation for their own acute sense of historical marginality. Only the calypso legends, ‘The Mighty Sparrow,’ ‘The Mighty Chalkdust’ and ‘Lord Shorty’ seem, in their titular ambivalence, to temper this accusation. These grand titles are, in fact, picong battle-names. They derive from the collective desire for the calypsonian to establish the scale of his superiority and / or verbal ferocity through consistent use of the prefix ‘mighty’ and the appropriation of the name of an exalted figure (Hill: 4 & 76). Such mock-signification – enacting and deriding bogus claims to authority – is a key dimension of the performative mien of Trinidadian

‘Laughing through the tears’

51

humour. This much is acknowledged by James M. Jones and Hollis V. Liverpool in their key study of 1974, ‘Calypso Humour in Trinidad’: There are numerous theoretical approaches to [calypso] humour. In general, cognitive theories are not readily applicable to calypso humour. […] ‘you can’t tell a straight joke. Trinidadians like slapstick, you gotta act it out.’ (Jones & Liverpool: 282)

With this performative, ‘act it out,’ functionality in mind, I wish now to turn to the evidence of sustained engagement with the theme of self-representation in V. S. Naipaul’s Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s Dragon. There are features of each text which, when looked at closely, reveal a self-conscious mockery of singular and elevated notions of self and identity that reflect the intense irony of the picong performance. These features also form the starting-point in both texts for a reassessment of the value of experiences of historical change and social plurality in Trinidadian society.

‘The Mighty Biswas’ Biswas is a text famous for its broadly imaginative and detailed exposition of the life of its protagonist, Mr Mohun Biswas. The title of this novel and the narrative’s persistent reference to Mohun Biswas as ‘Mr’ signals an attempt to ennoble the status of what is otherwise an impossibly ignoble life history. In its insistence on Biswas’ claim to ‘Mister-hood,’ this book might, in the light of the above, be easily titled ‘The Mighty Biswas.’ Naipaul’s prefix of ‘Mr’ can therefore be seen as a titre de guerre for an embattled protagonist whose dislocated life sees him failing in several different scenarios as he moves from residence to residence, from job to job, from country to city and from the stifling traditionalism of his domineering in-laws, the Tulsis, to the disparate materialism of the colonial capital. The narrative of Biswas is a playful amplification-in-repetition of circumstances in which the protagonist flounders in his efforts at self-improvement. Over the course of his forty-six years – years which straddle the Second World War era in colonial Trinidad – Mohun Biswas relocates to over a dozen different homes. Each location provides a different setting for Naipaul to illuminate the drama of crisis and conflict that persists in Biswas’ life. Variably accompanied by his wife Shama and their growing brood of four – Savi, Myra, Anand, and Kamla – Mr Biswas finds himself lodged in little more than a series of overcrowded barracks and shambolic half-built or decaying mud-huts. Equally frustrating are Biswas’ several changes of occupation. These have rendered him an absent-minded Pundit’s apprentice, a wayward bus-conductor, a neglectful sign-writer, a harassed plantation driver, and a liberal-minded journalist, among other things. From his uncertified, six-fingered birth to his anonymously announced death, the

52

Anthony Ilona

recurrence of failure in Biswas’ life seems a deliberate narrative excuse to have its protagonist wear a succession of mocking masques in a procession of contrasting situations. This – to echo Naipaul’s own epigraph to this discussion – in a kind of ‘lunatic’ carnival of narrative derision. This is evident after a particularly bruising period for Mr Biswas under the patronage of his domineering Aunt Tara and a corresponding internship as shopkeeper for a corrupt uncle. In his resolve to ‘get a job of my own. And […] my own house too’ (67), Biswas trawls the job-market the following Monday morning: He passed a tailor and tried to picture himself cutting khaki cloth, tacking, and operating a sewing-machine. He passed a barber and tried to picture himself stropping a razor; his mind wandered off […]. But he didn’t like the tailor he saw, a fat man sulkily sewing in a dingy shop; and as for barbers, he had never liked those who cut his own hair; he thought too how it would disgust Pundit Jairam to learn that his former pupil had taken up barbering, a profession immemorially low. He walked on […] it seemed, the same owners, the same assistants; and it all filled him with the same depression. (67-69)

The picaresque image of Mr Biswas moving through the spectacle of colonial Trinidad chimes in its mockery with his observations of the Woodford Square vagrants seen earlier. However, there are two features in this passage that confirm Naipaul’s strategic adoption of mock-signification to thematize the flawed self-regard of his Trinidadian protagonist. The first is the imaginative masquerade undertaken by Biswas. Note how he insinuates himself in each occupation to fantasise the dignity of a life of concentrated discipline (‘stropping the razor’). Note also how he denounces the value and relevance of these occupations, in relation to his own traditional Hindu background (‘how it would disgust Pundit Jairam’). Like an indecisive calypsonian seeking an apt battle-name, Biswas both assumes and mocks the roles of these dignifying yet constricting and repetitively low-grade (‘the same owners, the same assistants’) job prospects. The second notable feature of this passage signifies at the level of narrative form. This entire episode of Mr Biswas’ futile job-hunt might stand in as an analogy for the causality of the novel’s plot-structure as a whole. When seen in conjunction with the novel’s circular stress on the Biswasian pratfall, it echoes, in its detail, Naipaul’s broader design. There is also the suggestion of an Harrisian ‘play of values’ (see above) between the notion of spiritual improvement associated with the teachings of Biswas’ Hindu mentor, Jairam, and Smilesian character building in the daily discipline of full-time razor-stropping employment. Neither the traditionalism of Jairam, and of the Tulsi-household Biswas later seeks to escape, nor the self-help individualism that fuels the materialist concerns of the shopkeepers of colonial Trinidad, are satisfactory here. Both imply a life of stasis and

‘Laughing through the tears’

53

containment that Biswas must ‘move on’ from now that he has decided to be the free agent in his own self-determination (‘And […] my own house too’). My point here is that this rite of passage for Mr Biswas signals a brave new dispensation of unilateral orthodoxy (traditionalism, colonialist materialism) and the beginning of a more creative attitude towards his selfsustenance. Indeed, given his flights of fancy here, Biswas, having left job and home, is free to remake himself in a variety of ways. He thus becomes the producer / author in the re-presentation of himself to the world. It is no accident, then, that Mr Biswas soon takes up the more creative occupation of freelance sign-writer. This is employment that gives him some autonomy, and also, like his journalism later in life, licences playful mimicry and masquerade. Such is evinced in Mr Biswas’ plundering of calligraphic styles from foreign magazines (mimicry) (77-8) and in his indulgence of ‘snowcapped’ lettering in the inapt Christmas-time climate of the ‘blazing’ Trinidadian sun (masquerade) (77). Here, though, the figurative mimicry and masquerade are deliberate; they signal a mocking agency in Biswas’ calligraphic gestures common to all creative bricolage. Compare Biswas’ expropriative ways here with Naipaul’s 1964 description of his own early literary efforts: Books came from afar; they could offer only fantasy. […] The process of adaptation was automatic and continuous. Dickens’s rain and drizzle I turned into tropical downpours; the snow and fog I accepted as conventions of books. […] [A]nything which sought to remove the characters from the make-up world in which I set them, I rejected. I went to books for fantasy; at the same time I required reality. (Naipaul 1964 & 1984: 24-5)

Naipaul’s significant use of the words ‘fantasy,’ ‘adaptation,’ and ‘continuity’ reinforces the view held here that a strategic process of mocksignification, of a perceptual de-constitution and re-constitution of received forms and formulas, is a necessary feature of self-representation for the Trinidadian / Caribbean subject. Naipaul himself has never been seen as wholly enamoured of his own natal connection to the ‘half-made’ society of colonial Trinidad – leaving as soon as he could on a scholarship from Queen’s Royal College to Oxford University, aged eighteen. Yet, as writer, he has an appreciation of the historical significance of Trinidadian expropriation in the face of social stasis and containment: The slave in Trinidad worked by day and lived at night. Then the world of plantations fell away; and in its place was a securer, secret world of fantasy of […] ‘kingdoms,’ ‘regiments,’ bands. The people who were slaves by day saw themselves then as kings, queens, dauphins, princesses […]. The [n]egro kingdoms of the night were broken up. But the fantasies remained. (Naipaul 1970 & 1984: 267-8, my emphasis)

54

Anthony Ilona

What Naipaul exposes here is the fact that there has never been anything but pantomime when it comes to questions of identity in Trinidad. The masked world of pretend ‘kingdoms’ and ‘princesses’ exposes a tragic genealogy of violated self-esteem, repressed creativity and mockery circulating in the colony’s past of plantation slavery. Indeed, Naipaul has been accused of overstating the case in his subsequent works. Most notorious in this regard is his suggestion in his non-fictional book The Middle Passage (1962) that a deficit of obvious creative achievement in the scheme of world affairs disqualified Trinidad, and the West Indies in general, from official historical recognition. However, if Naipaul’s succession of his youthful propensity to assimilate Dickensian fog is anything to go by – having, in more recent times, been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2001) – then he contradicts himself. For as much as historical violence blocks and represses direct acts of creative self-expression, it inspires among its mocking victims new forms of creative release.

The play’s the thing This last point about violence as the insignia of creative repression and masked self-assertion can be understood as a thematic concern of Earl Lovelace’s novel Dragon. Such violence precipitates again in Trinidad in an era when the officially recognised prospect of local autonomy is undermined by unanticipated forces of repression emerging from within the nation. It is here, during the early post-independent nation-building era in Trinidad, that Lovelace sets his novel. In the anglophone Caribbean, this era largely spans the 1960s and 1970s. It is an era when the process of decolonisation and the bourgeoning of ‘national consciousness’ (Fanon: 119-65) took firm hold in the region. In this era, there is unwavering focus on issues of self-reliance and reform away from the dictat of a centuries-old colonial governance. Such focus allowed for sustained and widespread engagement with finding alternative models of self-rule and self-image for the region. There were proposals of alternative orthodoxies and discussions about identity from among the masses, politicians, intellectuals, and cultural movements. ‘We of the Caribbean and its contingent territories,’ writes John Hearne in his introduction to Carifesta, the pan-Caribbean critical forum of 1976, ‘had better realise that much is going to be asked of us in the next three generations, and that we had better come up with some original answers’ (Hearne: xi). Hitherto, much of these ‘answers’ failed to satisfy the demands of a broadly heterogeneous environment. Dr. Eric Williams, the celebrated historian and Prime Minister who led Trinidad to independence in August 1962, concedes this much towards the end of his autobiography Inward Hunger (1969): ‘Independence did not bring us a clean slate. Our

‘Laughing through the tears’

55

independent society inherited the sectionalism and individualism bred by colonialism’ (Williams: 338-9). This retention of categorical ‘-isms’ from an officially bygone era is what Frantz Fanon terms a ‘pitfall’ of national consciousness. This describes an interruption or slippage in the process of moving on from the past due to the retention of logic inscribed in the customs and practices of institutions (educational, legal, administrative) inherited from the colonial era. ‘Even when we have power,’ Lovelace’s protagonist, Aldrick, confirms, ‘we was looking to somebody else to make the decision. Even when we acting we ain’t the actor’ (188). The collective insecurity from which such moments of indecision and subconscious reliance arise has been termed a ‘nervous condition.’4 A key manifestation of this nervous condition is, for Fanon, a reactionary violence. This describes an attempt to assert authority that overthrows its own selfassertions by repeating the divisiveness, the ‘sectionalism’ as Williams puts it, of colonialist aggression. What was the oppressive structure of colonizer versus colonized now becomes the national ruling elite versus the masses. Authority asserted under these oppositional terms effects a logic of repression and rebellion that conflates the character of the ruling elite with that of the old colonizer. The national elite therefore negates its own assertions of rehabilitation out of the colonial era as repressive violence becomes its main gesture of self-assertion. Fanon describes the ineffectual gestures of this countervailing violence as ‘a sort of auto-da-fé in the destruction of all […] idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word’ (Fanon: 36-7). This theme of violence in the era of bourgeoning national consciousness is figured in Dragon in the trope of the carnival masquerade. The masquerade allows for contrasting styles of signification in the novel in response to the nihilistic effects of violence on self-presentation. Here, in the fictional setting of the ‘Yard’ in Alice Street – located on the former slave-rebel outpost of Calvary Hill, near Port-of-Spain and now inhabited by lower class urbanites – Lovelace’s cast of characters use a succession of metaphorical masques as signifiers of their ‘insistent surviving’ (159) in the face of social alienation and poverty. For some, such as Fisheye, the masquerade degenerates into a Fanonian auto-da-fé; for others, like the calypsonian Philo, the masquerade is a transformative ‘picong.’ For most, though, the masquerade is a nervous entrapment between the two, negation and re-creation, such that ‘laughter is not laughter; it is a groan; it is a groan coming from the bosom of these […] shacks’ (9). Such pathos is evident in Aldrick’s careful suture and mnemonic 4

See Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: ‘The status of the ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent’ (Fanon: 17).

56

Anthony Ilona

fetishism of his carnival-time dragon costume (35). It is evident in the dishevelled bridal gown Sylvia wears in silent invitation to Aldrick (42). It is also evident in the unappreciated acquisition of a ‘Humber’ bicycle by the marginalized figure of Pariag (93). Individually, these masques signify the social alienation of each performer. Collectively, they represent a latent schism in the community consciousness of the Yard that contradicts its idealistic ‘all o’ we is one’ (59) doctrine. There is a key moment in Dragon where the issue of violence appears as an ambivalent moment of negation in the text. It appears in the novel’s central scene. This scene replicates some of the defamiliarizing effects of Hamlet’s ‘The Mousetrap,’ where gesture is preferred over verbal utterance as the means of representation in a performance that imitates and derides reality. This occurs when Fisheye, deciding he has to ‘rip open the guts of the city’ (124) – note Lovelace’s Bakhtinian imagery of bodily subversion and negation here – enlists his fellow street-gang ‘cowboys’ and a now discontented Aldrick in the siege of a police vehicle. Naming themselves, in grand picong fashion, the ‘People’s Liberation Army,’ they circle Woodford Square advocating Black Power and holding two police officers hostage at gun point. At this moment, Aldrick feels an uncanny, albeit temporary, sense of elation at their newfound agency: He felt the calm power of a man surrounded by miracles […]. As the jeep cruised slowly down the street […] he had the feeling of being imprisoned in a dragon costume on Carnival Tuesday. This feeling pierced him more as he saw their route lined with people […]. (177)

The analogy Aldrick makes here to being ‘imprisoned’ in a carnival costume and the carnival-like spectacle their siege causes cannot be overstated. Within Lovelace’s text itself the siege takes place over the course of the same two days (the days preceding Ash Wednesday) and over the same route (encircling Port-of-Spain’s Woodford Square) as the Trinidadian carnival in which Aldrick usually performs his Dragon dance. Indeed, the temporal and spatial details of the P.L.A. siege loosely resemble the details of Trinidad’s historic ‘February Revolution’ of 1970. This was a series of social disturbances that culminated in a concerted demand among individuals and interest groups for the Trinidadian State to eliminate ‘colonial ties, habits and institutions as well as for the redistribution of national wealth’ (Bennett: 129). The historian Herman L. Bennett gives vivid account of such disturbances: The first portent of the challenge to the existing order occurred on the first day of Carnival, February 9 1970, when Black Power themes and protest bands appeared alongside the traditional costumes. The political overtones were apparent in a depiction

‘Laughing through the tears’

57

of the black experience entitled, ‘The Truth about Blacks – Past and Present,’ which portrayed […] ‘massas’ and the ‘stooges of the massas.’ (Bennett: 136)

Even here, in the dramatic, real-time context of political protest, there is deliberate use of masquerade in the act of representing the condition and grievances of the post-independent Trinidadian subject. The 1970 carnival masquerade’s metaphor of degrading relations between ‘massas’ and their ‘stooges’ makes direct comment on the oppression felt by the populace in this supposedly independent nation-state. ‘[M]ake no peace with slavery,’ (179) Aldrick declares from a megaphone during his own carnivalesque protest. Earl Lovelace has himself made comment on the subjective feeling of disempowerment circulating around that time: [T]he individual has been dwarfed by the hugeness of institutions which do not allow his voice to be heard. He has been a spectator at the parade of power, in activities in which he has had no deciding voice. (Lovelace 1984: 4)

No surprise, then, that neither Lovelace’s fictional liberation army nor the serious-minded revellers of 9 February 1970 achieve a full redress of their socio-economic grievances. Both become victims of violent intervention by the State. This suspends any prior dialogue about reform or rehabilitation. In Dragon, police surveillance is increased and the posturing street-gangs of Calvary Hill and elsewhere are expunged (164). By April 1970, as Bennett notes, skirmishes between post-carnival activist groups and the police had increased to such a point that a national State-of-Emergency was declared (Bennett: 134). It is only in the character of Philo that Lovelace finds any respite from the nervous condition of violence circulating in this fictional setting of postindependent Trinidad. It is no accident that Philo is a calypsonian. This is in recognition of the calypsonian’s propensity to, as Gordon Rohlehr puts it, ‘visualise multiple characters in multiple situations and to do so by capturing multiple tones of voice’ (Rohlehr 1970: 94). In this regard, only the ironic art of the calypsonian can generate sufficient polyphony to represent the heterogeneity comprising the Caribbean experience. This, without collapsing into a regressive negation of opposing ideals. Indeed, in an encounter not long before the siege and where, on the street corner, Fisheye violently rejects Philo’s appeal to unity and friendship, the latter is provoked to turn this experience into a popular calypso. Needless to say, the calypso aids the revival of Philo’s hitherto flagging career and lifts him out of the economic depravity and social violence of the Yard. Thus goes Philo’s picong: Bad Johns on the Corner and in night clubs I ain’t ‘fraid you again

Anthony Ilona

58

Yesterday you was bad, today I am the ruler Of Trinidad. (233)

The self-assertive realism of Philo’s lyrics here reveals little hint of a nervous condition. Real violence is sublimated into the creative act of making song, of making a style that mocks negativity and violence and extols self-transformation. There is a phrase common in Trinidadian vernacular – and, perhaps, elsewhere in the Antilles – ‘making style.’ ‘Like Cleopatra down her river, making style,’ goes Derek Walcott’s famous poem ‘Mass Man’ (Walcott 1969: 19). Making style means showing-off; showing-off but also making new, idiosyncratic shapes in the process. The two novels discussed above, Biswas and Dragon, have been seen to emphasise this phenomenon of making style through themes of imitation and expropriation, mimicry and masquerade. I have collectively termed these functions mock-signification and outlined the performative resemblance of this mock-signification to the peculiarly creole art of the picong. Through the characters of Mr Biswas and Philo, mock-signification has been seen, often with humorous effect, to divert consciousness away from fixed, unitarian notions of subject constitution and towards changeability and plurality. The idiosyncrasy here lies in the aptness of this emphasis on change and plurality to the heterogeneous condition of the creole Caribbean. In privileging these terms within the bounds of characterisation in their respective texts, Naipaul and Lovelace make – rather than reflect – styles of representation suitable for showing off the complex and dynamic composition of Trinidadian identity.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Introduction. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. 1-58. Bennett, Herman L. ‘The Challenge to the Post-Colonial State: A Case Study of the February Revolution in Trinidad.’ The Modern Caribbean. Ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer. U of North Carolina P, 1989. 129-46. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. 1900. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1911. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.’ October 28 (1984): 125-33. –––. ‘Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism.’ The Theory of Reading. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. Brighton: Harvester, 1985. 93-122.

‘Laughing through the tears’

59

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1990. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: OUP, 1988. Harris, Wilson. ‘Adversarial Contexts and Creativity.’ New Left Review 154 (1985): 124-8. –––. ‘A Talk on the Subjective Imagination.’ 1973. Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966-1981. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1981. 57-67. –––. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Books, 1967. Hearne, John, ed. Carifesta Forum: An Anthology of 20 Caribbean Voices. Mona: Institute of Jamaica, 1976. Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin, U of Texas P, 1972. Jones, James M., and Hollis V. Liverpool. ‘Calypso Humour in Trinidad.’ Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. Ed. Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot. London: John Wiley, 1976. 259-86. Knight, Franklin W., and Colin A. Palmer. ‘The Caribbean: A Regional Overview.’ The Modern Caribbean. Ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 1-19. Lovelace, Earl. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: André Deutsch, 1979. –––. ‘Engaging the World.’ Wasafiri 1 (1984): 3-4. Marquez, Roberto. ‘Nationalism, Nation and Ideology: Trends in the Emergence of a Caribbean Literature.’ The Modern Caribbean. Ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 293-340. Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr Biswas. 1961. London: Penguin, 1969. –––. ‘Jasmine.’ 1964. The Overcrowded Barracoon. 1972. London: Penguin, 1984. 24-31. –––. ‘Power?’ 1970. The Overcrowded Barracoon. 1972. London: Penguin, 1984. 267-75. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy. 1872. Ed. Michael Tanner. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993. ‘Picong.’ The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Ed. Richard Allsopp and Jeanette Allsopp. Oxford: OUP, 1996. 439. Rohlehr, Gordon. ‘Sparrow and the Language of Calypso.’ Savacou 2 (1970): 87-99. –––. ‘The Shape of That Hurt: An Introduction to Voiceprint.’ 1989. The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays. Port-of-Spain: Longman, 1992. 164-90.

60

Anthony Ilona

Walcott, Derek. ‘The Figure of Crusoe.’ Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert D. Hamner. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993. 33-40. –––. ‘Mass Man.’ The Gulf and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. 19. –––. ‘The Spoiler’s Return.’ The Fortunate Traveller. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. 53-60. Williams, Eric. Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. 1969. London: André Deutsch, 1981.

VIRGINIA RICHTER

Laughter and aggression Desire and derision in a postcolonial context

I

n contemporary theory, laughter tends to be linked with the epithet ‘subversive.’1 According to Hélène Cixous, for instance, laughter is closely connected to transgressive female writing. The ‘laughing Medusa’ breaks through established phallogocentric patterns coupling femininity and death; consequently, the very structures of desire, language, and history are changed (Cixous: 885). This far-reaching claim presupposes that social structures are solely dependent on psychological structures and, consequently, that a re-coding of the ways we desire can transform actual power relations in our society. In Cixous’s proposition, this change can be worked through the (female) body, through the exploration and acceptance of ‘the fantastic tumult of her drives’ (Cixous: 876). From the perspective of more recent feminist theory, Cixous’s link between the liberation of the body and political liberation seems naïve, to put it mildly; in fact, this notion of ‘subversion’ is only conceivable through a metaphorization of the political which erases the real effects of power structures. In Cixous’s outlook, oppression is constituted by semiotic allocations of meaning (e.g. woman as castrated) which can be challenged on the semiotic level (the laughing woman denies her castration). Particularly illuminating in this respect is her use of Freud’s metaphor of the ‘dark continent’ for femininity: You can incarcerate them [women], slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they’re

1

Laughter as ‘subversive’ in the sense of ‘politically liberating’ is described in Jenkins; see esp. his chapter on ‘Ridiculing Racism’ (Jenkins: 79ff.).

62

Virginia Richter taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark. (Cixous: 877f.)

In this discursive tradition, femininity is turned into an abject territory, but this forbidden space can be reclaimed: ‘[W]e are black and we are beautiful’ (Cixous: 878).2 Obviously, Cixous quotes Freud’s metaphor with critical intent; nevertheless, her re-iteration is deeply problematic from a postcolonial point of view: although she wants to reverse the traditional valorization of the male / female dichotomy, she does not even consider breaking down the semantic link between ‘Africa’ and the abject (darkness, danger, horror).3 In addition, her use of the ‘dark continent’ as a metaphor of universal gender oppression points to her unreflected affiliation with Western feminism, which privileges gender as the origin of oppression – at the expense of other categories such as race, ethnicity, or religion (cf. Mohanty: 202). Finally, Cixous completely sidelines factors which stabilize an uneven distribution of power, such as economic issues or historical determinants, or rather, she subsumes such factors as metaphors under her critique of phallocentrism (‘Apartheid’). The problems inherent in Cixous’s approach are representative of most psychoanalytical theories of humour: on the one hand, the focus on the individual at the expense of the political; on the other hand, universalization at the expense of cultural difference. What marks Cixous out is her optimism concerning the liberating power of laughter which is posited as analogous to the subversive effect of écriture féminine. Concomitantly, Cixous completely ignores the question whether laughter can itself collude with power, i.e. whether ridicule can be a means of oppression. This question will be at the centre of my analysis. In particular, I aim to discuss the function of laughter for the attribution of ethnically marked identity – in the most extreme case, racial stereotyping – in a situation understood by at least one participant as ‘funny.’ This attribution of a stereotyped identity to others goes hand in hand with the affirmation of one’s own identity as superior, individualized, nonstereotyped; derogatory laughter plays a crucial role in this mechanism of distancing and hierarchy-formation. In a first step, I will re-read Freud’s 2

3

Cixous here alludes to the popular slogan of the African-American civil rights movement, ‘black is beautiful;’ her interest, however, lies in its use as a metaphor for her argumentation from a decidedly white feminist perspective. This conjunction has a long tradition, but in modernity it was most forcefully established in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It can be argued that the space penetrated first by Kurtz, then by Marlow is coded as female. The notion that a feminised Africa is not just mute and passive but ‘laughs back’ could indeed disturb a long-standing dichotomy in Western racial thinking; but this train of thought is not pursued by Cixous.

Laughter and aggression

63

theory of the joke – one of the few theories which explicitly deal with laughter and aggression – in the light of postcolonial theory, particularly Bhabha’s notion of the stereotype; in a second step, I will analyse the interaction of laughter, aggression and discursive power in Joe Penhall’s drama Blue / Orange.

Freud’s theory of the joke: Laughter as aggression According to Freud, the greatest pleasure is called forth either by obscene or by ‘tendentious’ jokes, i.e. by jokes directed against somebody (e.g. a member of an ethnic group) or something (e.g. religion). They can be said to be ‘subversive’ in the sense of giving voice to a forbidden truth – but by functioning as socially admissible vents they also contain their own subversiveness. Compared to Cixous, Freud’s notion of the subversive is set in a lower key: the release of drives is not expected to result in social changes. Jokes are based on the release of repressed sexual or aggressive impulses; both sexual drives and aggression against others are permitted only under carefully laid down circumstances – the mechanism of the joke, which is analogous to the psycho-linguistic work in dreams (displacement, condensation), allows the circumvention of the restraint. Most importantly for my argument, Freud describes jokes as manifestations of a symbolic victory over an enemy, a victory that is confirmed by the laughter of the third person (the audience). By laughing, the hitherto indifferent listener is transformed into someone who shares the hate and contempt of the narrator for the object of the joke (Freud: 126). In this way, a ‘coalition’ is formed between the first person (who tells the joke) and the third person (who listens and laughs) at the expense of the second person (the butt of the joke). Freud makes it abundantly clear that the primary impulse of the joke is not ‘funny’ but hostile, intended to humiliate and vanquish the ‘enemy’ (Freud: 98). In this constellation, the role of the third person is quite crucial: the listener is the authority who confirms the defeat of the butt, the triumph of the teller, and, consequently, the establishment of a hierarchical power structure. As Sander Gilman has observed, the jokes Freud tells refer to incidents in which an Eastern Jew is the butt of the joke of another Jew: ‘Freud’s scientific narrative frames the telling of these jokes in precise scientific discourse, separating his own scholarly, masculine voice from the marginalized voice of the Jews in the jokes’ (Gilman: 128). A fourth person is thus introduced into the triangular structure of the joke: the scientific observer whose identity is constituted precisely by his double distance from the butt of the joke, as an assimilated Jew and as somebody not involved in the psychological processes at work in the exchange of jokes. His retelling of

64

Virginia Richter

this particular kind of joke from a disinterested scientific position thus amounts to an affirmation of his transcendence of a stereotyped Jewish identity. In the transformation of jokes into the material of scientific discourse, the subjectivity of the scientist is constituted as an unmarked one – i.e. nongendered (or male) and non-racialised (or white). At the core of the joke is the stereotype. In fact, this is the basis for the ‘coalition’ established by the joke: persons A and C distance themselves from B, who fully personifies the stereotype. The notion of the stereotype brings me closer to the question of laughter and aggression in postcolonial discourse. Homi Bhabha points out the importance of ambivalence in the colonial stereotype. The otherness expressed in the colonial stereotype is an object of both desire and derision, thus constituting the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse. The colonial stereotype is always already known, but has to be constantly reiterated; it is structured by a simultaneous recognition and disavowal of racial, cultural, and historical difference – colonial discourse produces the colonised as other and, at the same time, as fully knowable (Bhabha: 70). The point of postcolonial intervention, Bhabha claims, does not consist in replacing a ‘bad’ stereotype with a ‘good truth,’ but in understanding this productive ambivalence. Only when the notion of a binary structure – the antagonism between coloniser and colonised – is replaced by an analysis of the dynamics of rejection and desire is it possible to achieve a more profound understanding of colonial discourse, and, possibly, to break the chain of endless repetition. However, an important change has to be made when Bhabha’s inquiry into colonial discourse is transferred onto the postcolonial condition: if the ‘dirty secret’ of colonial discourse is its unacknowledged desire for the other (cf. Young: 3), in postcolonial discourse it is the persistence of derision, the trace of racial stereotyping in both critical and fictional writing. The valorization of hybridity and liminality in Bhabha’s writing runs the risk of ignoring the fixing of the postcolonial subject by the continuing effect of the stereotype.4 The in-betweenness attributed by Bhabha to the postcolonial subject thus occupies structurally the same position as female laughter in Cixous’s theory: it denotes slippage, elusiveness, indeterminacy – and consequently an undermining of the hierarchies of gender and race, respectively. But again, like Cixous, Bhabha has to downplay the real effects of existing social difference, which may be constituted discursively but are experienced as tangible restrictive categories by those who are unable to embrace joyfully their hybridity. Despite the cultural productivity of the colonial encounter

4

For a critique of Bhabha’s universalism and postmodern textualism, see Loomba: 178.

Laughter and aggression

65

claimed by authors such as Paul Gilroy, the pathogenic quality of a black person’s contact with white culture, so eloquently described by Frantz Fanon, should not be ignored.5 What are the implications of Freud and Bhabha’s theoretical work for an analysis of postcolonial laughter? While Freud insists on the separation produced by the joke – the distancing and exclusion of the ‘second person’ – Bhabha in turn makes it abundantly clear that this separation is, in fact, an impossible construct. The aggression inherent in the joke and the stereotype cannot really keep the ‘other’ at bay; the desire for the other always compromises the difference and distance proclaimed by derision. A study of derision in the postcolonial context has to account for this paradox: the continuing construction of categories of exclusion and their simultaneous precariousness. If postmodern celebrations of subversive laughter take it too easy, Freud’s insistence on the neat separation between the three positions involved in joking situations is just too pat. Although laughter is not liberating in a simplistic way, it does contain an element of uncontrollability which renders difficult to maintain the distance between teller and butt, or butt and audience. To sum up the crucial aspects of the three theories presented here: Cixous’s positive evaluation of laughter results in an empowerment of the subaltern (here: women) as a laughing subject. Conversely, Freud’s focus on jokes as mechanisms of exclusion leads to a devaluation of the subaltern (here: Jews) as an object of laughter. Bhabha, without directly referring to either of these approaches, can be said to occupy a meta-position: as the contradictory object of desire and derision, the subaltern (here: the colonised) simultaneously confirms and denies both the possibilities of empowerment through laughter and of devaluation through derision, and thus points not so much to the fact of social hierarchy but to the process of its (endlessly deferred) constitution. While Bhabha’s theory appears as the most sophisticated of the three, the interplay of the issues raised by Cixous and Freud – subversion vs. containment, empowerment vs. exclusion – is equally indispensable for a consideration of laughter and derision from a postcolonial perspective.

The ambivalence of derision in Penhall’s Blue / Orange In Joe Penhall’s comedy Blue / Orange,6 the interaction between postcolonial identities, social encounters informed by power, and the ambivalent function

5

For an analysis of this encounter from the point of view of recent psychoanalytic theory, see Juliet Flower MacCannell’s chapter on ‘The Postcolonial Unconscious; or, The White Man’s Thing’ (MacCannell: 57ff.).

66

Virginia Richter

of laughter is directly addressed.7 The plot revolves around two white psychiatrists, Bruce and Robert, who have to determine whether their black patient Christopher is mentally ill or culturally alienated, suffering from a ‘situational neurosis’ (Fanon: 60) which results compellingly from his situation as postcolonial subject, as a black man in a white world. In fact, Christopher displays most of the symptoms resulting, according to Fanon, from the ‘Negro’s’ encounter with white hegemony: a ‘feeling of insignificance,’ ‘inadequacy in all human communication’ (Fanon: 50), rage, delusions, paranoia. Initially Christopher was hospitalized under ‘Section II’ of the Mental Health Act, a regulation allowing to detain him for a period of twenty-eight days, and diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. At the beginning of the play – on the eve of his release – Christopher is once more examined by young doctor Bruce, a trainee in psychiatry. Bruce wants to revise the original diagnosis from BPD to the more serious schizophrenia which would allow him to detain Christopher for another six months under ‘Section III’ of the Mental Health. This aggravation of the diagnosis could finally result in a confinement of indeterminate duration; it is opposed by senior consultant Robert on a number of grounds: charity – Christopher would be institutionalized and stigmatized for the rest of his life – but also expediency – the hospital lacks funds and free beds. The debate about Christopher’s clinical diagnosis is pervaded by the initially latent and later open power struggle between Bruce and Robert, who is also the young doctor’s supervisor. In due course it becomes clear that what is at stake is not just a difference in medical opinion, but the career prospects of the two physicians. Jokes and jests play a crucial role in their dispute. A casual remark made by Bruce is understood as a racist joke against Christopher, and used by Robert to remove Bruce from the case and, in the end, from the clinic. The contest hinges on the question who can make which kind of jokes at whose expense. Jokes are thus used to determine the relative power positions of the two scientists; Christopher can initially be seen as the butt at whose expense the struggle takes place, but in the process his identity becomes more and more elusive and finally disavows the efforts at 6

7

Blue / Orange was first performed at the Cottesloe Theatre, London, on 7 April 2000, under the direction of Roger Michell, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the role of Christopher, Andrew Lincoln as Bruce, and Bill Nighy as Robert. For my analysis of Blue / Orange, I will draw on Freud’s theory of the joke although in Penhall’s play verbal comedy is not created by jokes in the narrow sense of the word – ‘a brief usu. oral narrative designed to provoke laughter and typically having a climactic humorous twist or denouement’ (Webster’s Dictionary) – but by comic utterances of all kinds – quips, word play, sarcastic comments, and irony. The dramatic tension arises out of the indeterminacy of these utterances: it is not always clear whether something was spoken in jest or in earnest.

Laughter and aggression

67

categorization pursued by the two psychiatrists. In a way, the situation moves from the Freudian realm, where power relations are marked by derision, to Bhabha’s concept of the interdependence and precariousness of subject and object: the coalitions formed between the three persons become unstable and unpredictable. Christopher, the borderline patient who is represented as someone who does not belong to any social group or community, functions as a ‘court jester,’ not bound by law or decorum to adhere to the communication rules of his environment (cf. Palmer: 25ff.). As a person of African descent and British upbringing, he is a hybrid subject in Bhabha’s sense. But although this figure can be subjected to a celebratory reading as a representative of inbetweenness, and although as a jester he is linked to verbal transgression, on an individual level he is clearly deprived of agency. Christopher’s use of jokes is transgressive in the sense of breaking through the politically correct euphemisms prescribed by contemporary medical ethics. Bruce in particular becomes the target of his wordplay and wit. The young consultant, a stickler for rules and correct procedure, is drawn out to overstep the boundaries of objective medical discourse by ‘quoting’ Christopher’s incorrect language. His aim is to ‘connect’ with Christopher, to talk to him at his own linguistic and social level. However, the bond formed by this banter is precarious: Christopher remains one of the patients, Bruce the ‘white doctor’ who treats him from a superior position – after all, Bruce’s diagnosis will decide Christopher’s fate. In fact, it soon becomes clear that Bruce’s ‘quoting’ expresses his hidden aggressions against his patient. Still the power hierarchy is far from unequivocal: Christopher succeeds in disrupting Bruce’s selfimage as benevolent, caring doctor. He points out the cracks in Bruce’s verbal armour by subjecting his words to a literal, almost childish, but most efficacious analysis: Christopher: It’s a nuthouse, man. Bruce: I grant you – indeed – there are a fair proportion – Christopher: A fair proportion? You’re kidding me. Bruce: Of quite, quite – Christopher: They are NUTS! Bruce: [...] crazy people here [...] yes – Christopher: Crazies man! Radio Rental. Bruce: People with – well – we don’t actually use the term ‘crazy’ [...] Christopher: You just said it. Bruce: I know I just said it but – I shouldn’t have – I was – humouring – I was you know – it’s a no no. Christopher: But you just said it. Bruce: I know but – you see my point? Christopher: You said it first.

68

Virginia Richter Bruce: OK look [...] there are things we [...] there are terms we use which people used to use all the time, terms which used to be inoffensive but things are a bit different now. Certain words. (Penhall: 7f.)

Bruce knows that certain words, especially racist epithets, are taboo in the clinic. Against his better judgement, however, he lapses again and again into the use of ‘incorrect’ words such as ‘crazy,’ ‘idiot,’ ‘bastard,’ and, above all, ‘nigger.’ These terms are permissible as long as they are understood by all participants in the communication as ironic, as quotations, in fact, as jokes. Bruce wants to see his use of them interpreted as equalizing gestures, as efforts on his part to enter a non-hierarchical communication with Christopher. But he wants to keep the control over the interpretation of his utterances, a control which is repeatedly disturbed by Christopher’s insistence on their literal, non-ironic meaning, and on the situatedness of their exchanges between white doctor and black patient. By contrast, Robert, the senior consultant, blithely offends against the rules of political correctness. He refers to a French Rugby team as ‘The Frog,’ to Australians and New Zealanders as ‘hairy colonial outposts’ (10), and councils Christopher patronisingly to ‘[g]o home and listen to some reggae music’ (108). He justifies his racist stereotyping in Humpty-Dumptylike fashion with his position of power: ‘And right now doctor, my semantics are better than yours so I win’ (24). His handling of the case is entirely determined by career considerations, as he openly acknowledges: ‘I’ll never make Professor. You’ll never make your Specialist Registrar Training’ (19), if they do not manage the case according to the wishes of the hospital administration. When Bruce refuses to ‘play the game,’ Robert does not hesitate to sacrifice him, using one of Bruce’s ill-advised jokes or ‘ironic quotes.’ In an early exchange between Bruce and Christopher, the doctor lets himself be provoked into calling his patient an ‘uppity nigga’: Bruce: You know that’s not the way you talk to the consultants. Christopher: He’s giving me the fear. Bruce: Calm down. Now you are acting like a – Christopher: A what? A what. Go on say it. An ‘uppity nigga.’ [...] Bruce: Well [...] OK yes frankly you are and that’s not what we do is it? Eh? And when you get out of here, if you start staring at people like that, what are they going to think? [...] They’ll think you’re a, a, an ‘uppity nigga’, that’s what they’ll think. (15)

Bruce has to learn that what he intended as a joke can be read as disrespectful against his superior (85) and offensive against his patient. However, he finds out that he cannot ‘take back’ his utterance, and that his elevated position as a doctor does not automatically grant him the licence to joke about his patients.

Laughter and aggression

69

Rules that did not seem relevant at the time – e.g. politeness – can be invoked retrospectively: Bruce: I, I, I, didn’t call you a, a, a, um, a [...] a [...] (Beat.) ‘Nigger.’ Christopher: You said ‘uppity nigga.’ You did. Deny. Bruce: Only because you did. My God! It was a quote! Christopher: Yeah but you shouldn’ta said it. Bruce: Oh so so so only you can say it? Christopher: It’s not polite. (77)

Bruce finds out the hard way that the doctor-patient relationship is not really ‘permissive’ of joking – i.e. that his quips spoken in jest are understood as earnest. According to humour theorist Jerry Palmer, a joke must be permitted as well as intended in order to accede to the status of joke (Palmer: 147). Consequently, a joke can potentially fail if one of the participants rejects it as ‘not funny.’ In general, it is not the butt – in this case, Christopher – who has the authority to accept or dismiss the joke, but Freud’s third person, the addressee. Robert as the true addressee of Bruce’s joke strategically rejects sanctioning it as funny. Instead of forming a coalition with his colleague by stereotyping the patient as ‘nigger,’ he leagues unexpectedly with Christopher, or rather takes advantage of him in order to get rid of Bruce: He manipulates Christopher into lodging an official complaint with the hospital authorities. The conflict turns precisely on the assessment of the communication situation as permissive of joking – hence funny, or not – hence inappropriate and offensive. Robert spells it out for Bruce that he not only failed to be funny, but that he cannot expect to control the interpretation of his utterance: Bruce: OK. OK. Look [...] have you never heard [...] listen, uh, Doctor [...] did you hear Christopher refer to himself, somewhat effacingly, somewhat ironically as a, quote, ‘uppity nigga’? Did you hear him say that? Robert: It was unmistakable. Bruce: And presumably you heard me quoting him, also, I offer, somewhat ironically? 8 Robert: I’d steer clear of irony if I were you. You’re not Lenny Bruce. (82)

The interpersonal structure of Freud’s model is inverted in Blue / Orange. Here, the person who jokes (Bruce) does not succeed in forming a coalition with the addressee (Robert), i.e. Bruce does not gain Robert’s support for his intended treatment of Christopher, nor for the furtherance of his career. Rather, an extremely tenuous coalition is achieved by Christopher and Robert, which results in the patient’s release from hospital and the senior 8

Bruce is unlike Lenny Bruce in not being funny, but in another respect he does resemble him: he misjudges badly the political effect of his words, just as the American comedian did who was repeatedly indicted for obscenity (cf. Schaeffer: 59ff.).

70

Virginia Richter

consultant’s gain of material for his research on culturally induced paranoia. This happens although, in fact, Robert and Bruce share the same contempt for Christopher; it is hard to say which one of the physicians is more condescending. However, the expression of aggression and derision serves only as a basis for the most fleeting kind of social bonding which is easily overridden by personal interest. The ethical positions of both psychiatrists are radically discredited in the course of the drama. Consequently, the truth-value of their utterances – particularly their diagnoses of Christopher’s mental state – is equally suspect. But nor does Christopher profit from this disaffection – he is also denied the authority to exercise control over his positioning in the communication situation. Whatever the outcome of Robert and Bruce’s dispute, Christopher remains at the mercy of their prescriptions. Despite his efforts to give himself a history, his identity remains elusive – a fact not to be celebrated but deplored since it is a part of the aetiology of his paranoia. At one point, Christopher maintains to be the son of Idi Amin – later, of Muhammed Ali. Robert tries to integrate these preposterous claims in his theory of culturally induced neurosis, thereby further demonstrating his scientific shallowness, whereas Bruce rejects outright Christopher’s assertions and Robert’s acceptance of them. Neither position is privileged by the text: although it seems evident that Christopher does suffer from delusions, the question whether he is neurotic or psychotic – or ‘on the border’ – remains open. Concomitantly, neither Bruce nor Robert can escape the Freudian triangle where every participant can become the object of derision. The desired fourth position mentioned by Sander Gilman, the unassailable position of unmarked enunciation, is structurally barred by the necessity to speak from a determinate place.9 One of the achievements of Blue / Orange is to demonstrate the situatedness of all acts of interpretation. The focus is not directed at the exposure of racism as such, but at the analysis of uncontrollable linguistic processes in a politically highly charged situation. Both Bruce’s dissenting interpretation of Christopher’s fictional filiation with Idi Amin – which reads this claim as a sign of Christopher’s illness – and Robert’s affirmative interpretation – which reads it as a sign of his cultural disaffection – result from the psychiatrists’ differing medical preconceptions, professional situations, cultural background etc. The drama does not take sides but opens a meta-level of interpretation; it inquires into the way interpretations are achieved. This structure in turn can be linked to the three theoretical positions presented at the beginning of this essay. The alternatives offered by Cixous – 9

I.e., there are no unmarked positions. In the play, Bruce and Robert’s whiteness does not just signify an unmarked normality (cf. Dyer 1, 13 and passim) but forms an oppositional, historically situated term that is structurally equivalent to Christopher’s blackness.

Laughter and aggression

71

laughter as a subversive force – and Freud – laughter as a socially repressive force – taken alone, would not result in satisfactory interpretations of the complex social interaction of the play. The function of laughter cannot be subsumed exclusively either under the heading of transgression nor under the heading of social control: it serves to stabilize the hierarchy between different social groups – black / white, middle-class / poor, doctor / patient, university educated / uneducated, but it is also transgressive since it discloses the aggressive desires habitually glossed over by politically correct language. Bhabha’s deconstructive approach, on the other hand, can help to integrate both aspects, empowerment and devaluation, in a theory of postcolonial laughter as a double-edged phenomenon whose specific cultural meaning is constituted in reference to a particular context. Such a theory would have to position postcolonial laughter at the border between liberating laughter and destructive aggression, taking into account both its transgressive potential and the concrete social structures restricting these transgressive possibilities.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.’ The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 66-84. Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (1976): 87593. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986. Freud, Sigmund. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. 1905. Psychologische Schriften, Studienausgabe IV. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1982. Gilman, Sander L. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Jenkins, Ron. Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: Free Press, 1994. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.’ Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A

72

Virginia Richter

Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 196-220. Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Parkin, John. Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997. Penhall, Joe. Blue / Orange. London: Methuen, 2001. Schaeffer, Neil. The Art of Laughter. New York: Columbia UP, 1981. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

HELGA RAMSEY-KURZ

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi

S

elf-consciously biased against any form of political, economic, or cultural patronising, postcolonial literature seems a highly likely place in which to find ideologies of subversion and revolt formulated and possibilities of their realisation reflected. Sympathy with a rebel’s traitorous fantasies, even to the point of complete identification with dissidents, insurrectionists, partisans, and anarchists is not an infrequent stance propagated by postcolonial writers.1 In fact, it is a stance widely expected in their works, so much so that an openly counter-hegemonic slant may indeed be identified as a feature of postcoloniality itself. The mutinous nature of postcolonial literature would, of course, not meet with the same broad acceptance without the authors’ observance of their audiences’ understanding of political propriety, or correctness, which, not even among western readers, apparently so committed to freedom of thought and expression, is informed by an unlimited capacity for tolerance. Given the ambivalent position of writers from Europe’s erstwhile colonies as both opponents to, yet at the same time beneficiaries of, still overtly hegemonic (infra)structures, it seems obvious that they should resort to a mode as evasive as humour in their 1

This is documented, for instance, by Margaret Scanlan’s study of representations of terrorism in English fiction, which, apart from positing the indebtedness of nineteenthcentury representations of terrorism to the Romantic idea of rebellion, records a sudden caesura in the production of terrorist novels after the Great War and relates the re-emergence of the theme of terrorism in later twentieth-century fiction, especially by writers from outside Europe, to the reappearance of insurgent terrorism in the 1970s.

74

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

explorations of political insurgence. For in allowing them to strategically downplay and even negate the seriousness of their non-conformist political views, humour provides a most effective means of forestalling the censoring without which, postcolonial writers know, their demonstrative siding with malcontent and rebellious elements of their societies might be considered offensive or even dangerous. Over the last twenty years, the global circulation of anglophone literatures and their resultant accessibility to an unprecedentedly broad spectrum of readerships has, however, dramatically complicated the postcolonial writer’s task of ‘humouring’ his or her audiences. In fact, comic explorations of ideological or political concerns in texts addressing multiple readerships have proven rather perilous ventures in a number of cases. ‘Humour,’ as critical theory has it, ‘thrives only in its native climate.’2 Yet, to know what the native climate of a text actually is becomes virtually impossible when that text positions itself at the interface of different native lands. The pronunciation of a fatwa on Salman Rushdie probably constitutes the most notorious consequence of literary humour, which, while thriving in one ‘native climate,’ missed its goal and caused considerable psychological, political, and cultural havoc in another. Whereas, until recently, the west could afford to attribute the refusal to engage in the playful rapport which Rushdie solicits in The Satanic Verses, quite complacently, to a lack of enlightenment in non-western societies, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 have significantly transformed western perceptions of political dissent and opposition, and effectively corroded the acceptability of the discursive practice of making light of political radicalism and religious fundamentalism. As an ironic consequence, it is right at a time when the Christian and the Islamic worlds are finally witnessing the escalation of their hostilities predicted by Samuel Huntington, that they find themselves united in the experience of a profound unease, if not distaste, when confronted with certain formulations of political opposition and violence. Whether, in this situation, the humorous explorations of political and religious fanaticism which Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi offer in The Satanic Verses, in White Teeth, and in ‘My Son the Fanatic,’ respectively, would have seen publication or prompted the same broad approval with which the west has met their appearance is more than doubtful.3 This in itself seems to warrant a re2

3

‘Comedy,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. The notion of comedy’s ‘native climate’ is of course derived from Bergson’s understanding of society, or ‘life in common’ as the ‘natural environment’ of laughter (cf. Bergson: 65). This is a question also raised by Werbner in Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims (3).

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

75

examination of the three narratives which tries to assert whether and, if so, how their comic nature can still be operative in a cultural climate informed by a heightened collective sensibility to the threat of ideologically motivated aggression and its immense destructive potential. ‘The novel begins metaphorically as well as literally – with a bang,’ Ranjan Goonetilleke writes about The Satanic Verses and proceeds to observe: Hijackers explode an Air India jumbo jet over the English Channel. It is based on a real occurrence: the blowing up of an Air India Boeing 747 off South-West Ireland in 1985 by Sikh militants. Though it is not examined, Rushdie does present terrorism, another prominent and growing aspect of recent history. (Goonetilleke: 74)

It is true, Salman Rushdie does not exactly examine terrorism in The Satanic Verses. Nor does Zadie Smith in White Teeth as she leads the novel towards a ‘bang’ at its very end. Hanif Kureishi does not submit an examination of terrorism either in ‘My Son the Fanatic,’ even if the short story portrays the son of Punjabi immigrants to London as an Islamic fundamentalist and, in the process, addresses the fears that the boy’s religious zeal evokes in others. A proper examination of terrorism would imply considering the phenomenon also as ‘violence aimed, either directly or indirectly, at governments in an effort to influence policy or topple an existing regime’ (‘terrorism’), or, somewhat more specifically, as ‘the deliberate military targeting of civilians [with the aim to affect] the political behavior of nations and leaders’ (Carr: 17). The Satanic Verses, White Teeth, and ‘My Son the Fanatic’ neither interpret nor explore terrorism as a tactic of collective intimidation; nor do they record historical instances of this particular and, according to Caleb Carr, rather ancient form of warfare against non-combatant citizens. If the narratives explicitly or implicitly touch on the theme of terrorism, they do so in the first place to reflect on its psychological effects, on the fears terrorist action generates and the scenarios of horror it inspires in the minds of the terrorised. The view of terrorism they promote essentially agrees with the interpretation advanced by Mustapha Marrouchi. Rejecting ‘the civilised world’s’ ‘glib definitions of “terrorism,”’ which, he contends, have so far only served the west to criminalise its political opponents and to justify its own aggressions, Marrouchi insists that terrorism requires to be comprehended in the first place as a conceptual problem and, as such, as a still thoroughly intangible phenomenon: Terrorism overrides history, politics, economics, and above all common sense. It has no immediate graspable definition, it does not admit of negotiation or argument, its moral force cannot really be challenged, except by terrorists, it is applicable virtually everywhere and to nearly everything at any time. Terrorists are, or have become, a

76

Helga Ramsey-Kurz Platonic essence: they never change, they have no history, they simply terrorize. (Marrouchi: 13)

Utter incomprehension, which Marrouchi identifies as the most pervasive attitude to terrorist action today, is ironically reduplicated and hyperbolised in the stories under study here. In the process, the difficulty to assert and discuss terrorism objectively is linked to another epistemological dilemma, namely that of apprehending contemporary Islamic revivalism and resurgence. In strictly abstaining from analysing both the motives of the anarchist actions they portray and the Islamic or Sikh sensibilities their characters represent, the narratives analysed in this paper also anticipate and resonate the atavistic fear of Muslim militancy which has been prevalent in Britain especially since the Gulf War and the then explicit siding of the Muslim conference in Bradford with Saddam Hussein (Ahmed: 163-81). ‘What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe-conduct to a country of their choice’ (Rushdie: 78-9), the narrator of The Satanic Verses typically reels off the demands of the hijackers responsible for the explosion of the jumbo jet Bostan, flight AI420, in a tone suggestive of total indifference to the terrorists’ cause, if not even of utter boredom at the lack of imaginativeness the terrorists’ undertaking betrays. ‘The men do not know,’ Saladin Chamcha, one of the hostages, establishes, unimpressed by the hijackers’ daring. ‘They want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV; they are reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their tails’ (Rushdie: 78). The young rebel Millat in White Teeth is hardly credited with a better apprehension of the cause to which he has subscribed. His peers may admire him as ‘the first into battle come jihad, cool as fuck in a crisis, a man of action’ (Smith 445), but they do so really only for his perfect impersonations of Brando, Pacino, and Liotta. ‘Millat,’ the narrative allows, ‘was far from possessing one of the best minds, or even a reasonable mind; intellectual proof or disproof was beyond him’ (Smith: 445). His motives for supporting the ‘Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation’ are correspondingly banal, too. He has joined KEVIN, we learn, ‘because he loved clans (and the outfit and the bow tie), and he loved clans at war’ (Smith: 442). The reasons for Ali’s sudden espousal of Islamist ideas are kept even more oblique in ‘My Son the Fanatic.’ Whatever the reader’s own position, Kureishi’s story requires her or him to share the father’s bewilderment at the boy’s sweeping condemnation of the west as ‘a sink of hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, drug takers and prostitutes’ (Kureishi: 126) and his pompous announcement that the Law of Islam will ‘rule the world,’ ‘the skin of the infidel’ will ‘burn off again and again,’ and ‘the Jews

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

77

and Christers [...] be routed’ (Kureishi: 126). Overwhelmed by Ali’s grotesquely platitudinous talk of the west’s moral degeneracy, his father Parvez succumbs to the impression that the person lecturing him from the back seat of his taxi is not really his son or that the boy must have ‘swallowed someone else’s voice’ (Kureishi: 126). The father’s reading of the son’s transformed behaviour seems as valid as Ali’s, who, when asked why he would give his life for jihad, vaguely retorts, for ‘us the reward will be in paradise’ (Kureishi: 126). Ali’s susceptibility to religious claptrap is obvious. So is the futility of Parvez’s attempt to find an acceptable explanation for his son’s discovery of the ‘spiritual dimension’ (Kureishi 123). Nothing allays the sense of obscurity which overcomes Parvez at the beginning of the story when he studies the new order in Ali’s room and registers spaces ‘where before there had been only mess’ (Kureishi: 119) and marks on the walls where Ali’s pictures have been removed. With only a private identity, yet no public mission to define them, the militant subjects’ part seems constricted to that of would-be terrorists, of innocents, idealists, ‘fanatics,’ ‘babies,’ pathetic ‘worms’ merely masking themselves as terrorists. This impression is enforced by the other characters’ categorical refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the threats with which they are confronted. Not in the least intimidated, Saladin Chamcha, for instance, briefly contemplates arguing with Tavleen, the female head of the hijacking quartet, and advising her that ‘unbendingness can also be monomania, [...] can be tyranny, and also [...] brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane’ (Rushdie: 81). Sitting in a restaurant and listening to Ali’s accusations while studying his son’s fastidious face and the look of censure in it, Parvez looses his temper and throws a plate on the floor, suppressing the urge to also rip the cloth from the table only when he becomes aware of the other customers and waiters staring at him. Descriptions of violence and the bold defiance of its perpetrators by their victims are central also to the comic blurring of positions in Smith’s novel. Parvez’s rage compares to the exasperation with which Alsana in White Teeth responds when she recognises her son Millat among a group of enraged Muslims on television, burning copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. ‘Has the day come when babies are burning the books, has it?’ (Smith: 237) the infuriated mother exclaims, before storming into Millat’s room and collecting all his worldly possessions to incinerate them in the back yard. ‘Everyone has to be taught a lesson,’ Alsana announces, lighting the match. ‘And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also’ (Smith: 237), is her curt appraisal of the imminent family crisis. Apart from such hilarious demonstrations of quixotic bravery, the rebels’ comically unfortunate choice of targets apparently immune to intimidation

78

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

may even result in the victims’ ready identification with and keen support of their aggressors. An instance of such curious confusion of loyalties occurs in The Satanic Verses, when the hostages, seized by a sense of having been forgotten by the rest of the world, join the hijackers screaming furiously into the desert night, ‘Hijras! Chootias! Shits!’ (Rushdie: 80). The resultant merging of roles enforces the carnivalesque nature of the situation in which (would-be) terrorists and terrorised find themselves strangely united. It seems clear that in the ensuing confusion, the protagonists have lost control over both the narrated course of events and their part in it. To use Zadie Smith’s words, they are reduced to enacting ‘an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else’ (Smith: 526). In the light of the ambiguities emerging from the sudden multiplication of actual and feigned identities, the anticipated catastrophe ceases to present itself as the only possible closure. Other scenarios come to constitute just as likely outcomes to the events set in motion. In The Satanic Verses, this prompts Saladin Chamcha to speculate that Tavleen might really be a well-meaning airline hostess. Even when she suddenly lifts her djellabah and exhibits a stark naked body with explosives taped all over it, he remains unable to accept that the show is no longer part of an extravagant demonstration of safety procedures. The seriousness of her unrelenting call for a ‘sacrifice,’ with which Tavleen will bring Saladin back to reality later, is still absent from the thoroughly comic disclosure of the grenades she carries under her black disguise ‘like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage’ (Rushdie: 81). At least from the confused hero’s point of view, it appears not at all impossible that the paraphernalia attached to the woman will never be put to use in the way she has tacitly suggested with her ‘performance.’ A similar caesura interrupts the dangerous charade enacted by Millat in White Teeth as Smith has the narrative shift from a gradual revelation of the young man’s evil intentions to an analysis of the feelings keeping him from executing his murderous scheme. The reader is drawn into a sort of conspiracy with Millat as the self-appointed assassin recalls how easy it was to organise a gun for himself and how completely ‘unfazed’ (Smith: 526) he felt when he held the weapon in his hand for the first time. ‘It’s all so familiar. It’s all on TV’ (Smith: 526), he reflects, almost certain that shooting someone is merely a matter of convincing himself that he is just a star in the role of an unscrupulous killer. However, doubts overcome Millat as the moment of action draws closer. ‘Of course, now that he’s here, now that he’s stoned and scared, and it doesn’t feel so easy, and the right-hand side of his jacket feels like someone put a fucking cartoon anvil in there,’ the narrative offers, ‘now he sees the great difference between TV and life, and it kicks him right in the groin’ (Smith: 526). As in The Satanic Verses, the disclosure

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

79

of the rebel’s secret fears serves to accommodate the possibility of a development bypassing the explosion towards which the narrative has been accelerating. Humanity, the reader is led to hope, will assert itself and the terrorist be identified as an innocent only masquerading as a villain. Kureishi’s story evokes the same hope, albeit in a slightly different manner, by deconstructing the perspective from which it at first presents its central character’s transformation into a fanatical Muslim. In gradually exposing Parvez’s bias against Islam, his naivety, short temper, patriarchal airs, his unreasonable dismay at Ali’s sudden show of prudence, and his paranoid suspicion that Ali is on drugs, indeed must be a ‘drug addict killer’ (121), Kureishi effectively erodes both the validity of the father’s judgement and his reading of Ali as a fanatic. As a result, one is led to conclude that rather than a pre-emptive characterisation of the son, the story’s title is intended as a first characterisation of the father, beside whose personal conflict allusions to the potential political danger of the son’s conversion to Islamism will remain secondary. What Glen Cavaliero notes about comic fiction and comedy in general, then, can be said to find a perfect illustration in the special treatment that militant activism receives in The Satanic Verses, White Teeth, and ‘My Son the Fanatic’: Comedy is nothing if not self-scrutinising, its turning of the tables being in perpetual revolution. [...] It draws attention to, and thrives upon, the factor of surprise, that element of sheer chance which upsets all sense of the dependability of foreseeable predestination. It does not resist, but welcomes, disruptive incursions [...]. (Cavaliero: 4)

Comedy, in other words, calls itself in question. It surprises by not keeping what it only pretends to promise, thus undermining the authority it also only pretends to assert.4 Rushdie, Smith, and Kureishi take this comedic principle to an extreme in temporarily departing even from the comic vein in which they inscribe political and religious fanaticism. In typically postmodern defiance of the formal virtue of generic purity, they endorse a method of shifting freely and abruptly between diametrically opposed styles and genres, of moving unexpectedly from comedy to melodrama or from comedy to tragedy, thereby assaulting their texts’ logic and alienating or ‘terrifying,’ as it were, their readers whom insistent gestures of comedic appeasement have been luring into dismissing the possibility of a seriously catastrophic ending. Rather than validating the seriousness of the political and religious fanaticism described, these manoeuvres demand to be read as generating yet another quality of seriousness, one altogether different from the deadly earnestness 4

Or, to express it in Kant’s words: ‘Comedy effects a sudden evaporation of expectation to nothing’ (Kant: 198).

80

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

with which the militant characters, Ali, Millat and Tavleen, adhere to their oddly unaccountable or unaccounted for missions. This ‘other’ seriousness crystallises, for example, towards the end of the hijacking episode in The Satanic Verses and instantly revokes the sense of lethal danger that has been effectively suppressed by the grotesquely inappropriate reactions of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta to the hijackers and their threats. The narrative suddenly changes back from an oriental fantasy recounted from the limited perspectives of these two antiheroes into a political statement, when after one hundred and ten days (rather than one thousand and one nights) the hostage-taking reaches not the implicitly promised happy ending, but a deeply chilling turning point: The woman, whose unexpected revelation of a heavily armed but otherwise naked body may momentarily have tempted some hostages to believe themselves the rather fortunate beneficiaries of some exquisitely extravagant hospitality, announces that her patience has been exhausted, selects a hostage, pronounces his death sentence and before the eyes of the still incredulous onlookers shoots him in the back of his head. The dead body topples out of the aeroplane onto the tarmac. The woman shuts the door and says, softly, ‘Martyrdom is a privilege [...]. We shall be like stars; like the sun’ (Rushdie: 86). The unequivocal brutality of the incident instantaneously eliminates any remaining expectations of its comic invalidation as yet another delusion on the part of one of the witnesses. Re-alerted to the imminence of a catastrophe, the hostages (and, with them, the reader) are made aware of a change of setting and forced to acknowledge that, after all, the plane is approaching its destination and circling over England’s shore ‘like a gigantic seabird. Gull. [Or, even more tragically, like an] Albatross’ (Rushdie: 87), and that the woman ‘really means business’: [S]he was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down. (Rushdie: 87)

Likewise, towards the end of White Teeth, Smith crushes the expectation of a non-violent finale, which she has earlier encouraged by the suggestion of Millat’s fears. She does so by unexpectedly opening a new chapter with a bullet from Millat’s gun hitting Archibald Jones, probably the most sympathetic, peace-loving and likeable protagonist in the novel. Penetrating Archie’s thigh, the bullet sends him spinning round ‘with some melodrama’ (450) before he falls right through a glass case containing, quite absurdly or even anticlimactically, a mouse. ‘Shards of glass all over the gaff. What a performance,’ the narrative comments upon the scene, adding: ‘If it were TV you would hear the saxophone around now; the credits would be rolling’

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

81

(Smith: 450).5 The comic quality of this commentary does not diffuse the horror of the revelation that Millat has indeed overcome his fears, selected a human target, chosen a trajectory for his bullet, and fired. To foreground the gravity of the sudden turn of events, a flashback is inserted just before the narrative shifts to the shooting of Archibald Jones. It takes the reader back to an earlier chapter set in Bulgaria in 1945, and presents the recipient of Millat’s bullet, Archibald Jones, or Archie, as a young British lieutenant about to execute an alleged collaborator of the Nazis. The end of the war has already been proclaimed and Archie knows that, by liquidating his captive, he would commit a criminal act. Only fear of his friend Samad Iqbal, who insists on the murder as a pledge of Archie’s manliness, prevents Archie from letting his prisoner escape. In the ensuing dialogue between the captive and his involuntary executor, Archie is persuaded to throw a coin and let it decide the man’s destiny. As the coin is flying through the air, the captive grabs Archie’s gun and shoots him in the hand. Martyrdom, for Archie, is not a ‘privilege.’ As the surreal recurrence of the same situation and Archie’s decision to react once more as he did decades earlier suggests, it is ultimately a moral choice and so is the killing of others. Despite the fact that the injury Archie receives from Millat is not lethal but harmless enough to warrant an essentially humorous description, Millat does not stand completely redeemed at the end of the novel. The revocation of Archie’s only dramatic experience of war, along with the uncanny reappearance of his former captive Dr Sick, disturb the sense that all is well because all has ended well, even if the damage stays limited to a wounded leg and the release of a genetically manipulated mouse. A similarly ambiguous turn of events is brought about towards the closure of Kureishi’s story, when the narrative suddenly abandons the strategy of presenting Ali as an innocent victim of parental distrust and defamation and shifts to examining, in fact positing, the legitimacy of Parvez’s alarm at his son’s sudden display of radical tendencies. As part of this shift, Kureishi has Ali shed the role of a mere object of the father’s seemingly paranoid projections and finally appear as a figure in his own right; not, however, to challenge his father, but his father’s friend and confidante Bettina. While delaying the final showdown between father and son, the ensuing confrontation between Ali and Bettina restores the sense of alarm which Parvez feels when he first becomes aware of Ali’s conversion, but which is eroded so effectively by Kureishi’s comic accounts of Parvez’s ludicrous reactions to his son’s new behaviour. For a rather sinister side to Ali’s 5

On the fascination of serious novelists with the link between terrorism and the television medium see Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001).

82

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

fanaticism surfaces when the boy, judging Bettina unworthy of his respect because she is a prostitute, begins to treat her with increasingly malicious and brutal insolence. The chance of a resumption of the story’s comic tone is finally annulled when the boy’s verbal assaults become so vitriolic that Bettina suddenly opens the door of Parvez’s car and, before Parvez can stop, throws herself out. From this point, the only possible turn for the father-son conflict to take is a seriously violent one. The fact that, at home, Ali goes straight to his room to pray, is as devoid of any comicality as is Kureishi’s description of Parvez beginning to pour himself drinks to drown his frustration. The seriousness of both men’s reactions undermines the impression hitherto sustained of their antagonism being but a harmless discord. What is more, it foreshadows the graveness of the narrative’s closure brought about by the drunken father eventually storming Ali’s sanctuary, pulling the boy from his prayer mat, and beating him up. The suggestion that the beating is an unpremeditated act of drunkenness is characteristically misleading. With it, Kureishi once more casts doubt on the reliability of the father’s judgement and deflects from a highly significant piece of information supplied towards the end of ‘My Son the Fanatic’: Like Archie’s selfsacrificial effort to protect Dr Sick in White Teeth, Parvez’s act of retribution has an important precedent. Three years earlier, the reader learns, he rescued Bettina from a violent customer and it is from this incident that their friendship has developed. This seemingly insignificant detail deserves special attention as it significantly complicates the meaning of Ali’s contempt for his father. While at first sight not an entirely implausible attitude for a devout young Muslim to assume vis-à-vis a parent who consumes alcohol, loves bacon, fails to grow a beard, and believes that ‘life is for the living’ (Kureishi: 129), Ali’s scorn translates into something far more ominous at the suggestion of Parvez’s chivalrous behaviour and the sympathy for ‘the oppressed’ that his father has actually practised, yet Ali himself only been preaching. Miraculously, both Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha survive the explosion of Bostan, flight AI420. This, indeed, is the main point of the hijacking episode in The Satanic Verses. Fate confirms what Gibreel has always believed, namely that ‘[t]o be born again [...] first you have to die’ (Rushdie: 3). Miraculously, too, or rather, ironically, Millat gets away with attempted murder and is sentenced to no more than four hundred hours of community service to be served together with his brother Magid, for the trivial reason that recorded evidence and eyewitness statements prove too inconclusive to determine who of the twins has actually delivered the shot at Archie. No less ironically, after Parvez has beaten up his son, Ali turns his

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

83

bloodied face at his father to demand curtly and with still unbroken pride: ‘So who’s the fanatic now?’ (Kureishi: 131). In none of these instances, humour is simply resumed after the final catastrophe. For all the authors’ efforts to comically exaggerate terrorist incompetence, the inflicted injuries and destruction make clear that the expected (because implicitly promised) unmasking of the young rebels as harmless fools will never ensue. The reader is forced to accept in the end that the protagonists’ determination is far more than mimicry and that their weapons and explosives are far more than eccentric accessories worn only to enhance the ingenuity of their masquerade. The roles they have adopted prove more seriously theirs than has been suggested all along. Uncertainty prevails in the end as to whether the characters have at all left the carnival that seems to have brought them together or whether they have never joined it in the first place. Kureishi, Rushdie, and Smith’s identification of South Asian Islamism (or a variation of it) as the inspirational source of their characters’ extremist tendencies does not help to resolve this uncertainty.6 Ali’s parents are Punjabis, Millat and Magid’s Muslims from Bengal, and the hijackers in The Satanic Verses are Indian Sikhs. It is clear that with their characters’ cultural background, all three authors revoke the close historical ties between British and Muslim India, which so crucially contributed to the formation of Islamic nation states on the Asian subcontinent. In so doing, they assume an angle spectacularly unsuited to develop the idea of jihad, as proclaimed by their protagonists, on the basis of the received opposition of Christianity and Islam. Even if their protagonists insist that what they are fighting is a holy war against unbelievers in Europe, the authors carefully avoid attributing the antagonisms in their stories to irreconcilable differences between ‘occidental’ and ‘oriental’ civilisations. In fact, they strategically describe affinities and hostilities that run counter to the popular perception of Christian and Muslim mentalities as essentially incompatible traditions of thought. The crosscultural friendships between Archie and Samad in White Teeth and between Bettina and Parvez in ‘My Son the Fanatic’ exemplify such deviations as much as does the fact that the (would-be) terrorists in all three texts ultimately choose to assault not some totally unknown Other, let alone an individual embodying western affluence and hegemonic power, but someone either of their own kind or close to them. Ali attacks his father; Millat fantasises about killing his brother before he shoots his father’s best friend; the hijackers in Rushdie’s novel select and execute a shorn Sirdarji, ‘a Sikh who has given up the turban and cut his hair.’ At the same time, obvious 6

On Kureishi’s novels and their resistance to the confines of ethnicity see also Mark Stein’s paper, ‘Posed Ethnicity and the Postethnic: Hanif Kureishi’s Novels’ (Stein: 2000).

84

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

traitors to their faith, homeland, and primary culture like Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta or such unpalatable personifications of western technocracy as Marcus Chalfen or Dr Perret escape any disaster unharmed. Cultural divisions are effectively dissolved; loyalties appear purely accidental and so do hostilities, rendering it impossible to predict who, in an apparently incomprehensible chaos of affections and disaffections, will eventually assume the part of the assassin and who will be assigned that of the assassinated. Comedy, by definition, does not deplore such confusion, but celebrates it. In their comic explorations of contemporary British society, Smith, Kureishi, and Rushdie identify chaos as an inevitable but not necessarily deleterious corollary of cultural diversification. For them, the flexibility and freedom that chaos permits is more conducive to cultural regeneration than the continuity secured by order. In The Satanic Verses it is immediately after the explosion of the jumbo jet over the English Channel that the productivity of chaos finds expression in a baroque tableau of aircraft passengers, two actors, ‘more than a few migrants,’ ‘a quantity of wives,’ and ‘a sufficiency of children’ suspended in the air amidst ‘reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks’ (Rushdie: 4). The wild collage epitomises a moment in the reconfiguration of meaning which, for Rushdie, is bound to ensue from disorder. Their open celebration of anarchy and chaos, however, does not warrant comprehending Smith, Kureishi, or Rushdie as fully endorsing the Romantic identification of the writer as rebel and, conversely, of the rebel (or terrorist) as the writer’s Doppelganger (Scanlan: 83). What distinguishes their notion of the subversive function of writing from the Romantics’ is the awareness that, in the contemporary world, rebellion (or terrorism) is no longer propelled by an abhorrence of dogma, of hegemonic structures, and of monolithic concentrations of power, but by a determination to impose new dogmas, install new hegemonies and construct and enforce new monoliths. Accordingly, the critique offered in the texts analysed here is directed against representatives of established power structures and advocates of alternative, yet ultimately equally rigid regimes at once. The rebels whom Rushdie, Smith, and Kureishi portray are neither visionaries nor anarchists; they are just as dependent on order as the systems they attack. Their rather constricted notion of freedom entraps them in a discourse of subversion which allows no room for imagination, let alone for humour. What they turn out to share with their enemies is a fierce belief in the importance of being earnest. ‘[U]nbendingness can be monomania, tyranny [...] and brittle,’ Saladin Chamcha considers telling Tavleen. Yet Rushdie’s foolish anti-hero is wise

Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised?

85

enough to realise that Tavleen will never understand that only ‘what is flexible can also be humane’ and remains silent. It is thus that Rushdie transfers the exploration of what he conceives as subversion to an altogether different level in his novel. My readings of The Satanic Verses, White Teeth, and ‘My Son the Fanatic’ have demonstrated, that the deadly seriousness with which Tavleen, Millat, and Ali pronounce their readiness to die for their causes, if taken entirely seriously by Rushdie, Smith, and Kureishi, would dramatically constrict the narratives’ scope to a single trajectory and thereby yield a rather stereotyped interpretation of the characters’ aggression. The authors escape this limitation by implicitly insisting on the importance of not being earnest, which their characters fail to understand. It is in the process of exposing this failure that these texts posit humour both as a viable political stance and as a powerful, if not even as the only antidote to dogma. They leave no doubt that, by comparison, earnestness is a pathetically unimaginative mode of responding to ideological opposition. As a form of response to terrorist aggression, it may even signify the willing acceptance of the terrorists’ terms. On the other hand it appears that humour is most effective precisely where it is least expected, as has recently been illustrated by the rather unconventional attempt of NATO general secretary George Robertson to locomote the American government away from the murderously serious position into which it had allowed itself to be petrified by its latest experiences of terrorism. The world’s fear of war in Iraq was momentarily suspended by Robertson’s ironic revocation of the notoriously grave spirit of Winston Churchill with the quotation: ‘You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after exhausting all other alternatives.’ Unfortunately, the few in power were too earnest to take seriously this rare recourse to humour by a leading politician.

Bibliography Ahmed, Akbar S. Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Carr, Caleb. The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again. London: Little, Brown, 2002.

86

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

Cavaliero, Glen. The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. ‘Comedy.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reference Suite CD-ROM. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc, 2003. Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. Salman Rushdie. Macmillan Modern Novelists. London: Macmillan, 1998. Huntington, Samuel P. ‘The Clash of Civilizations.’ Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22-41. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.C. Meredith. Oxford: OUP, 1952. Kureishi, Hanif. ‘My Son the Fanatic.’ 1997. Love in a Blue Time. London: Faber, 1999. Marrouchi, Mustapha. ‘Introduction: Colonialism, Islamism, Terrorism.’ College Literature 30 (2003): 1-55. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. 1988. London: Vintage, 1998. Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Literature Can Look Terrorism in the Eye and Measure Its Human Consequences.’ Chronicle of Higher Education 48.17 (2001a): 11. –––. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001b. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. 2000. London: Penguin, 2001. Stein, Mark. ‘Posed Ethnicity and the Postethnic: Hanif Kureishi’s Novels.’ English Literatures in International Contexts. Ed. Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer. Anglistische Forschungen 283. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000. 119-39. ‘Terrorism.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reference Suite CD-ROM. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc, 2003. Werbner, Pnina. Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims: The Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.

II. Traditions and transgressions – Writing back and forth

This page intentionally left blank

HEINZ ANTOR

Postcolonial laughter in Canada Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk

P

ostcolonial studies, on the one hand, seem to be an utterly humourless affair, as a brief glance at some of the current anthologies and surveys of the field quickly shows. Consult any of the well-known handbooks giving a survey of colonialism and postcolonialism and you will soon find that their indexes do not list concepts such as ‘laughter’ or ‘humour.’ On the other hand, both a look at concrete examples of postcolonial literature and more detailed reflection on the concepts of the postcolonial and of humour and laughter will make the absence noted above appear to be quite a curious one. For one thing, many literary texts dealing with the phenomenon of postcolonialism are very funny indeed and the naïve reference to the seriousness of the subject of postcolonialism obviously does not only misrepresent the body of literary works that forms an important pillar of its primary material, but it is also based on the erroneous assumption that laughter is something that cannot be taken seriously. However, the presupposition that makes the separation of humour and of postcolonial literature possible is based on a conceptual misunderstanding of the nature of laughter, which must not only be seen as a form of light entertainment, but also as a phenomenon which has a legitimate place in such a conflict-ridden field as that of colonialism and its aftermath and must therefore be taken seriously. The age-old conjunction between humorous laughter on the one hand and seriousness of purpose on the other reaches back to the Ancients, and we find it theorized in many a twentieth-century writer’s critical thought as well. The British writer Kingsley Amis, for example, provides us with just one such

90

Heinz Antor

instance. In his early period as a writer in the 1950s, he was often referred to as one of the so-called Angry Young Men because of the harsh social criticism he expressed in his early novels, in which he fiercely attacked contemporary structures of social injustice and abuse in the class society of postwar Britain, and yet, at the same time, he produced hilarious texts leaving many of his readers in stitches. Amis himself pointed out several times that this constituted no contradiction whatsoever. When asked whether he considered himself to be a comic writer, he answered: ‘Not primarily. Seriocomic’ (Amis 1961: 46). He went on to point out that the comic and the serious are not mutually exclusive alternatives. On the contrary: ‘One ought to be prepared to be funny about anything. It doesn’t preclude having serious feelings about it too. It may even draw attention to them. I think politics comes in here [...]’ (Amis 1961: 48). Amis, in his context, clearly referred to the social and political situation in contemporary Britain, but the point is valid in a postcolonial environment as well. Humour and laughter and their function of drawing attention to serious matters are particularly relevant to a discussion of satire. In 1957, Amis published a programmatic essay entitled ‘Laughter’s to be Taken Seriously’ in the New York Times Book Review, in which he explicitly established a link between laughter and satire and discussed their serious functions: Satire offers a social and moral contribution. A culture without satire is a culture without self-criticism and thus, ultimately, without humanity. A society such as ours, in which the forms of power are changing and multiplying, needs above all the restraining influences of savage laughter. Even if that influence at times seems negligible, the satirist’s laughter is valid as a gesture – a gesture on the side of reason. [...] Satire in its modern forms I take to be fiction that attacks vice and folly as manifested in the individual. (Amis 1957: 1)

Amis places himself here in the tradition of Juvenal and of the latter’s combination of laughter and saeva indignatio, and this is something we can come across not only in the context of British literary social criticism, but in many other texts dealing with human vice and folly, be it in Ancient Rome or in modern postcolonial environments. Satiric laughter as a tool of the rational attack on abuses cannot be restricted to criticism of individual weaknesses and wrongdoings, though, as Amis self-contradictorily seems to imply in the passage last quoted here; it has to be seen as a major weapon in the fight against social and political evil as well. Indeed, personal and collective vice and folly often go together in postcolonial (and other) texts, and their laughter often aims at both the individual and at entire social systems. Postcolonial societies, with their multicultural conditions and their postindependence nationalisms and re-arrangements, are prime examples of the changing and multiplying forms of power referred to above (just as Amis’s

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

91

postwar Britain was) and thus provide ample opportunity for the critical laughter of satirical deconstructions. The laughter of postcolonial satirists, though, does not only fulfil the function of savagely lashing out in a Juvenalian manner at the iniquities of the colonial system and of its postcolonial consequences, but sometimes it also tries to ‘laugh mankind out of their favourite follies’ (Fielding: I, xvii) in a way that is related more to the satires of Henry Fielding and of Horace than to the fiercer and more aggressive Juvenal.1 Whether we find a rather urbane and suave Horatian satire that combines criticism and laughter with benevolence in the vein of Fielding and Shaftesbury or whether we are confronted with an altogether more bitter kind of humour in ‘savage’ satires full of anger and fury depends on the concrete historical and cultural context of the individual texts in hand; this is why a study of laughter, and even more so one of postcolonial laughter, beyond all generalizations, will have to abide by the New Historicist injunction to always historicize.

The 1960s: Canadian identity in focus When in 1963, the anglophone Jewish-Canadian writer Mordecai Richler published a slim volume of fiction entitled The Incomparable Atuk, Canada had officially been a more or less independent dominion for ninety-six years and the centenary of Confederation was approaching rapidly. This was a time when Canadians began to questioningly look at themselves and ask who and what exactly they were. The issues of Canadianness, of specifically Canadian qualities, and of a Canadian identity were to become hotly contested ones in the years that followed, and Richler’s book has to be seen within this postcolonial framework. Canada had ceased to be a British colony in 1867, but it had not really become an economically, politically, culturally, and psychologically independent nation at the same time. The history of Canadian culture is that of a country which well into the twentieth century considered itself to be on the margins of the anglophone world, of which London and New York constituted the centre.2 Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk is an early representative of the spate of writing published around the centenary of Confederation dealing 1 2

It is interesting to observe in this context that, in ‘Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,’ Amis named Fielding as the writer to whom he felt the closest affinities (Amis 1961: 50). It was as late as 1941 that Hugh MacLennan, a writer from Nova Scotia, decided to put Canada on the literary map and to cut out a genuinely independent role in the world for it in his blatantly nationalistic novel Barometer Rising. In his later novel The Precipice (1947), he cast a very critical and an anxious look at the growing influence of Canada’s big brother in the south on his country’s culture. The question of British colonialism gradually came to be substituted by that of American economic and cultural imperialism and the postcolonial status of Canada had to be discussed increasingly within a different context.

92

Heinz Antor

with the idea of Canadian identity, i.e. it is a typical example of a kind of fiction that has been one of the pillars of the Canadian literary scene since the mid-twentieth century. Like many other books of the period, it is concerned with a Canadian self as well as with that self’s relations with its others. Unlike most other writers on the issue of Canadian identity, however, Richler uses the comic lens of a hilarious kind of humour to cast a very critical and satirical glance at the key questions involved.

Comic alterity, or: An Inuit in Toronto The basic idea of The Incomparable Atuk is one which immediately places the book in a postcolonial context and at the same time provides ample food both for comedy and for the serious discussion of the multicultural issues created in such an environment. Atuk is an Inuit3 from Baffin Bay who is taken to Toronto in 1960 by Rory Peel, a representative of the Twentyman Fur Company who will use Atuk’s poetry for their own purposes, as we are told in the first chapter: The Twentyman Fur Co, a vastly misunderstood enterprise, was, at the time, suffering from a foul run of newspaper publicity and questions in parliament because, it was claimed, the Eskimo was dying of consumption, malnutrition and even frost-bite, all because of what the white man had done to make his accustomed way of life unfeasible. Peel, the brightest young advertising man in Toronto, was flown north to see if he could come up with an idea. And so [...] he gave Atuk two electric blankets, a sack of flour, his cigarette lighter, and twelve bars of chocolate in exchange for a sheaf of his verse. The poems, as everybody knows, later ran in a series of advertisements in magazines all across Canada. (Richler 1989: 2-3)

The company that takes Atuk south to Toronto is in the fur trade, i.e. in that branch of the capitalist economy that historically played such a dominant role in the colonizing of North America (Ray: 76-7). The Twentyman Fur Co thus becomes the representative of colonial practices in the novel, and indeed, it seems to be engaging in the same exploitative strategies as its historical forebears. Atuk is taken to Toronto as part of a huge publicity campaign aiming at restoring the company’s somewhat weathered reputation, and he is thus made into a pawn on Twentyman’s economic chessboard. The company is not really interested in Inuit poetry, but merely in regaining consumer confidence in order to maximize the profits it draws out of Canada’s natural resources. Atuk literally comes from the ‘True North strong and free,’ as Canada is referred to in ‘O Canada,’ the Canadian national anthem and he is displaced to Toronto in order to serve the company’s purposes. Like his forebears centuries earlier, Atuk is unfairly recompensed for his poetry by the 3

Throughout the novel, which was published before the advent of political correctness, Atuk is referred to as an Eskimo, and Richler has been criticized for this more recently.

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

93

modern equivalent of the cheap baubles given to indigenous peoples by first colonizers around the globe in exchange for their riches. The fur company and the Inuit thus represent colonizers and colonized, and Atuk’s move to Toronto confronts the alterities of two Others in a postcolonial setting. All this sounds very problematic, and indeed, Richler could have taken this basic situation as the point of departure for a very serious engagement with questions of (post)colonial exploitation. This certainly is an important element of one level of this text. And yet, the very confrontation between the othernesses of different cultures is one of the sources of this novel’s comic quality. What makes sense within one culture may be felt to be risible from the point of view of a member of another. Richler also makes use of the comic potential of an intercultural situation at the beginning of The Incomparable Atuk, and the eponymous hero at times turns into a Canadian version of Voltaire’s ingénu,4 whose naïve look at life in contemporary Toronto does not primarily serve to make the Northern visitor appear as a simpleton, but to comically and with satiric effect deconstruct life in the Canadian metropolis.5 In Toronto, Atuk is confronted for the first time with the promises the consumer constantly faces in a market economy; he takes them literally, which has absurd consequences, so that the comic effect thus created draws the reader’s attention to the fraudulence of the whole economic system: Toronto was so rich in opportunities that an alert Eskimo could even make a start on his fortune while he slept. Atuk kept his radio tuned to CJFD all night, just in case Night Owl phoned to find out if he was listening and offered him a free television set, washing machine or wrist-watch with automatic calendar and built-in alarm. [...] Because he took the Standard each morning he was entitled to a free accident policy and as he had the Gazette delivered to his door he was automatically covered against harm by hurricane. [...] in Toronto they stopped just short of paving the streets with gold. Any minute a fortune might drop at your feet. Round one corner The Friendly Loan Company beckoned you to just come in and grab what you wanted, and round another, men with guns drawn unloaded bags of money from an armoured car. A fifty pence purchase at Twentyman’s Department Store entitled you to a chit that could get you a free return trip to Rome or the Setting for Ben-Hur, if you won the Lucky Dip. [...] [...] In Toronto, remember, a fortune could drop at your feet every minute. Today, as always, he carried an Ozo soap wrapper with him on the off chance that he might run into the beautiful, prize-giving Miss Body Odour. Although he had no purchases to make, Atuk zigzagged in and out of the magic eye doors of supermarkets, chain 4

5

The comparison also turns up in Woodcock (44) and in Morra (5). Golden chooses another character by Voltaire for a very similar comparison when he calls Atuk ‘a Baffin BayCandide’ (Golden: 78). Cf. Ramraj (67): ‘Atuk functions initially as an artless figure whose primitive innocence serves to undercut the pretensions of civilized society.’

94

Heinz Antor drugstores, and department stores, all the way home, just in case he should be the One Millionth Happy Customer to pass through These Friendly Doors, and therefore be showered with munificence. Nothing. (Richler 1989: 37-9).

The absurdity of the literal-mindedness and gullibility Atuk displays when confronted with the marketing hype of the big city has a defamiliarizing effect which, in the sense of Shklovsky, de-automates our perception and makes us look afresh at what we are surrounded by every day and what we normally do not think about any longer but simply accept. We thus recognize ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ (Sypher: 84), which, according to Bergson, creates an inward protest reaction in us that we normally refer to as laughter. This protest, however, is not only directed against the human being submitted to the mechanical here, but also against the deceptions and against the organized fraud of a profit-oriented capitalist system that seems to have colonized and abused us all just as it has colonized and abused Atuk and his people. Richler could have concentrated on Atuk’s character as that of a northern ingénu and gone on in a similar vein. Instead, however, he turns his protagonist into a somewhat rounder character capable of developing and of surprising the reader. Moreover, he introduces a number of other Canadian characters whom Atuk meets in Toronto and he thus transforms his satire into a more multi-layered text.

The comedy of derivative Canadian dream(ing)s and myths Atuk is willing to adapt to his new environment and he learns quickly in Toronto. He wants to profit from the supposedly great opportunities offered by capitalism and become rich and well-known. He dreams a Canadian version of the American dream and embarks onto the route from arctic rags to Toronto’s riches.6 This is why the first part of the novel is entitled ‘What you Dare to Dream, Dare to Do’ (Richler 1989: 1) and this motto turns up intermittently as a leitmotif throughout the first third of the book. It soon turns out that virtually everybody in the novel dreams this Canadian dream, and Richler uses this device as a satirical tool which allows him not only to take a critical look at contemporary Canada as a postcolonial nation but also to create a kind of laughter that certainly has to be taken seriously.7 ‘What you Dare to Dream, Dare to Do,’ the motto of the first part, has been coined by Dr. Burt Parks, a trainer and sports teacher touring Canada 6 7

As Davidson points out: ‘The “American Dream” becomes the “Canadian Dream”; the “Canadian Dream” becomes the “Eskimo Dream”’ (Davidson: 106). This is why Golden can insist that ‘[i]n The Incomparable Atuk, comic rendition is more than [...] distracting humorous motif’ (Golden: 80).

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

95

with a show displaying a group of body-builders for supposedly patriotic purposes, as he eloquently explains: ‘We have brought together here some of the finest examples of Canadian manhood in the world. We are building a new race of muscular marvels greater than the Greek Gods. We’re doing it for patriotic reasons’ (Richler 1989: 26). The comparison between the high (Greek Gods) and the low (the body-building show) has a mock-heroic effect here and, through the discrepancy between patriotic claims on the one hand and the banality of what is offered to justify them, humorously debunks the pretentiousness of Parks’s nationalistic gesture. Moreover, the latter’s patriotism is seriously questioned when it turns out that rather than celebrate his country, Parks simply wants to market his body-building programme, such as when he claims: ‘You too [...] can develop a physique like Buddy Lane and overcome constipation, hernia, hardening of the arteries, diarrhœa, impotence, and so forth’ (Richler 1989: 26). In Parks’s show, economic interest poses as Canadian patriotism and thus exposes the latter as a hollow shell covering mere self-interest. The Canadian dream of muscular marvels presented here, then, quite apart from its fascist overtones, is ridiculed as a sham. The reader laughs at Parks’s pompous grandiloquence and at the same time is made to reflect seriously on what would actually justify the idea of a distinct Canadian identity and of a Canadian patriotism. When, a little later, Atuk is introduced to Dr. Parks, the body-builder describes himself in the following words: ‘I’m world-famous [...] all over Canada’ (Richler 1989: 30). Again, this incites laughter in the reader, who recognizes the discrepancy between Parks’s grand aspirations to world fame and the restrictedness of his reputation to Canada, which cuts down to size all those in the novel who, mainly out of sheer self-interest, would like to overcome Canada’s postcolonial marginality by exaggeratedly turning it into a global centre. Rather than stress Canada’s greatness, Parks’s remark emphasizes his own provinciality,8 and it draws the reader’s attention to the fact that Canada is indeed still considered by many to be on the colonial margin. There are many examples in this novel of the satirical deconstruction of contemporary versions of Canadianness as derivative and as still indebted to colonial thinking.9 Seymour Bone’s reputation as a critic of national importance, for example, is humorously founded on the Canadian presupposition that the cultural standards of the erstwhile colonial centre in London are still to be accepted as guidelines that can provide orientation. 8 9

Ramraj also sees The Incomparable Atuk as a satire exposing Canadian ‘insularity’ (Ramraj: 70). This is why Morra refers to Toronto society as described in the novel as ‘a microcosm of colonial-minded English Canada’ (5).

96

Heinz Antor

This becomes obvious when Bone decides to put out a critical journal pompously entitled The Genius and written only by himself and by his wife Ruthy: It did not do well the first year, even as a give-away to actors, writers, and producers. But the second year a miracle happened. Within one week, both Time and the London Spectator decided to do humorous columns about culture in Canada and chose Bone’s journal as a logical take-off point. Very few people in Canada realized that their struggling, no-saying critic was being ridiculed. On the contrary. Most people were impressed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we think,’ a realistic CBC producer said. ‘If the London Spectator feels he’s worth writing about, we ought to give him an opportunity.’ (Richler 1989: 62)

The satire of this passage excludes and ridicules Bone because of the pretentiousness of his apparently quite boring magazine and all those Canadians who are still so indebted to colonial thinking that they mistake London taking notice of a Canadian cultural product as a sign of its greatness. The serious implication here is that Canadians do not have cultural standards of their own and that, rather than look to the old colonial centres, they should develop properly Canadian values. Bone himself is an imitator of English culture and he merely sells as his own opinion what he has read in the British print media. The reader is confronted with a very similar case of Canadian postcolonial cultural imitation of models from the colonial centres in the character of Harry Snipes, who edits a journal imitating the style of American-style popular culture magazines. Canada is here attacked for not being strong enough to withstand being caught up in the powerful wake of American mass culture. This is such an important theme in the book that the author prefaced it with a quotation from an article by Richard H. Rovere published in Maclean’s on 5 November 1960: What would happen in Canada if full sovereignty were invoked and the southern border were sealed tight against American mass culture – if the air-waves were jammed, if all our comic books were embargoed, if only the purest and most uplifting of American cultural commodities were allowed entry? Native industries would take over, obviously. Cut off from American junk, Canada would have to produce her own. (Richler 1989: n.p.)

The last sentence implies that Canada is so America-centred that even in the unlikely case of a cultural embargo directed against the southern neighbour, Canadians would only produce the same kind of junk again, and the kitsch

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

97

offered in Snipes’s magazine is an illustration of just that.10 Snipes is so deeply immersed in the American imagination that he is no longer able to come up with an independent Canadian counter-part. When he meets Atuk for the first time, he immediately asks the Inuit to write a contribution for Metro: ‘We’re fighting for our life here. We stand for a Canadian national identity and the American mags are trying to drive us out of business. Like Fiction?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good. Now lemme see.’ Snipes lifted a copy of the Aug 4, 1940 issue of Collier’s off a stack of old magazines and neatly razored out a short story. ‘Here’s a good one. I want you to re-set it in Moose Jaw 1850. We haven’t any Western yarns for the May issue. But please remember to change more than the names. Play around with the physical descriptions and details. Use your imagination, Atuk. That’s what we’re paying you for. (Richler 1989: 5-6)

The satire of The Incomparable Atuk, then, is directed against the derivativeness of Canadian culture which, just like Harry Snipes and the readers of his magazine or like the readers of Seymour Bone’s critical journal, makes itself dependent on the point of view and on the standards of the old colonial power or of the southern neighbour.11 In another scene, Snipes is referred to as ‘the most notorious of Canada’s middle-aged angries’ (Richler 1989: 47), and this only reinforces the point made here because this description quite fittingly looks to contemporary Britain and to its so-called Angry Young Men for an epithet for the epigonal Canadian.

Atuk’s Canadian dream With Atuk, Richler presents us with a character trying to act out the experimental idea mentioned in the epigraph of a taking over of Canada by native industries on the level of cultural production. This experiment, however, will merely show that an independent Canadian culture stands only a very small chance in the face of the corrupting forces of an American-style market economy that has long since taken over even the minds of those trying to define an independent Canadian identity. The vehicle used in the novel to bring across this sobering insight, again, is the Juvenalian laughter of ‘savage’ indignation.

Golden sees the novel as ‘an unabashed comic assault on Canadian kitsch culture’ (Golden: 77). 11 Cf. Ross, who has pointed out that Canadian cultural products ‘are all hand-me-down American style’ (Ross: 111). 10

98

Heinz Antor

Atuk first becomes famous when his poetry is used in the advertising campaign of the Twentyman Fur Co. Since this is a ploy to detract public attention from the company’s exploitation of the Inuit and the Canadian north, indigenous poetry is here made to serve the purposes of others rather than being appreciated for its own sake. Indeed, before Rory Peel finds Atuk at Baffin Bay and brings him south, RCMP sergeant Jock Wilson ‘had discouraged Atuk from writing poetry. He had pointed out to the lad that verses would not get him the bigger, better igloo he craved and, what’s more, his writing was ungrammatical’ (Richler 1989: 2). What to the Canadian policeman, from his white Anglo-Saxon perspective, seems to be a lack of quality, to the Twentyman Fur Co, however, turns into a marketable commodity because it fits a racist stereotype of Inuit ‘primitivism;’ therefore Atuk’s poetry is lauded for ‘a certain arctic simplicity’ (Richler 1989: 47) expressed in such lines as ‘I go hunt bear in white dawn/ good spirit come with me./I go fish in silver twilight,/good spirit come with me./Over the white crust soon comes/ forever night/ good spirit,/O, spirit,/stay with me’ (Richler 1989: 46, italics in original text). Atuk is prized in Toronto for serving stereotypical notions of white Canadians about life in the arctic north, and Twentyman is not the only one to profit from the Inuit’s writings. Professor Norman Gore, who disparagingly looks down upon Atuk as a ‘chunky little primitive’ with a ‘sly side to his nature’ (Richler 1989: 4), rides the wave created by the fur company’s advertising campaign, edits and publishes a volume of Atuk’s poetry and thus gains a lot of publicity together with the book (Richler 1989: 3). In order to fulfil his dream of greater wealth, Atuk at first falls victim to an internal colonialism that does not grant him any freedom, poetic or otherwise, but expects him to play the game of his exploiters in Toronto. Atuk does so to a limited extent only, though, and tries to serve different gods simultaneously. He shocks and surprises Rory Peel as Twentyman’s representative at a public reading where he comes up with the following poem: Twentyman Fur company,/I have seen the best sealhunters of my generation putrefy raving die from tuberculosis,/Massey, you square,/eskimos don’t rub noses any more and the cats around Baffin Bay dig split-level houses./Listen to me, Pearson,/a house is not a home,/an igloo is not a pad./And you, Diefenbaker, can kiss my ass/ where holy most holy pea-soup hockey players have rumbled./Canada, wake up, you’re all immigrants to me:/my people are living like niggers. (Richler 1989: 47)

On the one hand, this text exposes the truth of the allegations of colonialist exploitation of the north levelled against the Twentyman Fur Co and, by implication, it foregrounds the internal colonialism of Canada’s treatment of its indigenous population. On the other hand, though, the rejection of arctic

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

99

stereotypes and the criticism of leading Canadian politicians here does not merely constitute a genuine act of indigenous rebellion against oppression at the hands of white invaders, but yet again is deeply implicated in a more complex game of very different interests. Atuk here levels a calculated attack against the hand that has fed him so far, and in so doing caters for the interests of the critics of Twentyman. Accordingly, when Peel is infuriated by this act of insubordination and calls Atuk a ‘son-of-a-bitch’ who in the future will ‘clear every poem with [him]’ because he ‘took Twentyman’s name in vain’ (Richler 1989: 47-8), Atuk counters by drawing Peel’s attention to the audience’s deafening applause, and he turns to his listeners with the following words: ‘Is much good you all like [...] My heart fills’ (Richler 1989: 48). This passage is a source of laughter for several reasons. First of all, one can feel a certain Schadenfreude and side with Atuk when he breaks out of the stereotypical corset of ‘primitivist’ pseudo-poetry the Twentyman Fur Co expects him to come up with and when, in doing so, he exposes the latter’s exploitative profiteering. Peel, in his infuriated reaction, implicitly likens the name of Twentyman to that of God, which, in its total inadequacy, provokes our irreverent laughter and at the same time exposes the extent to which Twentyman’s capitalist interests are illegitimately raised to the status of religious doctrine. Atuk’s syntactically and grammatically correct and angrily colloquial protest poem is placed side by side in the novel with his linguistically ‘primitivist’ invocation of ‘good spirit’ quoted above. Together with his reaction to the audience’s applause, in which he again reverts to the role of the linguistically incompetent simpleton, this not only creates a humorous effect through the sheer formal discrepancy of the language used. Rather, it also makes us laugh with Atuk because we realize that the Inuit, who so far has been abused by the white Anglo-Saxons in Toronto, now in turn uses these people’s stereotypes – be it that of the ‘primitive’ or that of the ‘postcolonial rebel’ – to further his own purposes.12 Atuk has quickly learned his lesson and has turned from a naïve ingénu into a clever picaro who drifts through the social world of Toronto seeking his own advantage.13 Although this can make the reader laugh with him at those who only consider him as an instrument for the realization of their own dreams of wealth and fame, it does not make us uncritical towards Atuk. The protagonist’s comical devices also make us aware of the Inuit’s own One must allow, though, that different readerships might react differently here. To a German or to a Canadian indigenous readership, for example, laughter might come more easily than to many a white Anglo-Canadian reader. 13 Ramraj also compares Atuk’s stay in the big city to a ‘picaresque journey through Toronto’s social world’ (Ramraj: 68). 12

100

Heinz Antor

corruption in Toronto. Atuk, the indigenous Canadian, seems to have taken over the values of the capitalist colonizers of his country and this makes him copy the exploitative strategies he has observed in others. Having discovered that Inuit sculpture is sold at very high prices in Toronto, Atuk sends for eighteen members of his family and takes them south from Baffin Bay in order to make them work in a presumably illegal basement factory he sets up. There they have to produce those sculptures he sells at a large profit. Atuk dreams the capitalist dream, which is an essentially Anglo-Saxon one, and he exploits his own relatives whom he keeps imprisoned like slaves. Atuk becomes ‘Eskimo Tycoon’ (Richler 1989: 43), as we are told by the title of the second part of the novel, and this goes hand in hand with a process of moral deprivation. The moral indignation one might feel about this, however, is not brought about by means of sermonizing or ranting in the vein of an angry young man such as, say, Jimmy Porter, but by wild and maniacal laughter induced in order to create a postcolonial version of saeva indignatio again. For example, in order to isolate his relatives from the outside world and to make them comply with his wishes and put in more working hours, he constructs a narrative in which he depicts the world beyond the walls of their artificially created work-prison as one full of dangers in which they cannot survive without his help. In addition, he uses television, which hitherto has been unknown to his relatives, as a supposedly magic device he alone can use to reward them if their output is productive enough. In a hilarious scene, he comes home and turns the switching on of the TV set into a pseudo-shamanic performance14 the only purpose of which is to strengthen his authority with his family workforce: The Old One took down the bar, unbolted the door, and opened the locks one by one. ‘Enter in peace,’ the Old One said. ‘Hi,’ Atuk said. ‘How’s everything?’ ‘They are all gathered around the box and waiting. There is much tension among them for you failed them yesterday. The Old One strongly recommends the magic for tonight.’ [...] ‘Have you worked hard and long while Atuk, who cares not a reindeer’s knuckle for his own safety, has rushed hither and thither among the many white, washed, and unfriendly ones, always in your interest?’ ‘Yes,’ they chanted. ‘Yes.’ ‘Tonight, then,’ Atuk said, ‘I shall plead for the magic. [...]’ [...] Atuk went into his trance. Stumbling, swaying, eyes rolling, he wandered round the room. The others watched hopefully, afraid, tears rolling down their cheeks. Except, Atuk noticed, for Ignak. ‘Oh ... oh ... I’m beginning to feel the power.’ Ti-Lucy cried out. Moose groaned. ‘Ai,’ Atuk called. ‘Aiii-aii.’ He backed up against the window and felt behind the 14

Morra also sees Atuk in ‘the guise of a shaman’ in this scene (Morra: 2, cf. 11).

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

101

curtain with his hands. ‘Aii.’ With a sudden sweep of his arms, he said, ‘Oh, Mighty One, let there be sound for my flock.’ There was a sound and Atuk saw that it was good. He counted to five and called out, ‘Let there be pictures, Mighty One, for my hard workers. Let the wavy lines form moving pictures. Bring us – ’ [...] ‘...bring us a Dupont Special with Frank Sinatra...’ [...] ‘...bring us songs, dances, fill us with laughter.’ ‘It is too much, Atuk. We burst.’ ‘Give us this day many girls with long, delicious legs and leaping breasts uncovered.’ The boys began to stamp their feet. Moose stood on his head. ‘Look, it is here!’ ‘Long live Atuk! Maker of miracles!’ ‘Amen!’ (Richler 1989: 69-72)

Atuk here takes up a position similar to that of the western colonizer, using superior technology to intimidate the people he wants to make docile and obedient in order better to exploit them. He also constructs himself into a divine position, as the Biblical references in the text show, in order to earn his family’s respect and justify his claims for longer working hours. This puts him in a similar position as the one taken up by Twentyman, whose name, like that of a divinity, as Peel has told Atuk before, should not be taken in vain. Just as in Twentyman’s case, the religion that is here used as opium for Atuk’s people, is not based upon a transcendent deeper meaning of life but upon sheer economic greed.15 We laugh here both at the gullibility of Atuk’s family and at the comic discrepancy between the bombast of his performance and the banality of what it artificially blows up into a supposedly metaphysical event. Atuk’s relatives here seem to become the butt of a politically incorrect kind of humour16 because they conform to and thus reinforce the stereotype of ‘naïve’ and ‘primitive’ indigenous people who have reached a less advanced state of civilization and thus appear more like children than like mature people. But this is only possible because they are artificially kept in the dark about the TV set by the exploiter Atuk. Moreover, it is only the flat characters in the Inuit family who are deceived by their clever and ruthless relative. Ignak does not walk into the trap and sees through Atuk’s performance. Consequently, he is referred to as ‘an Eskimo fascist’ (Richler 1989: 85) by Atuk, who in turn is accused by Ignak of being an ‘[a]ssimilationist’ (Richler 1989: 87). When Ignak tells his relative: ‘We wish [...] you would remember Baffin Bay and how the white scum rule our land,’ Atuk answers back: ‘How Morra also points out that Atuk ‘sacrifices any tenable attachment to his own community and culture for the sake of self-interested gain’ (Morra: 4). 16 Morra also refers to The Incomparable Atuk as a ‘satirical, politically incorrect text’ (Morra: 1). Richler’s humour can also be quite aggressive, which is why Cohen talks about his ‘pugnacious urban humor’ (Cohen: 24). 15

102

Heinz Antor

long will you hold a grudge? Another thousand years?’ (Richler 1989: 97). The protagonist here denies history because it would make it more difficult for him to imitate Twentyman in an act of postcolonial mimicry.17 Atuk adopts the colonizer’s disparaging attitudes towards the colonized indigenous peoples in his own reactions to his relatives whom he considers to be ‘indolent to the bone’ and ‘in constant need of a whip-hand over them’ (Richler 1989: 53). He refers to them as ‘[p]rimitives’ (Richler 1989: 100) and as ‘savages’ (Richler 1989: 109). He wants them to be ‘primitives’ and to produce ‘primitive’ art because that is what he can sell in the postcolonial market-place. When his relatives begin to produce better quality sculptures, he is paradoxically shocked because he finds ‘[a]ll crudeness and innocence gone’ (Richler 1989: 97). What would normally elicit laughter in us here also serves to foreground the way in which the protagonist caters for a demand created by disparaging colonial stereotypes of native ‘primitivism.’ Atuk is infected with the virus of the spirit of free capitalist enterprise, and with it he catches the infection of inhuman exploitation and denigration. In a way, he becomes a traitor to the Inuit cause, and the laughter created by such scenes as that of the ‘magical’ TV set is to be taken very seriously indeed as a tool of emphasizing the working of a colonial spirit that even transgresses ethnic borders and works within a colonized people itself. In the second part of the novel, then, Atuk has turned from ingénu and victim of Twentyman and his exploitative company to Twentyman’s disciple18 and to a neocolonial little villain himself19 who, invested with the picaro’s moral indifference, now turns colonialist mechanisms against his own people and even dares to challenge Twentyman with his more rebellious poems. When Rory Peel warns him against Twentyman’s shrewdness, he answers: ‘You watch me. I’m shrewder’ (Richler 1989: 112). Thus, the third part of the novel follows the further fortunes of Atuk in the world of Twentyman’s neoliberal capitalism and it demonstrates that Atuk still is merely an instrument that is used by Twentyman to secure the latter’s own profit. Again, this is shown in a humorous vein, this time through the medium of black comedy. In order to be able to go through with a business deal with the Chinese, Twentyman has to get rid of American opposition, and he plans to cash in on Canadian anti-Americanism by artificially turning Atuk into a Canadian Atuk’s mimicry of Twentyman’s capitalist colonialist tricks also unfolds the force of parody for the reader, alongside with parody’s deconstructive effect (cf. Bhabha: 86 and Morra: 3). 18 Davidson also sees Atuk as ‘the creature of Buck Twentyman, the ultimate tycoon and the villain of the novel’ (Davidson: 107). 19 Ramraj draws our attention to the fact that, in the end, ‘the reader enjoys the conflict of villain against villain’ (Ramraj: 70). 17

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

103

martyr and a victim of America. Here Twentyman yet again proves to be a scheming Machiavellian who abuses people to realize his profit, and Richler takes recourse to the macabre and uses black humour to point an accusing satirical finger at all those involved. He enjoys teasing the politically correct by incorporating into the story a tale of an act of cannibalism perpetrated by Atuk who, it turns out, has eaten ‘an American army intelligence colonel’ spying on the Russians (Richler 1989: 54) in the Canadian arctic north. Canadian sovereignty here is violated in the Cold War rivalry of the two superpowers. The reader is never told why Atuk consumed the American intelligence officer, and it remains open whether his cannibalism is to be read as an act of postcolonial self-defence or as a symbolic representation of Canadians such as Snipes feeding on American culture.20 The drastic exaggeration of the metaphoric nurturing of Canada by America turns Atuk’s anthropophagy into black comedy, and it combines humour and horror21 in order to expose Canada’s neocolonial dependence on America. When Atuk is arrested because he has eaten the American colonel, Twentyman tries to turn him into the figurehead of a postcolonial Canadian reaction against America by organizing popular support for the Inuit, and he lures Atuk into becoming the first candidate in Stick Out Your Neck, a TV quiz show organized by Twentyman which offers a huge sum as prize money but guillotines the candidate should he fail to answer a question.22 Twentyman leases the rights to the programme to an American company. Atuk reverts to his early naïve status of gullible ingénu and believes Twentyman, who tells him he will secretly signal all the correct answers to him during the programme. Instead of doing so, Twentyman has Atuk confronted with a ridiculously complicated and difficult hockey question and leaves him in the lurch so that, right at the end of the novel, the Inuit is indeed guillotined, and Twentyman uses the American sponsorship of the programme to stage a wave of anti-Americanism on which he rides to eventually sell his tractors to China. Once again, the indigenous Canadian dies for the sake of the white trader’s profit, but the Canadian masses who violently protest against America are also pawns in Twentyman’s game. Cf. Morra (13). Referring to Terry Heller’s definition of black humour, Randall, in his discussion of St. Urbain’s Horseman, another comic novel by Richler, states that ‘black humour is the result of suspending the two extremes (horror and humour) so that the reader becomes moved “to the verge of schizophrenia” and ultimately tries to reconcile the two to avoid insanity’ (Randall: 25). 22 Golden refers to the programme as ‘a surface emblem of the broader cheapening of Canadian cultural life in the novel’ (Golden: 79). Richler himself wrote about the performative and media aspect of modern life: ‘Put plainly, these days everybody’s in show business, all trades are riddled with impurities’ (Richler 1991: 264). 20 21

104

Heinz Antor

Nevertheless, many a reader will laugh at the end of the book, namely at Atuk and at those gullible Canadians23 who react exactly as planned by Twentyman because they are flat characters without a soul of their own. They react mechanically like robots and are remote-controlled by colonialist capitalist interests.24 Since they are unable to come up with a viable and independent Canadian position of their own, we cannot feel with them, but see their failures as stumbling blocks on the way to a strong and genuine Canadian identity. The title of the novel, The Incomparable Atuk, echoes the title of another famous North American novel, namely The Great Gatsby.25 Atuk’s dream is a Canadian version of the American dream, and, as in Gatsby’s case, he comes to a bad end. Unlike in Fitzgerald’s novel, though, we laugh at Atuk’s follies, but the laughter thus created nevertheless is to be taken seriously because of the criticism of very real faults represented thus. Richler’s humorous deconstructions, however, are not only aimed at Twentyman’s neocolonialist exploitation of Canada and at Atuk’s character, which combines features of the picaro with those of the fool and of the trickster (cf. Morra: 2ff.). Rather, Richler also makes us laugh at the folly of the many characters who accompany Atuk on his picaresque journey from arctic origins to death under the postcolonial guillotine wielded by commercial interests. In particular, the book’s satire is directed against the use of stereotypes and the treatment of minorities in multicultural Canada, ranging from Professor Gore and his wife’s racist stereotypes hidden away behind their gentle façade to Rory Peel’s pseudo-liberalism and covert antiSemitism. In the course of these satirical deconstructions of the benevolent surface of a politically correct Canadian multiculturalism behind which there still lurk the ugly faces of racism and discrimination, the Inuit are not only compared to Jews, but also to black people. Atuk himself, in the protest poem that so enraged Rory Peel, says about his people that they are ‘living like niggers’ (Richler 1989: 47) and thus stresses the history of colonial and postcolonial exploitation Canadian indigenous and black people share.

Atuk here is to be seen as the representative of Canada as a whole. Golden emphasizes this in his interpretation of Atuk’s death when he writes: ‘As his head rolls, so rolls all of Canada’s in Richler’s perception’ (Golden: 80). 24 Cf. Morra (3): ‘Atuk, the poet, is beheaded by Twentyman, the representative of materialism and imperialist tendencies.’ Davidson also indirectly refers to Atuk as a flat character when he describes the protagonist as ‘the stock character in an archetypal capitalist myth’ (Davidson: 112). 25 Davidson also draws this comparison and considers The Incomparable Atuk as ‘a “Canadianized” version of the American novel’ (Davidson: 106). 23

Postcolonial laughter in Canada

105

Conclusion The Incomparable Atuk provides a good example of the possibility and of the range of postcolonial humour. The laughter that is so plentifully incited in the reader of the novel is to be taken seriously because it is the laughter of the detection of abuses in a postcolonial context. Richler’s brilliant and hilarious satire exposes the continuing colonial practices in the dealings of white Canadians with their country’s indigenous population just as much as the latter’s corruptibility when faced with the commercialist culture of the descendants of colonial settlers. Canadian culture of the 1960s becomes the butt of humour because it is shown to be derivative and lacking a value structure of its own, with pompous attempts at constructing a Canadian identity providing the material for mock-heroic deconstructions.26 Canada’s role in a postcolonial world under American sway is laughingly exposed just as much as the unreflected anti-Americanism of many Canadians. Finally, many of the evils to be met in multicultural contexts and particularly frequent in postcolonial environments, such as racism and ethnic prejudice, are exposed to the ‘savage laughter’ of a kind of satire that is sometimes indebted to Juvenal, but can also rise to the standards of Horace in its mellower moments. Paradoxically, in a teasingly mock-heroic gesture with a Shakespearean reference, the final word in the novel is given to Snipes, who addresses a huge crowd of Canadians after Atuk’s violent death and tells them: ‘Friends, Canucks, countrymen, [...] use your noggins’ (Richler 1989: 178). The novel thus ends with an invocation to Canadians to do a bit of their own thinking27 – and the implied author of the novel would certainly agree with that.

Bibliography Amis, Kingsley. ‘Laughter’s to be Taken Seriously.’ New York Times 7 July 1957: 1-13. –––. ‘My Kind of Comedy.’ Twentieth Century 170 (July 1961): 46-50. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. ‘The Comedy of Urban Low Life: From Saul Bellow to Mordecai Richler.’ Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 4.2 (1981): 21-4. In view of the combination of laughter and satirical criticism, it is more accurate to use the term ‘mock-heroic’ here than to follow Morra, who simply states that ‘both Atuk and Twentyman are given heroic proportions’ (Morra: 15). 27 Atuk’s headlessness brought about by his execution in the guillotine can therefore also be interpreted as the ‘headlessness of both Atuk and Canada’ (Morra: 17). 26

106

Heinz Antor

Davidson, Arnold E. Mordecai Richler. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones. 1749. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1974. Golden, Daniel. ‘Mystical Musings and Comic Confrontations: The Fiction of Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 22 (1981): 62-85. Goldie, Terry. ‘The Minority Men.’ Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 4.2 (1981): 15-20. Greenstein, Michael. ‘Mordecai Richler and Jewish-Canadian Humor.’ Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor. Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987. 196-215. Morra, Linda. ‘Playing the Fool: The Satire of Canadian Cultural Nationalism in Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 26.1 (2001): 1-26. Ramraj, Victor J. Mordecai Richler. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Randall, Neil. ‘Laughing at the Victim: Humour in St. Urbain’s Horseman.’ Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 4.2 (1981): 25-30. Ray, Arthur. ‘When Two Worlds Meet.’ The Illustrated History of Canada. 1987. Ed. Craig Brown. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1997. 17-104. Richler, Mordecai. The Incomparable Atuk. 1963. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. –––. ‘Why I Write.’ The Canadian Essay. Ed. Gerald Lynch and David Rampton. Toronto: Copp Clark Pittman, 1991. 259-67. Ross, Malcolm. ‘The Incomparable Atuk’: The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions. Reflections on Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Shklovsky, Victor. ‘Art as Technique.’ 1917. Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. Sypher, Wylie, ed. Comedy. George Meredith: ‘An Essay on Comedy.’ Henri Bergson: ‘Laughter.’ 1956. Baltimore: Hopkins, 1980. Woodcock, George. Mordecai Richler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971.

SUSAN LEVER

The colonizer’s gift of cursing Satire in David Foster’s Moonlite

I

n the central section of David Foster’s novel Moonlite (1981), a poor Scottish undergraduate at one of England’s old universities is led by his wealthier fellows into a life of drinking and gambling. Finbar MacDuffie, known as Moonlite, is an albino with night sight, a complete oddity who gains his only social value as an exotic curiosity. Lady Virginia Creeper invites him to a country house party where several other peculiar people compete for attention – including an effete poet and a German scientist. Readers of eighteenth and nineteenth-century English novels may find this scene strangely familiar; it could be from one of the country house satires of Thomas Love Peacock, with shades of earlier satirical writers such as Fielding. Yet this novel has already hinted at a slightly different viewpoint: Without wishing to scant the contributions made towards science and the arts by gentlemen, who alone have the means of pursuing them, it must be said that Colonial gentlemen take a very different view. The contrast is nowhere better exemplified than in the New West Highlands, where seventy years after colonisation it is rare to find a man who can name a single indigenous plant or bird. The English gentleman in new surroundings will always replace them as quickly as he can with a facsimile of his own ancestral seat, complete to the very vermin, and far from deriving any benefit from his love of nature, foreign species are forced to contend with a ruthless policy of depredatory rape, that must be seen to be believed. Then, not every man will leave a toilet seat as he would wish to find it, and the ideal society would contain no English gentlemen. (Foster: 139)

The mention of the toilet seat shifts the formal voice of the passage into a more contemporary and colloquial realm. While the novel’s literary models

108

Susan Lever

are English, readers will have grasped that it offers an Australian perspective in its account of British colonial history. Moonlite is set in the British Isles for three quarters of its length; it begins in the outer Hebrides island of Hiphoray where Finbar is born, and follows his picaresque adventures in Scotland, England and the New West Highlands. From its beginning the novel hints that its story of the colonization of a tiny island is, at the same time, a metaphorical history of the colonization of Australia. While the novel builds on research into the lives of the people on islands such as Saint Kilda at the time of the highland clearances, it also offers Australian references in passing. Like the Australian Aborigines, ‘the people claim they have always lived here, yet remarkably, they have no seafaring tradition’ (Foster: 18); when the first Christian missionary arrives on the island he brings (ominously for Australian readers) ‘a hutch with a pair of rabbits and a faggot of blackberry brambles’ (Foster: 56). In a reversal of the famous obeisance to Queen Elizabeth II by the long-serving Australian Prime Minister, R.G. Menzies, Hamish Menzies tells of his uncle’s sighting of the German prince at the Battle of Culloden: ‘Ah did but see him ridin by but Ah shall Hate him till Ah die!’ (Foster: 77). Australian readers will understand that the story of the dispossession of the primitive people on the island of Hiphoray prefigures the pattern of dispossession of the Australian Aborigines. It also, of course, follows an archetypal pattern of Western colonization with Christian missionaries joining capitalist opportunists, and scientists following in their wake. The Australian comparison offers a further irony – the Scottish highlanders were cleared from their homes for the same reason that the Aborigines of SouthEastern Australia were dispossessed – for sheep whose wool was destined for British mills. Don Watson’s account of the highland settlers in the Gippsland district of Victoria, Caledonia Australis, attests to the novel’s accuracy in this respect. Watson reports that some highlanders even recognized the similarities between their own displacement by the English and the pattern they were now enacting on the indigenous people of Australia. What Leela Gandhi calls the ‘Caliban paradigm’ (Gandhi: 148) has created much discussion in post-colonial theory, where Caliban’s response to Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest becomes an emblem of the ambivalence of colonized peoples to English language and literature: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse’ (I, ii, 366-7). Edward Said and others have argued that English literature is deeply implicated in the British colonial enterprise, and that it forms part of the psychological armoury of colonialism. Yet, alongside the canon of nineteenth-century English literature taught in universities and schools throughout the Empire, lies a relatively neglected, subversive tradition of

The colonizer’s gift of cursing

109

satirical writing. This is the tradition of Swift, Pope, and Sterne that, despite a decline in the nineteenth century, persisted in the novels of writers such as Peacock to re-emerge in the twentieth century with practitioners such as Evelyn Waugh. If cursing is the ancient origin of satire, as Robert C. Elliott has argued in his The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, Caliban’s cursing may also offer a model for one of the most significant forms of post-colonial response to the language of the colonizers. Satire may well be the archetypal postcolonial genre: it is the colonizer’s gift of cursing. Many of the landmark postcolonial novels, particularly those of Indian writers, have been satires. The ambivalent love and hate of the colonizer’s traditions dominates Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Both these novels make their reference to literary models clear – Tharoor by explicit parody of English and Indian classics, Rushdie by reference to Sterne, The Arabian Nights and the Mahabharata. In Australia, Foster’s use of satire to ridicule white colonialism has been followed by Kim Scott’s satirical account of the colonizing of Aborigines in his prize-winning novel Benang. Of course, this kind of contemporary satire has sometimes been read as postmodernist play, unreliable as an account of political experience and evading commitment through irony. Once we recognize it as satire, then its relationship to its context becomes clear: satire operates through comic exaggeration and relies for its political force on readers’ recognition of its reference to mutual experience. Satire is not bound to report history as a set of chronological facts, nor to offer sympathy with individual characters, but can observe, quite coldly and even inconsistently, a multitude of aspects of the world. Moonlite makes the English satirical tradition part of its analysis and attack on the process of colonization, and its comic variations on one of the strands of English literature prove peculiarly suited to the dilemmas of the white colonial settler, particularly the Celt. The novel mimics the Other tradition – the English satiric and comic tradition that has mocked the pitiless rationality and greed at the heart of British colonial power. At the same time, Moonlite’s portrayal of nineteenth-century colonialism reminds us of the presence of the Other within the Greater British nation – the Celts who so often fought British imperial wars and pioneered British colonies. The Celts, particularly the Scots, have performed the roles of both victim and complicit perpetrators of the British colonial project. They are Britain’s own colonized indigenes who have taken on the colonizing task. On the island of Hiphoray, access to the wider world soon leaves the islanders starving through the loss of their grain crop and their failure to hunt the fulmar fledglings at the appropriate season. They become used to performing for the enjoyment of tourists in the summer and adapt themselves

110

Susan Lever

to the strange gifts brought to them: a saucepan makes a good helmet for climbing, a single surgical boot balances the steepness of the mountains. They continue to dispose of rubbish in the traditional way – allowing it to blow away in the wind – but their new possessions don’t decompose, and they are soon regarded as greedy, dirty, drunken, and shiftless people. The tourists lose interest. The scientists, however, want to protect the island from change – at least until anthropological study can be completed – and forbid the tourists from feeding the hungry people. Within a few years the population of adult men has diminished while the number of women and children has grown, with the old women now remaining (rather than being left to die on a nearby island) and all the children surviving birth (rather than dying at the hands of the midwife). The capitalists return with more productive sheep so that the islanders can spin and weave tweed for export, but ‘the cost of shipping the world’s worst tweed far exceeds the demand’ (Foster: 98). Those islanders who haven’t succumbed to disease and alcoholism are shipped as settlers to the New West Highlands. The story of the island’s exploitation and abandonment could be a tragedy. Instead, it is a comic satire on the destructive nature of History, where History is understood as the ideal of chronological progress that emerged from Western Enlightenment thinking. Satire traditionally takes a conservative position in the face of such Enlightenment and is often dismissed as an inherently conservative genre, despite its anarchic stylistic qualities. Satire, whether in the hands of a Roman satirist like Juvenal or an eighteenthcentury writer like Swift, tends to see History as decline rather than progress; it regards the claims of history-as-progress with great cynicism. Stephen Harris has argued that, if the civilizing process of the colonial enterprise is seen as the fulfilment of History, Moonlite uses satire as an appropriate ‘counter-discursive’ mode to attack British exploitation in its guise of colonizing success (Harris: 72). Foster’s version of history looks to generalized and repeated patterns of change, rather than specific historical achievements, and it seeks out the ironies in a process that, as he shows, colonizes a people so that they can colonize in turn. The MacEsaus of Hiphoray live in touch with a spirit-world where mythology rather than history sustains them: Malcolm Mor’s exploits are recounted as if they were recent events. The islanders have no sense of themselves as individuals, so that individual death is accepted as part of the cycle of life. The twenty male MacEsaus go by the first name of Gillie or Murdo, depending on which side of the village stream they live, and they speak with only two voices. Each year at the winter solstice, the island men climb to the top of the highest cliff and throw themselves over as a

The colonizer’s gift of cursing

111

propitiatory offering to the spirit-world, which usually provides the high wind to throw them back again. After the arrival of Christianity and alcohol, the first man dies of natural causes (as opposed to a fall from a cliff) and, only then, do they learn the mundane nature of mortality. In any modern terms, the MacEsaus are absurdly primitive and ignorant, living as they do from fowling in one of the harshest climates in the world. The novel never presents their state as utopian or romantic, but Foster imagines them enjoying a confidence in their relationship to the spirit-world and a consequent physical courage. His respect for the strange logic by which they order their lives creates a dignity for the islanders even when they are at their most ridiculous. The novel mocks them gently while ensuring that readers appreciate the beauty of their harsh island and the intelligence of their adaptation to it. Part of the humour in this section comes from the concision with which the narrative progresses. The novel begins relatively slowly with magical visual descriptions of Hiphoray and its surrounding islands. Foster provides intricate detail about the process of fowling on a cliff-face, or the kinds of birds found nesting on the stacs of the North Sea, creating a sense of timelessness. By contrast, he economizes on characterization and allows dialogue to carry the human interaction. The novel moves forward in a series of comically compressed exchanges, interspersed with the rotund sermons of the Reverend Stewart Campbell to the MacEsaus and Swiftean satirical summaries of the state of the world. As the strange child, Moonlite, moves from the island into the historical world of modern Britain, the pace of the novel increases. He becomes a comic picaresque figure stumbling from the highlands into the class-based culture of the English university. His intellectual journey from paganism to Christianity to Science to disbelief is rendered comic by his social incompetence and lack of guile. By the time he reaches the goldfields of the New West Highlands in the final section, the novel has accelerated to breakneck speed. Its satirical models are no longer those of the English eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel, but the absurdist, modernist, elliptical satire of the late twentieth century. The novel adopts a medley of styles and voices, from close descriptive observation to low comedy, from learned disquisition to slang, and the humour often comes from the disjunctions between them. Foster drafted Moonlite while living in London in 1979 where he felt particularly sensitive to the way the Scots accent sounds comic to those (including Australians) educated by the English. He admired the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid for the way that it addresses complex ideas in a broad Scots language, and he tried to manage similar kinds of conjunction in his

112

Susan Lever

novel, using both Scots and Australian idioms. At the time, he told his friend Geoffrey Dutton that he thought MacDiarmid could teach him, as an Australian, to direct his hatred and bitterness in ways to reach his fellowAustralians (Foster: 1979). Satire provided the vehicle for this hatred and bitterness to be transformed into comic art. One of the main sources of comedy in the novel is the Scots idiom and accent, as Foster plays on the trained snobbery of other English speakers. The indication of accent is possibly one of the clearest signs of the current disposition of cultural power, and the middle-class perspective of most English fiction. Most novels preserve an unmarked speech for the characters with whom the reader is asked to identify. This usually means that middleclass characters speak unaccented dialogue while any character with an accent may be read as stupid, lower class, villainous, comic or simply amusingly colourful. The Irish and the Scots have long played comic roles in English drama and fiction, but by the late nineteenth century they were joined by the comic voices of Australians, Canadians, and Americans. By the late twentieth century, Indian and Caribbean accents added to the range of possible voices offered as comic amusement for readers (Rushdie, for example, mimics varieties of Indian English for comic effect). Indeed, any character who doesn’t speak standard English risks playing the fool in fiction. In Moonlite, Foster marks every character with a peculiar idiom and sometimes an accent, though this wavers to suit the needs of the novel, especially when an opportunity for a joke presents itself. So the MacEsaus utter a gracious, archaic speech, approximating their antique Erse / Norse language, for example, Murdo MacEsau: ‘Thy people darling, desire only that thou leave for two weeks, while they finish the killing! They do not wish to catch the stranger’s cough now!’ (Foster: 26). Donald MacDuffie, a Druid from the inner islands speaks a more familiar English, possibly because he often plays the straight man to the MacEsaus: ‘I’m no leavin this cratur’s education to that Campbell! He’ll get a rounded education, on that you may depend’ (Foster: 68). Foster indulges himself in the Rev. Stewart Campbell’s hellfire sermons rendered comic not only by their extremes of sentiment but also by their down-to-earth Scottish delivery: If you display […] a strict observance o’ the moral precepts, by observin the Sabbath, eschewin luxury, embracin sobriety and resistin rebelliousness, it may well serve God’s purpose to effect a redistribution o’ wealth in your favour. (Foster: 73)

By the time Moonlite reaches the university at Newbridge, the voices become more stereotypically English, for example, Dr Murray-Grey: ‘Wasn’t out of bed myself, till I heard that Whooore! Frightful banging. Can’t sleep as I could, you know: not the man I was’ (Foster: 121). But the main focus of

The colonizer’s gift of cursing

113

university life is the dinner party, where a man learns ‘all those skills indispensable to the ruling class, though, as the very antithesis of science and religion and banned from universities since the time of Plato, scarcely able to be taught or practised openly’ (Foster: 126). While Moonlite pursues a study of optical physics, his fellow students develop their rhetorical skills, including the necessary guile and hypocrisy for success in ruling an empire. On the goldfields of the New West Highlands, Moonlite finds an Australian idiom has already developed. The coachman teaches him the accepted speech pattern: ‘Listen son: I know you mean well, but you musta come out with a boatload of Poms. Talk like that creates the wrong impression. When you want to agree with something, what you say is, Fuckin oath dead set. Got it?’ (Foster: 177) ‘Tell you what Moonlite, you’ll get on son. We need your type out here. Just listen to those whinging, whining Poms – what do they want, the Ritz? They should stay in their own bloody country. We don’t want them.’ ‘Fuckin oath dead set my dear: but don’t they own the place?’ (Foster: 178)

In the final Australian section the repertoire of accents expands to the Dutchman Clogwog, the Aborigine Sunbeam and the Chinese Ar Wat, though, by this time, Moonlite has quite a repertoire of his own: ‘What is this? Last night you’re Scots, today you’re English, what tomorrow you are?’ (Foster: 174-5). In the confused life of the goldfields, a cacophony of voices clamour to be heard, and both Moonlite’s voice and that of the narrator increasingly adopt an Australian vernacular. Foster frequently omits the attribution for dialogue making the novel read, at times, like a script for The Goons: ‘[…] if you’re so bloody touchy, why wear the bone through your shnoz?’ ‘Listen mate: if I could take’m out, I would. But I’m stuck with’m see? Now then: feel anything yet?’ ‘How do you mean.’ ‘The cocoa mate. All right, I can’t tell a lie now, this fella mountain, he sacred to the Rainbow Fella, what we call’m “Wawa.”’ ‘You havin a go at me Sunbeam?’ ‘No mate, honest. Full of Love and Truth.’ ‘It must be the cocoa working.’

When Moonlite meets Sunbeam, they discover the similarities in their pagan pasts. Moonlite recognizes that Sunbeam’s stories of the Host parallel the Wawa from the Hiphoray saga. Sunbeam clearly belongs to Hiphoray’s Land of the Dark Fairy. When Sunbeam tries to purify Moonlite’s soul in an Aboriginal ceremony, Moonlite baulks at the sight of his own body and his spirit flies away forever. This finally qualifies him to become a New West Highland politician.

114

Susan Lever

‘We gonna kill you mate, bring you back more clever!’ ‘Fuck that for a joke Sunbeam!’ ‘No joke mate – dead set. We gonna kill you, that’s for sure. Whether you come back or not, up to you. Not frightened are you mate?’ ‘Wait a minute wait a minute – you’re talking about a ritual right? Token dab of water spot of wine and wafer – I have to pretend I’m dead to my old ways.’ ‘Yeah moreless. The Rainbow Fella’s gonna rip you apart, take out your gizzards, clean an dry’m, then stuff’m back with a quartz crystal. Now how about tucker? The boys don’t hunt anymore, but every night before supper, they smear themselves with turpentine, just to work up an appetite like.’ (Foster: 213)

By the novel’s end, Moonlite is both dead and alive. Without a soul he is perfectly suited to be Premier of the New West Highlands and he finds the secret to ‘electoral life’ in a policy of adapting to the will of the people: ‘To gain power, by whatever means necessary – and having gained power, to retain it! Forever and ever!’ (Foster: 219). Though he is stabbed by a Chinese for the treachery that will be the White Australia policy, Moonlite lives on in a kind of life in death. In the last chapter we see him entering a horse-drawn vehicle that hurtles over the Australian / New West Highland countryside until it reaches a cliff. At this point the narrator loses patience and intrudes with a final imprecation to the New West Highlands: Thou wast, from Thy beginning, a City of Refuge, victim and instrument of Unjust Law; yet clingest Thou, terrified, to the Old way, worshipping The Travesty at two removes […] Climb or Let Go! Thou hast had Time Enough, and the patience of Thy Father is exhausted. (Foster: 223)

The source of Foster’s ‘hatred and bitterness,’ then, is not so much the history of British colonization as the second-hand nature of Australian culture and its continuing obeisance to Britain. His anger, finally, is directed at the greed and mediocrity of white Australians who not only accept the materialist imperative of British colonization but also indulge themselves in nostalgia for English life and traditions. For every element of nostalgia for England, Foster finds an alternative: The spires of Newbridge on a summer’s evening, seen from the banks of the river, golden barley under grey skies, breeze in wych elm, wigwam of red-flowered runner beans, cry of cock pheasant, smell of wet hay, delphiniums![…] [B]ig-beaked charladies drooling over gaspers, phlegm-flecked sidewalks, riddled with dogshit, rising damp, stewed tea, complacent contumely, bad teeth. (Foster: 194)

This may seem more unpleasant than funny, and the novel’s comic power comes from the energy of its anger, rather than some good-natured mockery. Yet, like all fictions in English, it is caught within the language and traditions of the colonial Mother country. Rather than throw off English traditions, or even parody them as Tharoor does in The Great Indian Novel, Foster

The colonizer’s gift of cursing

115

demonstrates that forms of English satire can combat the nostalgic dreams promoted by English triumphalism. In eighteenth-century models he finds the corrective counter to the propaganda of British colonialism. The destruction of life on islands like Hiphoray as part of the highland clearances was brutal, but the Scots highlander lives on in British culture as an amusing fellow with a brogue. While Foster finds his Scots characters amusing, he refuses to sentimentalize their history, nor ignore Scottish complicity with English greed. He rewrites English satirical traditions with an Australian larrikin energy of resistance and humour. At the same time, he loses patience with the complacent Australian mimicry of English forms and English dreams. Moonlite presents a settler-society perspective on colonialism and frolics among the complex ironies of history where the victims of colonization become ruthless colonists, forgetful of their own experiences. At the same time, it looks to the intellectual source of these developments and recognizes that an individualist Christianity sets the conditions for a rational science that precludes the spiritual as irrational and absurd. On Hiphoray, the people see no reason for one idea excluding another, but Christianity demands a rejection of the Spirit Host. At Newbridge, Moonlite discovers that even optical physics requires the acceptance of paradox. In the New West Highlands, Christianity has given Sunbeam a way to avoid death from his fellow spirit men, but he can cheerfully abandon it once the danger is past. As Ar Wat puts it: ‘Gotta holda two views at once. The Tlute is not this, is not that – is a combination’ (Foster: 198). All of Foster’s writing seeks paradoxes of this kind. Here he suggests that pre-Christian beliefs, like those of pagan Celts and Aborigines might coexist with Christianity to provide an alternative to the materialist secularism of Australia. Moonlite shows how the colonizing energy of an imperial power like Britain can not only destroy the material wellbeing of the colonized but also deprive them of any spiritual consolation outside an exclusive and rational Christianity. The novel attacks both the colonial enterprise itself and the intellectual confidence in a rational and materialist world at its source. That materialism continues in the postcolonial experience of settler-societies such as Australia. In these terms, colonialism is not simply the process by which one nation overtakes and profits from another, nor even the imposition of one culture on another, but an intellectual shift bound up with Christian individualism and capitalism, the economic system that accompanies it. A scientific materialism that argues its way out of all spiritual belief inevitably follows, so that Moonlite can ultimately lose his soul in the utterly secular society of the New West Highlands. The clear divisions between the colonized and colonizer, familiar to much postcolonial theory, must be blurred in this process as

116

Susan Lever

individuals of all sorts are caught up in it – Scottish islander, Jew, Dutchman, Aborigine, and Chinese. Moonlite offers a more complex account of colonialism than the simple colonizer / colonized dichotomy. The source of its humour lies in the multiple ironies of history, where the colonized colonize in turn. Despite the tragedy of loss and displacement, the novel suggests that the process has a degree of inherent silliness as settler-societies, like Australia, mimic and admire the patterns of the colonizing society that has exploited them.

Bibliography Elliott, Robert C. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1960. Foster, David. Moonlite. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981. –––. ‘Letter to Geoffrey Dutton.’ 7 Apr. 1979. Geoffrey Dutton Papers, NLA, MS 7285, Series 2, Box 14, Folder 104. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Harris, Stephen. ‘David Foster’s Moonlite: Re-viewing History as Satirical Fable – Towards a Post-Colonial Past.’ Westerly 42.1 (1997): 71-88. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, 1981. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Scott, Kim. Benang. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999. Tharoor, Shashi. The Great Indian Novel. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. Watson, Don. Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia. Sydney: Collins, 1984.

MICHAEL MEYER

Swift and Sterne revisited Postcolonial parodies in Rushdie and Singh-Toor

S

ome contemporary postcolonial authors hark back to the heyday of English laughter in the eighteenth century for reasons of the political and cultural negotiation of Englishness. Matthew Singh-Toor’s ‘Samhadrarow and the Partial Exchange’ takes recourse to the satiric techniques of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in order to castigate the role of Britain in the global economy. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Yorick’ rewrites Hamlet in a farcical and humorous way following Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in order to question the use of English cultural heritage.1 An analysis of these postcolonial parodies of English literary classics runs the risk of falling under the verdict of Frank Schulze-Engler, who has alerted us to the danger that a traditional concept of intertextuality narrows down our research to philological relationships within the Western canon to the detriment of truly cross-cultural issues (6). In our case, however, the question is to which extent

1

I would like to express my gratitude to Anja Müller-Muth, who provided me with valuable comments on this text. I refrain from a digression on the possible function of elective affinities regarding the dialogic vision due to the dual cultural heritage of both Swift and Sterne, who were born in Ireland of English parents, and Salman Rushdie and Matthew Singh-Toor, who are of ‘South Asian’ descent but live in Great Britain and the United States respectively. It may be questionable to see these cosmopolitan writers as postcolonial due to their residence and appreciation in the West. However, Elleke Boehmer argues, now ‘the generic postcolonial writer is more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an ‘extra-territorial,’ than a national’ (233). She continues that birth, topics, and cultural and political interests affiliate these writers with non-Western cultures. I would add that their dual cultural heritage may give them privileged insight into different worlds but places them in-between divergent cultures.

118

Michael Meyer

the ‘Western’ critic is able to acquire a sufficient, let alone a thorough, understanding of ‘Eastern’ laughter? For our stories in question, a fundamental insight of an American Professor in India leads the way to the minimal requirement for understanding postcolonial parody; Lee Siegel almost despaired of finding evidence of contemporary Indian laughter until he encountered it unexpectedly: ‘[T]here was, in fact, laughter in the streets – people were laughing at me’ (430). The situation of the postcolonial ‘Other,’ who laughs at ‘us’ (neo-colonial) Westerners, ties in very well with Michail M. Bakhtin’s remarks about parody as the laughing double, like king and jester (316), who looks with ‘Other’ eyes on the style and ideology of the dominant discourse, which is represented in inverse refraction (318-9). According to Bakhtin, parody juxtaposes the decentring forces of multiplicity between and within discourses against a centralizing power, and exposes the dialogic hybridity of styles and discourses, which is related to the struggle between cultures (324, 331, 337). The satiric mode of the parodies in question requires additional specifications. Singh-Toor’s and Rushdie’s satire, I would argue, following Wolfgang Weiß, not only complements the ‘original’ with an alternative world according to Bakhtin, but also aggressively attacks doubtful norms and a repressive order (246). What happens when Singh-Toor and Rushdie parody eighteenth-century satiric parodies?2 To simplify, the rewriting of eighteenth-century English satires, such as Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy, is attractive to these postcolonial writers because these texts often ridicule the subversion of reason and moral ideals by the passions of the body within British culture, revealing an internal split, which the colonial discourse externalizes and projects upon the relationship between white civilized European minds and barbarian bodies of other races and cultures. In our examples, postcolonial rewriting implicitly superimposes satiric images on ideals of Englishness, which still presume superiority at least due to global economic power and a dominant cultural heritage. Singh-Toor and Rushdie in part acknowledge these assets, and their parodies endorse the importance of their models. However, they do not just repeat but appropriate eighteenth-century English satire and double the satiric mirror and laughter from the fringes of both East and West:3 Both Swift and Sterne assume an ambiguous attitude towards

2

3

It has been suggested that Gulliver’s Travels may be regarded as a parody of a travelogue and a satire on the traveller (Seidel: 84-6; Turner: xv). Tristram Shandy has been categorized as the parody of a novel in a satiric mode (New: 28-45; Pfister: 3, 29, 32-4; Sherbert: 2-7). The distance to these – in the wider sense – enlightened norms marks the difference between postcolonial writers and eighteenth-century black writers, such as Gronniosaw and Equiano, who also criticized the English with the help of their Eurocentric ideals but, at least implicitly, claimed to be superior to them.

Swift and Sterne revisited

119

their narrators, who become the subjects and objects of ridicule, and question dominant concepts, such as enlightened reason as an absolute value or association as a model for mental processes. Postcolonial parodies pick up Swift’s and Sterne’s equivocal stance towards their narrators or protagonists and distance themselves in an ironic fashion from the satiric norms which underlie the critique of mistaken ideals and moral deviations. Singh-Toor and Rushdie do not establish ‘Other’ norms because they do not presume to represent incontestable moral authorities. Singh-Toor’s title ‘Samhadrarow and the Partial Exchange’ addresses the asymmetry between the Western wealth generated from global trade and the comparative poverty among the masses of so-called developing countries. Singh-Toor transforms the first-person narrative of Gulliver’s Travels into a third-person narrative and contrasts an Englishman’s experience of India with an Indian boy’s journey to England. The Indian’s impression of the English, who are distorted according to his fantastic shrinking and growth along the lines of Gulliver’s experience in Brobdingnag and Lilliput, inverts the Englishman’s rather negative experience of India. In comparison, the Englishman’s subjective and at times surreal perspective is as strange as that of the Indian boy but more ridiculous due to the incongruity between his own assumptions of the English and that of the Indian, which is conveyed in the second part of the story. Gulliver travels to the East and the West Indies for economic and intellectual profit, but fortune foils his attempt to substantially increase his position (Swift: 3-4, 299-301), and his own blindness limits his insight into himself and his culture. Singh-Toor’s complacent contemporary traveller Marcus is neither seriously interested in economic gain nor even in personal benefit, traditional goals that dwindle into the mere consumption of exotic items, such as an Elephant ride, a mantra, a visit to the Taj Mahal, etc. Both Swift’s and Singh-Toor’s satires ridicule incongruities between the traveller’s high self-esteem and base existence as they juxtapose his grotesque body and his assumption of superiority over others, his ordinary behaviour and his elevated moral ideals. In the exchange of perspectives, the traveller also becomes an object of curiosity and laughter (Swift: 12, 17, 20, 28, 50-1, 87). Among strangers in a hot climate, both Gulliver and Marcus are primarily identified by their bodily existence and basic needs, such as food, drink, clothes, sweat, and defecation. Due to Gulliver’s enormous size among the Lilliputians, each of his needs becomes an inordinate or gross public spectacle. Gulliver’s assumed affiliation with the hyperrational horses receives a severe blow when a female Yahoo approaches him with sexual

120

Michael Meyer

interests, identifying him as belonging to her kind.4 Gulliver’s initial reticence to look into a mirror gauges his resistance to this shock of recognition, but he still assumes an air of superiority towards the irrational English, maintaining at the same time that he detests people who are proud in spite of their faults (Swift: 301-5). Gulliver may castigate rapacious and brutal colonialism but endorses the British expansion due to its missionary zeal, which espouses virtue, religion, justice, wisdom, order and happiness (Swift: 303). In a similar way, Singh-Toor’s English traveller, who indulges in clichés of English culture and superiority, is confronted with his body, with the exception of the sexual dimension and misogynist tendency of his predecessor. The lumbering traveller Marcus ‘has lost weight: fat shat away with chillies and dhal. His bones are long and clumsy, his flesh slack and white. He wears Bermuda shorts and a tie-dyed shirt from Puri. His hair is blond and straggly. He is sweating’ (Singh-Toor: 173) and his mere appearance raises an Indian boy’s laughter. In spite of his loss of weight, Marcus feels like a well-fed animal in comparison to an emaciated Indian boy: ‘The thick white neck rising from broad white back and shoulders. Like a sweaty ox. It should be pulling a cart’ (Singh-Toor: 177). Marcus basically shares Gulliver’s colonial attitude when he consumes India like a box of chocolates (Singh-Toor: 174), indulging in the highlights of touristy pleasures. However, rather than his famous predecessor’s sense of gratitude for services procured by his hosts, Marcus’s turn to charity on 26 December is motivated by his nostalgic yearning for Christmas in England, by being fed up with India, and by a sense of superiority: ‘Time to help. They need help’ (Singh-Toor: 175). Thus, Marcus’s ‘Good Work’ (Singh-Toor: 175) may be put in ironic quotation marks in opposition to the serious Christian norms of Swift’s satire. The helpless traveller’s lack of serious concern for those who are in need of help is revealed in his encounter with a beggar boy, whose ‘epileptic’ fit triggers off Marcus’s escapist daydream with a focus on himself. Marcus already tried to avoid any contact with the laughing boy, who accosted him with a little spiel in order to obtain ‘baksheesh.’ The ambiguity of the boy’s laughter is dissolved as soon as the foreigner realizes that the boy’s fit is not a bout of disease but a fit of laughter at the funny Englishman, whose forced laugh in return differs from the reader’s comic relief and siding with the subversive subaltern against the traveller’s pretension to superiority: ‘The boy is a beggar. He has been saved from the 4

Laura Brown points out that Swift may have targeted racist attitudes by revealing similarities between Gulliver and the female Yahoo, whose appearance resembles racist stereotypes of Africans (136-7). For the sake of brevity, I cannot go into detail about Gulliver’s changes during his four journeys.

Swift and Sterne revisited

121

street to work at the nursery. But he is still a beggar, and has the gall to laugh at an English man. That is how they are’ (Singh-Toor: 178). The traveller, who enjoyed the attractions of India on a shoestring, projects ingratitude onto the poor Indian. Instead of gaining insight into his own shortcomings or showing the proverbial good English sense of humour, the offended traveller retaliates: ‘He laughs in return, with a sickly grimace, and takes a photo’ (Singh-Toor: 178). The traveller’s photograph, which silences the sound of laughter, misrepresents the boy as a weak victim lying in the dust in order to recreate English superiority.5 This strategy in defence of the alleged hierarchy of the self over the Other recalls the giant sages’ reduction of Gulliver, who claims to be a human being of equal worth, to a helpless ‘Lusus Naturæ’ (Swift: 95), who could not survive on his own. Swift’s would-be scientists are unable to understand that Gulliver is perfectly adapted to fend his way in his world. These satires expose the blind and presumptuous claim to superiority in the face of blatant shortcomings. Whereas Gulliver becomes the subject and the object of the satire, Marcus is reduced to being the butt of the joke. Singh-Toor splits the dialogic tension within Gulliver’s first-person perspective into the ironic distance between narrator and character, and reverses the journey to India in a surreal way because the Indian boy on Marcus’s photograph, which is used for a charity letter, escapes from the picture in black and white and explores an English home after Christmas dinner at night. Singh-Toor telescopes and inverts Gulliver’s travels to Brobdingnag and Lilliput. The boy’s magic change in size stresses the subjective turn in his perspective rather than a change of real worlds in the pre-text. The intended effect of reducing the Indian boy to a helpless object of charity is ironically reversed by the literally diminutive boy’s gaze at the big and ugly Englishman, who has fallen asleep in front of his television set. The magnified perception of the other renders his or her body grotesque, as Gulliver reports from his own experience of the giants in Brobdingnag and that of a Lilliputian concerning Gulliver (Swift: 82-3). Singh-Toor transforms Swift’s distribution of agency and perspective of a scene in which a giant farmer scrutinizes Gulliver by blowing his hair off his face and peeking beneath the lapels of his coat (Swift: 78). In England, the boy creeps up the snoring giant but is hurled down by a cough, a ‘hurricane’ (Singh-Toor 184) of foul breath, which ‘roars against him, blows his lungi up against his chest, and throws him head-over-heels back onto the Afghan rug’ (Singh-Toor: 184). The Indian boy is as appalled by huge morsels of meat and bread as 5

This reading takes into account Hobbes’s deprecating definition of laughter that is caused by a misplaced sense of superiority: ‘Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER’ (38).

122

Michael Meyer

Gulliver in Brobdingnag (Swift: 80, 97), but here, the satire of the magnifying glass is enhanced due to the opposition between Marcus’ disgust with fresh Indian sweets and Samhadrarow’s nausea because of rotting leftovers from Christmas dinner. The juxtaposition of surfeit and charity belies Marcus’s nostalgia for Christmas and exposes its degeneration to an excess of consumption, which merely repeats Marcus’s behaviour in India. Far from merely reiterating Swift’s satiric critique of the opposition between moral norms and deviant reality, Singh-Toor condemns charity as an institution which complements and thereby sustains the unjust exchange in global capitalism. The Indian boy discovers the words ‘SAVE THE CHIL’ (SinghToor: 181) on the letter and ‘MADE IN IND’ (Singh-Toor: 184) on a label from the man’s dressing gown, revealing the connection between poverty, charity, cheap labour and inexpensive consumer goods. As an alternative to charity for the ‘helpless,’ Singh-Toor presents a rebellion by those who help themselves. Upon his sudden growth to giant size, which liberates the boy from his image, his insight into his superiority makes him laugh in Hobbesian fashion at a diminutive England. However, the artificial cause of this change in perspective recalls the boy’s material position, his initial ridicule of the Englishman, and Hobbes’s reservation about superior laughter by those ‘who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men’ (38). The magic change of size from the small frame of the photo was triggered by another medium, his memory of a Bollywood movie, which aggrandizes Indians in an escapist way: a quasi-divine rich Indian lover follows her beloved one to England, where they indulge in luxury and where she entices him into an embrace, upon which the Indian audience protests and Samhadrarow wakes up as a giant. It is open to speculation whether the illusion of glamorous Indians or a luxurious England or the Indian protest against the ‘Western’ display of affection on screen triggered his growing aversion against his image in England. The burning of the charity letter suddenly ignites fire in the streets, burns Indian items, such as teak chests, silver bangles and cotton blouses, and finally blasts all over England. It would be wrong to identify with Samhadrarow’s Schadenfreude and take the ‘cleansing’ fire as an image of justified satiric aggression against neocolonial capitalism because the Indian’s nostalgia for home, his indulgence in escapist illusion, and the misguided assumption that his condescending gaze conveys an adequate knowledge of the English (Singh-Toor: 186-7) simply reverse their attitude. Thus, Singh-Toor achieves two purposes: First, he points out the limitations of the inherited satiric formula because he reveals that the neo-classical opposition between the satiric ridicule of malpractice and its correction according to a mutual norm can no longer be maintained because the norms

Swift and Sterne revisited

123

themselves are questionable and the correctives complement rather than oppose the problems that they should solve. Second, he parodies both Gulliver’s Travels and the repetitive postcolonial strategy of writing back, maintaining an ironic distance towards the condescending perspectives of the West and the East upon each other without giving up his political critique of the partial economic exchange. In contrast to Singh-Toor’s targeting of politics and economics, Salman Rushdie’s short story ‘Yorick’ foregrounds a satiric Sternesque play with icons of Western culture, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and psychoanalytic criticism. The first-person narrator establishes his identity in a farcical genealogy of literary fools – which Sterne prefigured – as a descendant of the King Hamlet’s jester and in a more oblique way Tristram Shandy’s parson Yorick. Rushdie brings Shakespeare’s Yorick, who is only mentioned in Hamlet’s retrospect, back to life as a character, and draws on Sterne’s Yorick for the characterization of his narrator, which is our concern at present. Sterne follows the Shakespearean tradition of the fool when he gives his parson Yorick the double role of moral authority and entertainer, who figures as the subject and the object of ridicule (New: 34). Sterne’s Yorick, coming close to Don Quixote and riding a mare that recalls Rosinante (Sterne: 1.10.47, 51), is very much aware of the serious human constraints of time and death (New: 29) but prefers to deal with life by wit rather than by an affectation of gravity (Sterne: 1.11.55). Rushdie’s narrator does not inherit Yorick’s innocence but his disrespect for whoever ‘was the Hero of the piece’ (Sterne: 1.11.56) and his love of cock and bull stories (Sterne: 9.33.615, Rushdie: 83), characteristics which result in his farcical retelling of Hamlet. However, Rushdie’s narrator reminds us of more than Yorick’s playful wit because he also shares Tristram’s chaotic logorrhoea and Walter Shandy’s confusing theories.6 Rushdie’s narrator presents himself as a philologist cum story-teller, who, with the help of Yorick’s saga on a vellum in his possession, promises the sensational discovery of the reason why Shakespeare’s ‘morbid prince seems unaware of his own father’s real name’ (64), which is Horwendillus according to Saxo Grammaticus. In order to convey his insight, the mockscientific narrator intends ‘not merely to abbreviate, but, in addition, to explicate, annotate, hyphenate, palatinate & permanganate […the] narrative 6

Elsewhere, Rushdie claims that he consciously used the form of the clown-narrator of the Indian oral tradition, whose extravagant technique is marked by digression, circularity and intertextuality. In his novel Midnight’s Children, Rushdie maintains, Laurence Sterne was less of an influence than the Indian story-teller (in Ashcroft: 183-4). The short story under analysis explicitly refers to Sterne’s narrator. However, the parallel technique of these different narrative traditions is astonishing.

124

Michael Meyer

that richly rewards the scholar who is competent to apply such sensitive technologies’ (Rushdie: 64). Rushdie follows Sterne’s parody of witty and self-conscious learned discourse (Sherbert: 17) in the tradition of the ‘Menippean satire […which] attacks moral or aesthetic constraints by praising and, indeed, practising the improper and exuberant forms of wit that the learned deem as false’ (Sherbert: 2). Eighteenth-century satire parodied the elaborate discussion of manuscripts and the speculation on obscure passages and lacunae (Sherbert: 29). In particular, Sherbert mentions, Menippean satire cleverly defied witty attempts to explain psychology and literary experience in a highly self-conscious or double-voiced discourse (23), which corresponds to Rushdie’s parody of a psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet by partly transforming a repressed oedipal fantasy into a farce of literal events. Thus, Rushdie transforms the ‘modern’ sublimation of sexuality in Hamlet and Tristram Shandy back into violent desire and bodily action. Psychoanalysis offers itself to parody, the revelation of what was hidden or excluded (Bakhtin: 313-4), because its strategy is basically the same, and, even according to its own proponents, sometimes comes close to the absurd.7 Lacan, for example, condemns the ‘sort of hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of’ (20), such as the attention given to names (a fact that Sterne and Rushdie ridicule as well): ‘I’m just surprised that nobody’s pointed out that Ophelia is O phallos’ (20). However, he himself suggests a similar argument when he states that Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia as a woman corresponds to the loss of his object, which is ‘the equivalent of, assumes the place of, indeed is – the phallus [...] Ophelia is at this point the phallus, exteriorized and rejected by the subject as a symbol signifying life’ (Lacan: 23). It almost seems as if the psychoanalytic criticism of Hamlet, Lacan’s not excepted, at times ‘on its usual course of leaving things in a state of fuzzy confusion’ (Lacan: 42), involuntarily parodies the enigmatic play with signifiers it attributes to the tragic clown Hamlet (Lacan: 33-4). Rushdie relies on the readers’ familiarity with Hamlet and psychoanalysis because he invokes and suspends their knowledge, inviting the reader’s ‘deep’ reading of the tragedy, which he rewrites as a tragicomic farce that belies its serious interpretation.8 7

8

Valeria Wagner would extend the critique to the methods of other contemporary critics of Hamlet, who conceive of ‘their reading as the possibility of substituting’ (137) what is there for what is not there and vice versa. From the beginning, Sigmund Freud’s oedipal paradigm of Hamlet as a displaced version of the child’s incestual phantasy became as influential as it was contested (Freud 267-8). Freud rejects the arguments of melancholy or inordinate reflection as reasons for Hamlet’s procrastination of his revenge on his uncle Claudius. Instead, Freud argues, Hamlet hesitates to kill Claudius because his uncle fulfilled his own incestuous desire to murder his father for his mother’s love and therefore mirrors his own guilt (269).

Swift and Sterne revisited

125

At first, the narrator calls attention to the important meaning of names in true Shandean fashion because the prince’s calling his father’s ghost by the name of Hamlet instead of Horwendillus is ‘no mistake whatsoever, but rather the cryptic key’ (Rushdie: 65) to the true meaning of the play, i.e. a Freudian slip. The psychoanalytic narrator locates the origin of the problem in Hamlet’s childhood and explains his adult behaviour as a return of the repressed. Rushdie takes his cue from Hamlet’s nostalgia for his father’s jester in order to lead the reader back into Hamlet’s childhood which, however, appears to be very different from Hamlet’s sentimental memory of the fool because Rushdie’s young prince Hamlet tyrannizes Yorick as if he was a slave. Rushdie doubles the oedipal drama but rewrites the Shakespearean pattern of a comic sub-plot among lower-class characters, which mirrors the main plot, into a ludicrous sequence of a farcical and a tragic plot. The narrator suggests an ambiguous relationship of love and hate between Hamlet and Yorick, his father figure, and his beautiful young wife Ophelia. The seven-year-old tyrant Hamlet rides and whips his Shandean hobby-horse Yorick and hates Ophelia, whom he desires, emotions Hamlet transfers to her younger namesake. Rushdie parodies Shakespeare as well as psychoanalysis when he transforms metaphorical discourse into literal action. He retraces Hamlet’s enigmatic remarks towards ludicrous childhood experience. Hamlet’s statement that something ‘is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (Shakespeare: 1.4.65) after the appearance of his father’s ghost now refers to Ophelia’s overpowering foul breath (Rushdie: 66). Likewise, Hamlet’s oedipal passions are explained by his rage against his father, who severely beat him because the boy, who waited for his mother’s good-night kiss, mistook his parents’ sexual intercourse for a violation of his mother and tried to stop his father in order to save her. Hamlet’s ridiculous mistake, however, leads – via the beating – to serious consequences. He kills Polonius, who hides behind the same arras as the boy did when he witnessed his parents’ copulation. The murder of Polonius appears as an attempt to erase or repress his oedipal trauma. Next, he insinuates that his father Horwendillus has an affair with Yorick’s wife Ophelia, makes Yorick jealous and kill his father, whereupon Claudius has Yorick executed, which the prince condemns as a camouflage for his uncle’s murder of the king. Hamlet, ‘in his motherloving passion’ (Rushdie: 82), envisions the ghost of jealousy, which he calls by his own name, ‘by which the prince, the accuser, is accused’ (Rushdie: 82). According to an intriguing psychoanalytic logic, Rushdie converts Shakespeare’s change of the father’s name from Horwendillus to Hamlet into a psychosexual drama, which, however, he transforms into farcical events that foreground grotesquely smelling, puking, copulating, and urinating bodies. Rather than the displaced passions Freud perceives in the refined

126

Michael Meyer

Hamlet (Freud: 267-9), Rushdie gets down to basics, the ‘tyranny, even over queens, of natural functions’ (Rushdie: 71). The satiric effect of the romping story is compounded by the Sternesque narrator’s discourse, a self-conscious and ridiculous theatrical performance, which appeals to the reader as a co-performer in the text as a script (Pfister: 5, 42). The witty and highly self-conscious narrator plays with words, interrupts himself, questions the reliability of his received story (Rushdie: 67) and offers tentative interpretations of characters’ motivations. He shortens the story because of its ‘most lamentable lack of brevity’ (Rushdie: 71) but, because of his own garrulity, has to rush his characters ‘through DumbShows, tableaux, and other acceleratory devices quite unsuited to the story’s tragic contents’ (Rushdie: 74) so that his own ‘long-winded Folly must make these ancients Fools’ (Rushdie: 75). As in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the narrator improvises like ‘a comedian or professional fool’ (Pfister: 43), plays games with the readers and frustrates their expectations (Pfister: 44), and invites readers to a creative collaboration (Ostovich: 155-6). He exposes the gap between reality and its representation, Shakespeare’s version of Hamlet and his own. He invites the readers’ reflection on the representation of absence, mocking literary theory by referring to the absence of a kiss and of sleep, and on the representation of time as he asks readers to pass their time while he is humming a tune and Gertrude is in mourning for many years (Rushdie: 80-1). As a story-teller, the narrator reacts to his listeners’ (implied or anticipated) interventions upon deviations from Shakespeare, such as the omission of soliloquies or the introduction of Yorick’s wife Ophelia: ‘What’s this? Interruptions already?’ (Rushdie: 65). He asks for his listeners’ opinion about the boy’s hate for Ophelia, invites them to imagine Hamlet’s outrageous nightmares of jealousy and his plotting of revenge, and after having delineated these, congratulates them in an ironic way: ‘Your fancy, from which all these dark suppositions have issued (for I began this passage by swearing myself to silence), is proved by them more fertile & convincing than my own’ (Rushdie: 78). Finally, he juxtaposes his alternative version to that of Shakespeare and appeals to the readers’ tolerance: ‘[L]et the versions of the story coexist, for there’s no need to choose’ (Rushdie: 81). This statement seems to conclude the subversion of the canonical text along with its institutionalized reading practice, which Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin identify as a major strategy of writing back (189). However, it would be naïve to assume that Rushdie places his short story on the same literary and cultural level as Shakespeare’s tragedy: after all, the narrator is a learned fool, who assumes an ironic distance towards his own position as a coloured ‘humble AUTHOR’ (Rushdie: 83) in a line of Yorick’s with a fancy for witty nonsense, a fact that we can read as Rushdie’s joke

Swift and Sterne revisited

127

about himself and literary creativity in the realm of intertextuality, which, of course, characterizes Hamlet and Tristram Shandy as well. Rushdie’s story belongs to the modern tradition of parody and travesty, which resists the serious reflection and overreading of Hamlet (Schwarzer: 212). Rather than undermining the tragedy itself, Rushdie ridicules its exaggerated glorification as an epitome of English culture with universal significance, as it is claimed, for example, by Robert Barrie: ‘Hamlet is, after all, the greatest play by the greatest play-wright who ever lived, perhaps the single most sacred icon in the entire canon of English, if not world, literature’ (90-1). ‘Yorick’ rather presents a carnivalesque than a subversive complement to the tragedy, which parodies psychoanalytical readings by transforming their deep analysis of this highly philosophical play into low physical comedy. Psychoanalysis, one of the most pervasive Western paradigms of interpretation, comes under attack because of its Shandean building of systems, which sometimes tend to complicate rather than to explicate problems, and always seems to get back to human passions, especially sexuality, as a displaced motive of every activity. In particular, Rushdie insinuates that psychoanalytic critics have ridden their hobby-horse Hamlet to death. Besides the general ridicule of contemporary cultural icons, Rushdie introduces a more directly postcolonial and political edge in the frame of the story. At the beginning, Rushdie alludes to the burning of his Satanic Verses when the narrator digresses on the pleasure men take in destroying texts ‘through the use of kitchen scissors or strong teeth, by actions incendiary or lavatorial’ (63). At the end, the coloured narrator places himself in a genealogy of fools, among whom Sterne’s naïve Yorick becomes a victim of revenge by those whom he offended with his frank and witty jests (Sterne: 1.12.56-9). Here, Rushdie parenthetically ridicules his opponents as well as his own innocent underestimation of the political impact of his provocative Satanic Verses. His Sternesque rewriting of Hamlet and the allusion to himself as a fool, who came under attack from Muslim critics, place Rushdie at the fringes of both cultures. Singh-Toor’s and Rushdie’s dialogic parodies of eighteenth-century satires challenge English presumptuousness by implicitly questioning the ‘universal’ values of their models and by explicitly exposing the incongruity between the veneer of sophistication and the vulgarity of grotesque bodies. While Singh-Toor attacks the relationship between English global trading profits and the call for charity, Rushdie is mocking the glorification of the English cultural heritage. Their parodies share a long tradition in postcolonial writing, namely the subversive strategies of the imperfect imitation or the disrespectful rewriting of canonical texts by authors such as Shakespeare, Defoe, Kipling, and Conrad (Boehmer: 171-5, 204-6): ‘[T]he postcolonial

128

Michael Meyer

writer flamboyantly crosses, fragments, and parodies different narrative styles and perspectives’ (Boehmer: 206). Singh-Toor’s and Rushdie’s use of satires as models redoubles the subversive tradition. They multiply echoes of laughter from past voices by ridiculing both present ‘vices’ and the basis of the satirical critique, the specious claim to superiority based on moral norms and the discourse of reason.

Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Barrie, Robert. ‘Telmahs: Carnival Laughter in Hamlet.’ New Essays on Hamlet. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. New York: AMS Press, 1994. 83-102. Bakhtin, Michail M. ‘Aus der Vorgeschichte des Romanwortes.’ Die Ästhetik des Wortes. Ed. Rainer Grübel. Trans. Rainer Grübel and Sabine Reese. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1979. 301-37. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Brown, Laura. ‘Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift.’ Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift. Ed. Frank Palmeri. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993. 121-42. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford: OUP, 1996. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Ed. Vincent Caretta. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung. Psychologische Schriften, Studienausgabe II. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1994. Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw James Albert. ‘A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself.’ 1772. Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Schomburg Library, 2000. 1-34. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. J.C.A. Gaskin. Oxford: OUP, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.’ Literature and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Shoshana Feldman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 11-52. New, Melvyn. Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Swift and Sterne revisited

129

Ostovich, Helen. ‘Reader as Hobby-Horse in Tristram Shandy.’ Tristram Shandy: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Melvyn New. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992. 155-73. Pfister, Manfred. Laurence Sterne. Tavistock: Northcote, 2001. Rushdie, Salman. ‘Yorick.’ East, West. London: Vintage, 1995. 63-83. Schulze-Engler, Frank. ‘Cross-Cultural Criticism and the Limits of Intertextuality.’ Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English. Cross/Cultures. Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 32. Ed. Wolfgang Klooss. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 3-20. Schwarzer, Bert. Hamlet liest Hamlet: Produktive Rezeption eines weltliterarischen Schlüsseltextes in der Moderne. Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1992. Seidel, Michael. ‘Strange Dispositions: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.’ Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift. Ed. Frank Palmeri. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993. 75-90. Sherbert, Garry. Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of SelfConsciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne. New York: Lang, 1996. Siegel, Lee. Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Singh-Toor, Matthew. ‘Samhadrarow and the Partial Exchange.’ Many Voices, Many Cultures: Multicultural British Short Stories. Ed. Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. 173-88. Sterne, Laurence. The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759-1767. Ed. Graham Petrie. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726. Ed. Paul Turner. Oxford: OUP, 1986. Turner, Paul. Introduction. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Ed. Paul Turner. Oxford and New York: OUP, 1986. ix-xxviii. Wagner, Valeria. ‘Losing the Name of Action.’ New Essays on Hamlet. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. New York: AMS Press, 1994. 135-52. Weiß, Wolfgang. ‘Satirische Dialogizität und satirische Intertextualität.’ Intertextualität: Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Ed. Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985. 244-61.

This page intentionally left blank

DETLEF GOHRBANDT

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline Ronald Searle’s critique of postwar Englishness in The Rake’s Progress

The Portrayal of the Contemporary Scene

R

onald Searle’s The Rake’s Progress, first published in Punch in 1954 and collected in book form in 1955, gives a satirical portrait (or rather a composite satirical portrait in sixteen instalments) of a nation at the end of empire. After 1945, as the Attlee government strove with some success to build a new society, those who had been better off during the war experienced Labour austerity at home as ‘a drab, depressing, and constricted life’ going hand in hand with a ‘retreat from empire’ in India, Ceylon, Burma, Eire and Palestine (Webb: 576, 593). In 1951 the Conservatives had returned to power under Winston Churchill, Britain’s revered wartime leader. With the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 ‘people looked forward to a second Elizabethan age and Churchill’s towering presence as premier served to enhance their hopes of national recovery and glory’ (Sked and Cook: 116).1 A ‘Butskellite’ consensus about the new Welfare State reigned and in 1954, at the Tory Party conference, Harold Macmillan was ‘greeted like Richard the Lionheart for his pledge to make housing a “national crusade”’ (Sked and Cook: 121). Macmillan’s rhetoric hails back to concepts of the bourgeois heroic propounded by writers as influential as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Smiles and to the plethora of exemplary lives for the instruction of young people such as ‘The Children’s Heroes Series’ (c. 1900), which 1

Winston Churchill’s enduring status as a wartime hero was recently confirmed when he topped the poll conducted by the BBC Great Britons series with 27.9% (cf. Clennell: 8).

132

Detlef Gohrbandt

Winston Churchill’s Heroes of History (1968)2 was to follow as a contemporary offshoot. New heroes and new fields for heroic endeavour were now in demand, but the impetus for reform had slowed down. At a time when the once imperial power was more or less reluctantly setting its colonial subject peoples free to try and follow their independent courses, while the USA was taking over the hegemonial position so long occupied by Britain, and when after the battles and sufferings of the war and the austerity of the immediate postwar years the country was struggling to reassert its confident identity, Searle set out to analyse the true state of a nation that had survived but not changed, that had ‘lost an empire and not yet found a role,’ as Dean Acheson put it in 1962. What satirical strategy does The Rake’s Progress employ for such an analysis? Which are the targets that arouse Searle’s mocking anger, and to whom does he extend sympathetic or pitying laughter? How do his images and texts tell stories of postwar Englishness? What affectations and vices does he identify in these ‘progresses,’ and how does he reveal them to be causative of decline and fall and representative of the times? Can Searle’s satire diagnose specific forms of corruption, especially the corruption inherent in the rise and fall of imperial ascendancy? Does its mockery of heroes-as-rakes give any space to positive moral values, to alternative ideas of happiness, manliness and social well-being, comparable perhaps with the way that Hogarth in A Rake’s Progress (engraved 1735) had set Sarah Young’s virtues against Tom Rakewell’s vices? These are just some of the questions one might address in seeking to investigate the political and ideological contexts of Searle’s Progress, and especially its satire of belated imperial attitudes; attitudes that sought to perpetuate notions of the glory of racial and cultural superiority and the necessity of and right to global dominance and exploitation.3 A general characterisation, which casts some of these preoccupations as hypotheses, would be that Searle drafts a gallery of representative English types in search of fame and success, whose rise and fall he charts as a revelation of their parochial attitudes, insular innocence and inability to deal with temptations ancient and modern. Like Fielding and Hogarth, Searle aims to trace manners rather than men, and to be the chronicler of a period rather than the biographer of individuals. His method is therefore to place his 2

3

Published simultaneously in Britain, the USA and Canada, this was a posthumous selection of Churchill’s favourite lives from his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols., 1956-8. Cp. J.A. Hobson’s neat summary of imperialist arguments in Imperialism: A Study (1902), excerpted in Freeden (155-66). Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) has a cast of characters very similar to Searle’s, though rather more academic.

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

133

generic anonymous protagonists in a web of graphic and verbal allusion to recognisable contemporary faces and proper names, to current and recent events, and to places and institutions, so that the general and the specific, the stereotype and the instance are always intertwined and become mutually revealing. The pen and wash drawings (Pevsner’s Englishness of line confirmed)4 combine hyperbolical caricature and representational portrait, each selectively illustrating one of the episodes mentioned in the brief, condensed captions, which in turn specify place and time, and add narrative details. Searle’s protagonists strive for fame by aping those already famous, as in the case of ‘The Poet,’ who is ‘Captivated by German Youth Movement’ in anxious imitation of the homosexuality of Auden and Isherwood, with whom he subsequently ‘Shakes hands.’ Though Searle’s protagonists all fail, and their failure is shown to be inevitable, they do have some potential for success, and to that extent they are ambivalent figures, inviting the reader’s sympathy as well as his / her derision. Ambivalence, as Homi Bhabha has argued, is the essential feature of the mimicry that characterises colonial discourse. Mimicry means attempted or imposed sameness, and it co-occurs with difference, so that there is always the effect of the two not being congruent. The difference shows up behind or through sameness, as for example when a white colonial master dresses his black boy in discarded white men’s clothes to express the master-servant relationship, and at the same time, to demonstrate to the discerning how little the sartorial imitation really transforms the servant or alters the hierarchy. That is what Bhabha has in mind when he calls mimicry ‘the sign of a double articulation,’ or an ambivalence in which the colonial subject is made to undergo ‘reform, regulation and discipline’ and then slips (‘slippage’) almost immediately into ‘difference and recalcitrance’ (Bhabha 86). The ambivalence of mimicry carries contrary meanings: it can seem to denote the black man’s inferiority and yet suggest how easily the imposition may be overturned and become a ‘menace’ to all the master’s claims (86). My analysis of Searle’s Progress will argue that this insistently repetitive serial constitutes an early postwar critique of colonial discourse, in that its protagonists are low mimetic (in)versions firstly of those great Englishmen who created an Empire, and secondly of the rake in the sense of ‘a man of loose habits and immoral character’ (OED q.v. rake). In these representative accounts of ‘Downfall’ ensuing from ‘Promise,’ the ambivalence of approximation and excess is turned against the colonial masters, who in their youngest scions are shown to be ‘almost the same, but not quite’ as their

4

For Nikolaus Pevsner, in The Englishness of English Art, broadcast in 1955, the linear is one of the characteristics of English art, and it is of course an essential feature of caricature.

134

Detlef Gohrbandt

models, whom by their difference they unwittingly disavow (Bhabha 86).5 In Searle, this ambivalence is a feature of a discourse that is postcolonial in that it results from and inverts the discourse of colonialism. It results from colonialism in that it portrays the types (of role, career and character) that carried out the imperial project; it inverts colonialism in that it reveals the colonialists – strong in striving and ambition, strong in their advocacy of masculine virtues – to be fatally weak in themselves just as much as in the society with which they identify. But ambivalence, in Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter, together with this process of inversion is also a structural feature of the comic. The relevance of Bergson for Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, rigidity, mechanical repetition and ambivalence on the one hand and for the interpretation of visual satire on the other is rather too complex a topic to be dealt with here. Let us just note that Bhabha’s ‘splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist’ (Bhabha 91) and what Bergson calls the effect of serial interference, according to which a situation is comic when it relates simultaneously to two series of independent events, and therefore makes sense in two different ways (Bergson 73f.), are closely related. So are Bergson’s ‘raideur’ and Bhabha’s ‘fixity’: Bergson explains that we laugh when we witness mechanical rigidity where we would expect the flexibility of a living body (Bergson 7f.), and Bhabha shows how stereotypical representation wavers between rigid assertion of the ‘already known’ and an anxious repetition intended to fend off the unexpected and uncontrollable (Bhabha 66, 72f.). Searle’s ambivalence, interpreted through this double relation, is both comic and postcolonial. Searle’s method and preoccupations in this redrafting of Hogarth are given tongue-in-cheek expression in his dedication which in an accurate transcription reads: This book is Dedicated to those Eminent Personages whose natural likenesses have been taken advantage of to give Authentisity to the Declines and falls of those fictitious amalgams The Rakes, and without whose presence the portrayal of the Contemporary 6 Scene would be well nigh Impossible.

The sixteen rakes are thus cumulative inventions based like their supporting casts on the observation of real-life contemporaries, many of whom are named as ‘willing and unwitting authorities’ in the two-page ‘Author’s Note.’ This begins with ‘Mr William Hogarth, Mr Malcolm Muggeridge, Mr Rake,

5 6

The journalist and writer Brian Moynahan claims ambivalence as a virtue, ‘the best of British traits, because it allowed free rein to all the others’ (73). The dedication and the Author’s Note are quoted from the 1955 Perpetua Press edition of The Rake’s Progress; like the frontispiece photograph of Searle ‘about to strike’ they are missing from the Penguin Classics reprint of 2000, edited by Nicholas Lezard.

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

135

Mr Pilgrim Progress’ and then goes on to list the people and institutions who have left more or less identifiable traces in the drawings and captions, e.g. ‘The Chelsea Arts Club, The Tea Centre, Mr Christopher Hassall, Sir John Rothenstein,’ or ‘Mr Christopher Izzerwood, The Cherwell, Dr. Milcolm Maggeridge,7 Reveille, Mr Cyril Connolly.’ Oh for an annotated edition! But as Nicholas Lezard says, there is a ‘timeless perspicacity’ in Searle’s satire that allows us to understand and enjoy it even though ‘we might not get all the references’ (Lezard xiv). Searle’s ‘fictitious amalgams’ exemplify general tendencies and ideas in types that are just recognisably individualised. Over the past fifty years, however, the individualisation has faded, so that today, recognising fewer allusions than Searle’s contemporaries, we will tend to read the lives as so many period portraits, but collectively as the portrait of the mentality of an age.

The Structure of the Lives There is a simple basic pattern to the sixteen lives, or at least to the first fifteen, in that each consists of a frontispiece portrait and a series of six laconically captioned pictures documenting the subject’s progress. The final life, that of ‘The Great Lover,’ consists only of a frontispiece, with a Rapunzel cartoon added. In each sequence of six stages, an innocent but ambitious provincial from some stratum of the middle or lower classes encounters the lures and seductions of the metropolis, is borne aloft to a semblance of success by its mechanisms, and led into temptations he (once only she) does not recognise and therefore cannot resist. His provincial origin does not give the hero strength for very long, for in his innocence he is incapable of recognising and resisting the lure of what seems to embody success but is actually decayed, self-seeking, conventional, blinkered, and backward. In contrast to the rakes in Hogarth’s work and in Rebecca West and David Low’s The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress’ (1934), Searle’s protagonists are not shown as inheriting a fortune which they subsequently squander, rather, like so many Dick Whittingtons, they set out to make their fortunes themselves. Take ‘The Don’ for example. He is ‘Born in an almshouse in Middlesbrough of poor but honest parents.’ In the first picture, the ragged mother kneels before a chest of drawers, the bottom drawer serving as cot for her child, the floor is strewn with empty gin bottles, and the father lies in bed 7

The novelist and controversial journalist (on the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph) Malcolm Muggeridge was editor of Punch from 1953-57 and rose to fame as a broadcaster in the 60s. Searle expresses Muggeridge’s Protean showmanship by listing him seventeen times (if I’ve counted correctly), under his real and garbled name, as well as in roles like ‘Major-General’ and, prophetically, ‘Monseigneur.’

136

Detlef Gohrbandt

taking a deep draught. Stage 2 is ‘Triumph,’ with the hero entering the gates of an Oxford college while his proud parents skulk behind a wall. ‘Temptation’ comes in stage 3 when the ‘Fellow of All Souls’ is ‘Invited to write a column for the Daily Mirr*r.’ Is it his Middlesbrough origins that are going to let him down now? And again, when he achieves ‘Glory’ as his ‘Outspoken views lead to national representation on T.V. Quiz programmes’? The ‘Downfall’ that has been lurking in these gaffes follows as stage 5 in which ‘Insulting Gilbert Harding leads to expulsion from Lime Grove’ and the hero is ‘Spurned by his friends,’ who are unwilling to condone his stupid vulgarity. Finally, ‘Ruin’ shows him sprawling wet through and battered on a pavement in Fleet Street after he has failed ‘to make a comeback in Reyn*lds News,’ just moments before he ‘[d]ies in penury on the doorstep of Everybody’s Weekly.’ In the original Punch versions the six stages were numbered and had handwritten captions. In the book edition the texts were printed8 and analytic titles added which vary slightly from life to life, but always identify a rising action (called ‘Germination,’ ‘Promise’ or ‘Advent’) which proceeds to a peripety (‘Temptation’) or climax (‘Success’), and a falling action (‘Downfall’) which sometimes culminates in ‘Ruin.’ For Searle’s ‘rakes’ the quasitragic pattern of rise and fall is inescapable, and though the fall is mostly literal it can also be ironic (as in the case of ‘The Girlfriend,’ ‘The Painter,’ ‘The Dramatic Critic’ and possibly ‘The Humourist’) in that some would still call it success. It is significant that ‘Success,’ ‘Triumph’ and ‘Glory’ always contain the seed of failure or self-betrayal, i.e. they are false or corrupt in a way that the innocent but also rather silly protagonist does not recognise. It is still more significant that falsity and corruption are defined in terms of the role models and institutions of the old order that the protagonist is trying to imitate: what is ‘wrong’ with papers like Reveille and the Daily Mirror is that they exemplify the rising popular culture deemed vulgar by those members of the old establishment on whose approbation careers depend. So what Searle is attacking is not really the rakes, though there is a lot of incidental joking at their expense, but those that lead them into temptation and bring about first their rise and then their downfall. What is false is the career patterns that the hapless rakes attempt to imitate, and what is corrupt is the morality which these career patterns embody. False, too, is the way the rakes give in first to the lure of popularity, and then to the bribery of those who are already popular, influential and in positions of power. There is nothing objectionable 8

There are some typographical differences between the 1955 Perpetua Press edition (from which all my quotations are taken) and the Penguin Classics edition of 2000, e.g. Perpetua prints the captions in italics and uses asterisks in a pretence of disguising some of the proper names, while Penguin reserves italics for publications and does away with the asterisks.

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

137

about the progress of ‘The Painter’ as he gains a ‘Scholarship to the Royal College of Art,’ has his ‘First Painting exhibited at the Tea Centre’ and is ‘Praised by Sir John R*th*nstein’ (cleverly caricatured in the drawing) for his ‘Banana Motif’ paintings. But when in his ‘Triumph’ he accepts a commission ‘to paint Lady Docker in gold leaf’ and dresses up for the purpose in naval uniform and dark glasses and even employs two sailors to hold his paints and brushes, then he is making a fool of himself, and both tea and banana lose their imperial innocence. Now the artist has betrayed his gift, he becomes a venal fool of fashion, ‘Paints Lady M*nnings’ dog’ after accepting Sir Alfred Munnings’ flattery, and is swallowed up by the institutions of the old order (in this case the Royal Academy, the BBC and the honours system). The pattern of rise and fall is exemplified in representative figures, characters in the sense of Theophrastus and La Bruyère, except that Searle’s cast is composed of professional types of ambivalent and plural potential rather than singularly embodied vices and frailties. These representative professionals make up a whole society and illuminate the forces and conditions that in such a society lead first to success and then to ruin. The neutral phrase ‘conditions’ saves me from making any easy equation between virtue and success, or vice and ruin, and keeps the problem of moral analysis at bay for a while.

Place and the Postcolonial The Rake’s Progress is not a programmatically postcolonial work. It does contain a very few explicit references to empire, once when ‘The Trade Union Leader,’ in the fifth of the lives, is ‘accused of wrecking Empire by the Daily Ma*l,’ and then in an updated form when the ‘Downfall’ of ‘The Novelist’ is documented by the information that ‘Sales of third novel sink to 750 copies / including British Commonwealth.’ Occasional references to Australia, Tonga, and The Friendly Islands remind the reader of those parts of the map still coloured pink, where a promising young man may yet hope to make a career. But these names, only faintly resonant of imperial fame, are offset by bringing in the once colonial and long since colonialist United States as the place where a British career is liable to go really wrong,9 as when in the life of ‘The Athlete’ the stage of ‘Temptation’ is described in the following terms: ‘Paid £50 to sponsor underwear advertisement. Suspended by A.A.A. Visits States. Accepts athletic scholarship at Yale.’ If wearing a shirt advertising Y-fronts (i.e. men’s underwear) is the peripety, the scholarship from Yale marks the hero’s decline. Similarly, ‘The Poet’ reaches 9

As in Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman (1963); the parallels between Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Searle’s Progress are also remarkable.

138

Detlef Gohrbandt

the sixth and final stage of ‘Ruin’ when he ‘Accepts Chair of Poetry at a Los Angeles girls’ college,’ and for ‘The Trade Union Leader’ the same stage is signalled when he is ‘Refused American visa.’ As for ‘The Actor,’ his ‘Downfall’ comes when after ‘Success’ in the shape of being ‘Flown to Hollywood’ and ‘Triumph’ in the form of an ‘Oscar’ and ‘Life Story in Colliers’ he ‘Underplays [King Lear] in American accent.’ The lure of America has proved fatal. References to Bucharest, Berlin, Paris and Barcelona have much the same function, namely to identify those foreign parts where aspirations that failed at home may yet be brought to some compensatory (though escapist) fulfilment. The implication is clear: the kind of success that really counts, for Searle’s benighted British protagonists, as for all their role models and abetters, is that which is won at home and which wins the approval of the most prestigious institutions of Englishness. The postcolonial space is thus thematized in The Rake’s Progress through its demarcation (and devaluation) against English places, which are in turn contrasted with places (and institutions) in Europe and America, all associated with corrupt morals (e.g. venality, homosexuality, and vanity). ‘The Novelist’ is a model of such domesticity: he sets out as the ‘Son of a North Country Toiler,’ and achieves his early ‘Triumph’ when after a ‘Foyles Literary Luncheon’ he is ‘Mobbed in W.H. Smith’s, Clapham.’ In his use of a railway station as the locus of vulgarity, Searle may be seen in the tradition of Oscar Wilde’s Jack / Ernest Worthing. The epitome of English metropolitan provincialism, in Searle’s taxonomy of place, is St. Pancras Station, which becomes the fitting scene of the final stage in the life first of ‘The Athlete’ (who expires trying to catch the train to Durham) and then of ‘The Soldier’: ‘1948: Chairman of Committee to advise on colour schemes for railway waiting rooms. Knocked down by a taxi at St. Pancras.’ Not an important failure, and in some untidy spot, to borrow Auden’s words. When a figure escapes from England he experiences exile rather than liberation, and so when ‘The Novelist’ moves to Paris, and finally to Australia, he is not committing himself to cosmopolitan values but acting in what may be termed patriotic frustration after his name proves ‘unfamiliar to John Lehmann at P.E.N. Club party’ and he is ‘[t]henceforth tormented by desire to get into New Writing.’ In this manner, in all the progresses, the domestic is set against the foreign, home against the world, and Searle gleefully shows how an empire shrunk to Little England still exerts an irresistible pull on her sons (and the single daughter, ‘The Girlfriend’). This systematic contrast of place forms a postcolonial structure in The Rake’s Progress, and its fundamental meaning is that what was once a global space has shrunk to the provincial Englishness of place – to what (Searle implies) it was, at bottom, beneath the rhetoric and the pomp, all the time.

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

139

Cosy Institutions In Searle’s satire, place is metonymic for institution, and English institutions are the metonymic antithesis of the cosmopolitan world. To be rejected by such institutions is a sign of failure, but to be admitted by them is failure disguised, and to set them up as the highest goal of a man’s career is just as mistaken as to circumvent them (by going abroad). All four forms of involvement with English institutions are ruinous. Throughout The Rake’s Progress, ‘Downfall’ is equated with bowing to the Englishness of institutions like the B.B.C., the Arts Council, and the Critics’ Circle (in ‘The Dramatic Critic’), or the B.B.C. Third Programme, accepting an Hon.D.Litt. from Cambridge and acquiring a country house (in ‘The Humourist’), or toadying to figures who personify institutions, like Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, standing for the advanced literary establishment.10 An institution embodying both Englishness and masculinity is the club, which features in stage 4, ‘Temptation,’ of the life of ‘The Clergyman’: ‘Nominated Bishop of Woolchester. Elected to Athenaeum. Introduced to convivial and sporting pleasures.’ The Athenaeum, ‘the most intellectually elite of London’s clubs’ (Weinreb & Hibbert, q.v. Athenaeum), is also the location of the final stage in the progress of ‘The Humourist,’ who ‘Attempts to be Life and Soul of the Athenaeum. Knighted. Succumbs to melancholia.’ Perhaps the most striking example of a self-destructive (and in Bergson’s terms mechanical) obsession with institutions is ‘The Actor,’ whose life-long ambition is to perform in the Old Vic. The Old Vic Theatre, named for Princess Victoria in 1833, rechristened the New Victoria Theatre in 1871, became famous as a Shakespeare stage from 1914 on, with performances by Laurence Olivier in the 30s, and was reopened after wartime bomb damage in 1950. The location therefore brings together icons of cultural and imperial supremacy and literally forms the stage for the enactment of a success story. ‘The Actor’ wins first recognition in Noel Coward’s Private Lives11 and attempts to capitalise on this success when he ‘Sends press cuttings to Old Vic.’ Though these are returned, further ‘Success’ leads him to Hollywood, The Oxford Companion to English Literature tells us that ‘Connolly’s favourite themes include the dangers of early success and the hazardous lure of literary immortality’ (s.v. Connolly). 11 Searle’s technique of constructing the rake’s lives around lists of names and places clearly owes a debt to eighteenth-century satires like Pope’s Dunciad, but may also have taken hints from the self-conscious autobiographical style of Noel Coward himself, in his Present Indicative (1937), with reflections like the following: ‘The introduction of celebrated names into autobiographies is a rule that I am too timorous to ignore […],’ followed by a lengthy list and the remark that this ‘must make it obvious to the meanest intelligence that I was progressing like wild-fire’ (97). 10

140

Detlef Gohrbandt

and worldly ‘Triumph’ is achieved in winning an Oscar for playing ‘Doctor Johnson in musical version of Boswell.’ Now a ‘Man of distinction,’ our actor stubbornly claims recognition at home and ‘Sends donation to Old Vic.’ But it is not until he stars in a film ‘On location in Capri with prominent Continental starlet’ whom he ‘[w]eds’ that ‘Temptation’ knocks in the form of ‘Immediate offers from Jack Hylton and Old Vic.’ Being a snobbishly domestic rake, he of course rejects the popular bandleader and ‘Chooses Old Vic,’ a ‘tragic’ error which leads inexorably to his ‘Downfall’ (remember the Lear in an American accent) and ‘Ruin.’ In a similar vein, ‘The Humourist’ (not drawn as a self-portrait!) attains his ‘Triumph’ when after a series of libellous publications he first ‘[b]ecomes National Figure’ and is then ‘[i]nvited to Write for Punch’ and ‘[b]ecomes National Institution.’ ‘National Institution’ is thus the superlative of ‘National Figure,’ and it is the misguided purpose of all the rakes’ progresses to achieve precisely this shift from figure to institution, or from the human to the dehumanised. The irony operating here is that to become an institution, or even just to be admitted to one, is to submit to its control and to its power. ‘The Caricaturist’ most clearly exemplifies the contrary pattern in which the rake begins his career with acts of defiance or resistance, graduating from practical jokes at home via making fun of the masters at school to ridiculing the law. Similarly, the first sign of ‘Promise’ in ‘The Trade Union Leader’ is when, as an apprentice, he ‘Blacks eye of non-Union lad,’ but henceforth his progress is achieved through submissive integration into the structures of power, as when he ‘Buys first dress suit’ (i.e. ‘Temptation’) and is ‘Knighted’ (i.e. ‘Downfall’). Only in his final stage of ‘Ruin’ does he show guts again (or as Bergson would put it, spontaneity), when after being ‘[r]efused American visa’ he ‘[b]lacks eye of embassy clerk’ – but now of course it is too late for resistance. In their various failures, all the rakes confirm the power of institutions, but since this power is immediately demonstrated to be destructive of original promise, resistance, and individuality it is ironically proved to be a false power, false in its fundamental implications. In its ambivalence of representation and irony the satirical strategy of Searle’s Progress thus achieves ‘the inversion of the dominant structures of knowledge and power without simply reproducing them’ that Robert Young once called for as a corrective to a merely ‘detached, oppositional critical consciousness’ (Young: 173). Note again that inversion is both a postcolonial and a comic concept, and the reason for this, surely, is that both conceptualisations are emancipatory and subversive.

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

141

The Virtues of Success and Downfall To speak of the forces or conditions in a society that lead to flawed success and then to ruin is to speak of institutions and places and the representative personages associated with them. All of these are in evidence, for example, in the case of ‘The MP,’ who is ‘[f]ired with political enthusiasm by radical Norland Nurse’12 (i.e. ‘Advent’), then becomes ‘Secretary Cambridge Union Society’ (i.e. ‘Emergence’), and attains ‘Success’ when his ‘Moderation of views brings frequent bookings on B.B.C. Political Forum.’ The next three stages of his career are similarly defined. Place, institution, and personage have always been connected with virtue (but foreign places with vice) in the discourse of empire, as in the famous claim that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton, i.e. that the discipline and fair play, stamina and strategy practised in sports (‘games’ as it used to be called13) formed the soil on which the fruits of imperial expansion and administration could grow. As noted above, the voluminous literature celebrating the lives of great men and women, e.g. the popular writings of Samuel Smiles on the lives of self-taught engineers, manufacturers and inventors, was designed to propagate their virtues, such as thrift, self-control, truthfulness, and self-improvement, in a manner that looks back to a tradition of moralised lives represented in graphic art by works like Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness series of 1747. But the virtues of success are also the vices of downfall, and as one is stated the other is implied; this being another case of satirical ambivalence. For ‘The Dramatic Critic’ the height of success, which with Searle we recognise to be ‘Downfall,’ is to be ‘[r]espected’ after a ‘[b]rilliantly restrained comeback.’ The virtue of restraint finds its reward when one is accorded respect, which is another word for the vice of flattery. Searle repeatedly gives us images of calculating servility: ‘The Poet’ toadying up to Cyril Connolly in the ‘Temptation’ picture, ‘The Soldier’ in abject adoration of Captain Liddell Hart, the early theoretician of tank warfare, in ‘1922,’ with roles switched in ‘1938,’ when Neville Chamberlain’s Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha is shown in parallel adoration of our hero. The same idea is expressed in the final scene of ‘The Painter,’ where he is ‘Televised sitting next to Sir Winston at RA banquet,’ which immediately leads to him becoming an academician and a baronet himself. ‘The Athlete’ in whom the games-and-empire link is echoed also makes virtues explicit: the caption for ‘Success’ goes: ‘Joins Fulham Athletic Club. Paces crack miler in attempt on A nurse trained in enlightened methods of childcare (no physical punishment) at the Norland Institute (OED). 13 A famous expression of the link between games and empire is Henry Newbolt’s ‘The Lamp of Life’ (1898) with its refrain of ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ (in Brooks & Faulkner, eds.: 299). 12

142

Detlef Gohrbandt

world record. Praised for selflessness. Appears in In Town Tonight.’ The allusion is no doubt to Chris Chataway (and Chris Brasher) helping Roger Bannister to run the first sub-four-minute mile in May 1954. It was Chataway, too, who was runner-up to Bannister’s Sportsman of the Year of 1954 award. By retelling Chataway’s story rather than Bannister’s and shaping it into a story of failure,14 Searle refuses to share in the patriotic enthusiasm aroused by the ‘miracle mile.’ Instead of wallowing in the glory of winning he pretends to vaunt the selflessness of helping others to win and so makes fun of the tradition of sympathy for the underdog, an element in the system of values by which the British had traditionally defined themselves in their imperial mastery and which in the postwar period was inflated into nostalgic self-consolation. To show up vices disguised as virtues, or virtues declining into vice out of sheer stupidity (as in the already quoted inability of ‘The Don’ to distinguish ‘Outspoken views’ from insults) and to mock this moral confusion is the task of the satirist.

The Discourse of Colonialism Inverted: Postcolonial Satire Central to the model of colonial discourse proposed by Homi Bhabha, i.e. of the way the European masters chose to represent and so shape their colonial subjects, is the concept of paradoxical fixity: ‘[I]t connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition’ (Bhabha: 66). Searle’s tales of aspiration and fall have precisely these connotations. The ‘major discursive strategy’ of fixity, Bhabha goes on to explain, is the stereotype, ‘a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’ [because already known], and something that must be anxiously repeated’ in order to assert its continuing existence (66). Bhabha’s concepts of place, knowledge, repetition, degeneracy and rigidity are confirmed in Searle’s Progress, but with a difference. The difference is that, in Searle’s analysis, the fixity is attributed not to the subjects but to the masters, since it was their minds that produced and institutionalised this way of thinking and speaking. Searle recognises and dissects a pattern of anxious repetition (most feelingly in ‘The M.F.H.,’15 who four times breaks his collar-bone and finally his neck) in the lives of the rakes, caused by their rigid adherence to the received wisdom of institutions and their identification with ‘what is already known.’ Searle mocks the masters by turning them into stereotypes, and concentrates on that, leaving those who were previously subjects almost entirely out of the picture, since in the mode of caricature they cannot be represented without mocking them too, In actual fact, Chataway retired from running at the end of 1954 to study medicine, later becoming a consultant neurologist. 15 I.e. The Master of Foxhounds. 14

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

143

which Searle has no reason to do (the sole example of subject peoples is the scowling audience of Tongans in no. 5 of ‘The Poet’). Caricature resolves what Bhabha sees as the paradoxical coexistence of opposites into a single ridiculous entitity, since in the progresses the persistence of the old rigid order leads directly, laughably, to disorder. In the end there is no more ambivalence, for the pretence has been deflated. Similarly, where postcolonial discourse is an attempt to rectify ‘a history of discrimination and misrepresentation’ (Bhabha 176) of underprivileged or marginalised subjects, Searle’s satire provides a rewriting of a privileged site of representation, ironically overturning a majority discourse to show its self-contradictions and false assumptions, but also eliding minority discourse. Searle rejects the official success story and implies that some kind of personal happiness or fulfilment must be possible beyond the institutional structures that 1950s England has inherited from its imperial past. The most poignant and politically allusive illustration of this is in the final stage of ‘The Girlfriend,’ who has become ‘Minister of Health’ and is shown glumly sitting at her desk behind a jumble of files and reports on ‘Drainage’ and ‘Sewage Disposal.’ Her ‘Ruin’ (i.e. success) is capped with the award of the D.B.E (Dame Commander of [the Order of] the British Empire), an already rather obsolete honour that is hardly the fitting climax to the career of a woman who has clearly renegotiated ‘the boundaries of femininity.’16 Searle’s Rake’s Progress is after Hogarth and it is after empire: punningly, cunningly after, it is also an allusive visual and verbal record of the present of the late 40s and early 50s, and whatever else its intentions, it is designed to make us laugh. ‘Caricature, properly understood, is a serious dialogue by entertaining means’ (Bock 8).17 The intended laughter is specifically that of post-imperial tristesse, a look back in laughing sadness (or is it sad exultation?) at expended power and faded glory, at models and virtues that are no more, or more accurately, are no more as they were once said to be. For they do still exist, in 1954, as fifty years after, but in reduced and flawed shapes that huff and puff in the effort to maintain their eminence, that inflate themselves to clumsily heroic proportions – and so invite the short sharp deflating jab of the satirist’s pen. Searle’s satire is postcolonial satire on the affectation of empire, and on the poverty of survival after its demise.

Quoted from Maggie Andrews’ study of The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement, in which she reminds us that after 1945 ‘the status difference between male and female spheres was not changed by war’ (147). 17 My translation. 16

144

Detlef Gohrbandt

The Don Detail from Ronald Searle’s The Rake’s Progress I: ADVENT Born in an almshouse in Middlesborough of poor but honest parents

After-laughter, or the comedy of decline

145

Bibliography Andrews, Maggie. The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997. Bergson, Henri. Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. 1900. Paris: PUF, 1940. Bertmaring, Verena. ‘Twentieth-Century Interpretations of A Rake’s Progress: The Inspiration of a “Modern Moral Subject.”’ Apollo 148 (1998): 26-34. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bock, Henning. ‘Darf gelacht werden? Karikatur ist eine ernste Kunst.’ Ronald Searle. Ed. Henning Bock. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978. 7-15. Brooks, Chris, and Peter Faulkner, eds. The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology of the Empire. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996. Churchill, W.L.S. Heroes of History. London: Cassell, 1968. Clennell, Andrew. ‘Winston Churchill Wins Battle of Britons.’ Guardian Weekly, 28 Nov. – 4 Dec. 2002: 8. Coward, Noel. Present Indicative. Garden City: Doubleday Doran, 1937. Davies, Russell. Ronald Searle: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1985. Freeden, Michael, ed. J.A. Hobson: A Reader. London: Unwin-Hyman, 1988. Gombrich, K.H., and K. Kris. Caricature. King Penguins. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940. Moynahan, Brian. ‘The British Empire.’ British Greats. Ed. Annabell Merullo. London: Cassell, 2000. Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Englishness of English Art. London: Penguin, 1993. Searle, Ronald. The Rake’s Progress. London: Perpetua, 1955. –––. The Terror of St. Trinian’s and Other Drawings. Introd. Nicholas Lezard. London: Penguin, 2000. Sked, Alan, and Chris Cook. Post-War Britain: A Political History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Webb, R.K. Modern England from the 18th Century to the Present. 2nd ed. London: Allen & Unwin, 1980. Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, 1983. West, Rebecca. The Modern ‘Rake’s Progress.’ Illustrations by David Low. London: Hutchinson, 1934. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

This page intentionally left blank

III. Ethnic cabaret – A license to laugh?

This page intentionally left blank

MITA BANERJEE

Queer laughter Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and the normative as comic

I

n a volume concerned with the intersection of the postcolonial and the comic, it may seem obvious, even tautological, to choose to write a paper on Shyam Selvadurai’s first novel, Funny Boy. Yet, it is significant that the humour at the heart of Selvadurai’s narrative is ambivalent, doubleedged. The story of a gay Tamil boy, Arjie, growing up in Sri Lanka, the narrative traces both meanings of the very term ‘queer.’ Queerness is understood as an epithet of derision wielded by a heteronormative mainstream distancing itself from the spectacle of Otherness / sexual difference by the very act of laughter; and as the subversive appropriation of the term by the gay community itself. It is in this latter sense that the spectacle returns both the question and the laughter accompanying it to its sender. Just who is queer here? In my attempt to read both Selvadurai’s novel and Arjie’s performance in it as an instance of queer ethnic performance as what I will call ‘political cabaret,’ questions of audience and its expectations will loom large. My claim is that the narrative’s – as well as Arjie’s – success can be seen in its very suspension of audience identity: precisely on account of the narrative’s confounding audience and spectacle, it is never really clear who is laughing at whom. Crucially, the suspension of the target of (queer) criticism effects both a certain emptying out of political reference and the possibility of (hetero)normative acceptance. I am interested in the ways in which the theoretical paradigms of queer theory and ethnic studies can be seen to intersect.

150

Mita Banerjee

Following Gayatri Gopinath, I suggest that a queer reading may itself invite such abstraction: a ‘queer diasporic’ reading [...] juxtaposes wildly disparate texts and traces the crosspollination between the various sites of nonnormative desires that emerge within them. On the one hand, such a reading renders intelligible the particularities of same-sex desiring relations within spaces of homosociality and presumed heterosexuality, and, on the other hand, it deliberately wrenches particular scenes and moments out of context and extends them further than they would want to go. (Gopinath: 472)

Both queer theory and ethnic studies investigate the nature of subordinating practices, and the possibility of resistance to them. This theoretical proximity between two distinct but related paradigms, moreover, is also strongly motivated in terms of Selvadurai’s narrative itself. For Funny Boy hinges precisely on a slippage between Arjie’s difference as a Tamil and as a gay Tamil. From this difference, a confusion of the term ‘mainstream’ emerges which this paper will deliberately sustain. Arjie confronts, through his parodic performance, both a Sinhalese mainstream and a heteronormative one. This fusion of ethnic concerns and investigations of gay sexuality has also been emphasized by Wesley Crichlow to be indispensable. As Crichlow has criticized, white queer discourse has often re-marginalized non-white gays by effacing their subject position. According to Crichlow’s analysis of men of Caribbean ancestry living in same-sex relationships in Canada, it is essential to make these men subjects, not objects, of the sexualized exotic – dangerous and violent, but still visible in only two dimensions. Examples of the Black male as exotic and sexually racialized can be easily found in most male same-sex magazines or in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black men. [...] Regardless of the sexual orientation of the artist or spectator, this system of images suggests that the essential truth of Black masculinity lies in the domain of sexuality. (Crichlow: 74)

It is this projection of non-white gay identity that Selvadurai’s narrative can be said to resist. At the very juncture traced by Crichlow, white gay discourse may in fact mirror racist assumptions about black sexuality which are also held by a white, heteronormative mainstream. In this sense, a gay community may implicitly reposition itself as white mainstream. It is for this disturbing convergence that the following analysis will insist on superimposing different, but often not mutually exclusive, definitions of ‘mainstream.’ As Terry Goldie has argued, the challenge may lie precisely in tracing the contexts in which a ‘minority can become hegemonic’ (Goldie: 3).

Queer laughter

151

Following Mark Terkessidis’ analysis of Turkish German Kabarett or comedy,1 I will argue that it is integral for the performer to maintain the audience’s uncertainty about whether or not it is being laughed at by the performer on stage. Its certainty would be both a rendering un-ambivalent and thus politically obvious of the message and reason enough for the audience to leave the theatre before the performance is over. As Mark Terkessidis observes: Das unausgesprochene Einverständnis zwischen Kabarettist / Satiriker und seinem Publikum wird jedoch von den deutsch-türkischen Autoren nachhaltig aufgelöst: Tatsächlich agiert das allochthone Kabarett strukturell gegen das autochthone Publikum. […] Der Kabarettist führt dem einheimischen Publikum an sich selbst dessen Identität vor wie auch dessen rassistische und ausgrenzende Prämissen und das ist oft schwer zu ertragen. Wie schwer, zeigt sich insbesondere dann, wenn die Kabarettisten die ‘Vorurteile’ der liberal-mittelständischen Öffentlichkeit thematisieren: Es wurde bereits erwähnt, dass bei Vorstellungen von [der Gruppe] ‘Knobi-Bonbon’ bis zu zwei Dritteln der Anwesenden das Theater verließen. (Terkessidis: 299) (Yet, the unspoken agreement between comedian / satirist and his audience is broken by Turkish German authors: In fact, [ethnic] cabaret works structurally against its [mainstream] audience. […] The comedian shows the local audience through his own example its identity as well as its racist and exclusionary premises, and this is often hard to bear. How hard this is is made evident especially when comedians thematize the prejudices of the liberal, middle-class public: It has already been mentioned that at performances of [the group] ‘Garlic Candy,’ up to two thirds of the audience left the 2 theatre.) (Terkessidis: 299)

I am thus calling for the drawing of connections not only within a US context (between the fields of queer theory and ethnic studies), but also between various national contexts. My plea is for the possibility of a transnational minority studies. I would argue that even though, for instance, processes of racialization are highly context-specific, discourses of resistance can be mutually enabling across national lines. What Terry Goldie has suggested with regard to gay articulation – and articulateness – in Canada can, I hope, also serve to justify my own use of Turkish German political cabaret in a reading of Funny Boy. Goldie speaks of a dilemma in which Canadian gay communities have often described themselves in terms of US queer discourse (Goldie: 19). Even as Goldie criticizes this self-description and argues for specifically Canadian terms, I am interested here in a transnational imaginary 1

2

The genre of Kabarett is a form of political satire performed on stage which seems particular to the German-speaking context. It resembles ‘ethnic comedy’ as it is performed in the U.S., but could be said to have more of a political edge. Throughout this paper, I will use the term ‘political cabaret’ to convey this difference. Despite this difference in terminology, however, I also suggest that the concept of Kabarett can be applied to a North American context. This and all subsequent translations by M.B.

152

Mita Banerjee

of anti-homophobic articulation which can emerge from such linkages. While Goldie’s criticism is motivated by a critique of US image imperialism, such an imbalance of power would not pertain to the fusion of Turkish German and South Asian Canadian concerns which I am exploring in this paper. As Terkessidis observes, the subject of difference on stage thus performs a balancing act. S/he must critique the audience’s expectation of what his / her queerness consists in. Yet, the performer can only imply, never spell out the charge that these very expectations may point to the audience’s homophobia or racism. The audience must only be made to suspect that by laughing at the queer jokes of the sexually different subject on stage, it may ultimately be laughing at itself. The act of laughing along with the performer may thus ironically be a moment of self-denial, even rhetorical self-destruction, on the part of the audience. What is significant is that through this very split in signification, the ethnic / queer performer forces the audience to adopt his own subject position. If his own subjectivity is unidentical with itself precisely because his ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois) forces him to see himself not only through his own eyes but that of the mainstream, he returns this split to those who occasion it. As the audience does not know whether it is laughing at itself or those outside the theatre, it too is unidentical with itself and has thus almost become ethnic or queer. Terkessidis suggests: ‘Die deutsch-türkischen Künstler zwingen also die einheimischen Zuschauer/innen […] zur Nicht-Identität. Auf eine absurde Weise inszeniert sich der Kabarettist – der “Türke” – dabei als Referenzpunkt der “deutschen” Identität.’ (‘Turkish German artists thus impose on the local audience an un-identity. Absurdly, the comedian – the “Turk” – establishes himself as the reference point of “German” identity.’) (Terkessidis: 299). By the same token, Arjie, by rendering his audience un-identical with itself, renders his own queer subject position the point of departure for normative self-definition. Yet, in front of his sister’s bedroom mirror, before he is exposed to a heteronormative mainstream’s inquisitive glance, Arjie is still identical with himself – an identity which is perhaps paradoxical given this act of makebelief. Arjie is identical with himself as a goddess of Sri Lankan cinema; the paradox ensues only from the biases of heteronormative signification: The dressing of the bride would now begin, and then, by the transfiguration I saw taking place in Janaki’s cracked full-length mirror – by the sari being wrapped around my body, the veil being pinned to my head, the rouge put on my cheeks, lipstick on my lips, kohl around my eyes – I was able to leave the constraints of my self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self. […] It was a self magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema […]. I was an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested. (Selvadurai: 14-5)

Queer laughter

153

The key split occurs, then, in the audience’s reaction to this very spectacle. Or rather, the split occurs only when Arjie’s family turns itself into an audience of a performance it deems queer. Before this emergence of a normative gaze, Arjie is in fact his own audience: it is in his own eyes that he becomes a cinema goddess; looking at himself in the mirror he performs his own identity for himself. His family-turned-audience, however, is set on turning the mirror image into an indication of just what is wrong with this queer sheep of the family. Derisive laughter ensues from the charge of unidentity, of incongruity: a boy can never dress up in a sari. Yet, this unidentity is only in the eyes of the observer. It is this un-identity that queer or ethnic performance can target in its turn. According to Terkessidis: Dabei werden nicht nur die üblichen Rollen des Kabaretts unterlaufen, sondern auch die immer noch verbreiteten Vorstellungen von Identität. Denn während man sich gewöhnlich das bürgerliche Subjekt als Einheit vorstellt, findet hier jene ominöse Verdopplung statt, die Homi Bhabha anhand der Werke marginalisierter Autor/innen beschrieben hat – ‘die unheimliche Differenz desselben und die Alterität der Identität.’ (Terkessidis: 298) (In this manner, not only the usual roles of comedy, but also the still wide-spread idea of identity are subverted. For while the bourgeois subject is traditionally understood as a unity, there is here the ominous doubling of the subject which Homi Bhabha has traced in the work of marginalized authors – ‘the uncanny difference of the same and the Otherness of identity.’) (Terkessidis: 298)

It is at this juncture that the queer subject converges with that of ethnic difference. The Western mainstream targeted by Bhabha posits a stable, selfidentical subject position and derides hyphenated subjects as ‘pathological,’ schizophrenic. The Tamil society represented by Arjie’s family, on the other hand, inscribes and requires this same stability in terms of gender performance, or rather, the ‘naturalness’ of gender as such. Crucially, however, the act of laughter on the part of the mainstream is both a distancing device and an intimation of the audience’s uncertainty of distance. Laughing at queerness inscribes both the ultimate difference of self and Other and the slippage of this difference. For the family’s reaction to Arjie’s costume at once implies a suspicion that the audience is itself implicated in the spectacle. The ultimate difference between a queer subject and a heteronormative audience which looks in spite of itself is broken down by the audience’s suspicion that it is being mocked. By the very act of dressing up, Arjie is seen to laugh in order to scorn heteronormative signification. The boundaries between performer and audience have become fluid; homophobic laughter is a sign both of the ascription of difference and the uncertainty of those who inscribe it: ‘Unable to disobey [Kanthi Aunty’s] command any longer, I went to her. She looked me up and down for a

154

Mita Banerjee

moment, and then gingerly, as if she were examining raw meat at the market, turned me around’ (Selvadurai: 13). In a split second, the audience gasps at this obvious, physical breach of its gender signification. It is this split second, I will argue in the following, that the queer performer can appropriate: the very moment at which the audience sees its norms upset and has not yet recovered its balance. The silence following Kanthi Aunty’s discovery betrays the family’s uncertainty of its own involvement in the performance. On the invisible stage surrounding Arjie, its own values have come under scrutiny. The recovery of speech – or rather, of laughter, – is at once a moment of recuperative self-identification. Before this moment of selfrecuperation, however, there is a split second in which Arjie has made his audience feel un-identical with itself. Yet, at this point in the narrative, Arjie is still unable to turn the tables and turn the audience into the spectacle of weirdness: a jettisoning of normative signification in which the audience is looked – and laughed – at in the very act of gazing at difference. For the time being, then, the laughter is the audience’s own: Then the silence was broken by the booming laugh of Cyril Uncle, Kanthi Aunty’s husband. As if she had been hit, Amma swung around in his direction. The other aunts and uncles began to laugh too, and I watched as Amma looked from one to the other like a trapped animal. Her gaze finally came to rest on my father, and for the first time I noticed that he was the only one not laughing. (Selvadurai: 13-4)

The spectacle of weirdness is thus multi-layered, involving different stages of implication. For the fact that Arjie’s father is not laughing indicates that the joke is also on him: the family-as-audience performs and thus reinscribes its heteronormative self-identity by laughing both at the boy himself and a father whose masculinity has allegedly been unable to assert itself. The father’s difference is queerness by association. In the void ensuing from this family catastrophe, Arjie is left to wonder at the facets of humour. He becomes aware of the hurting power of laughter, the act of laughter as the stigmatizing of difference. Laughter becomes a marker of disgust; a disgust, in turn, in which a heteronormative mainstream denies, once and for all, its implication in the spectacle: It was clear to me that I had done something wrong, but what it was I couldn’t comprehend. I thought of what my father had said about turning out ‘funny.’ The word ‘funny’ as I understood it meant either humourous or strange, as in the expression ‘That’s funny.’ Neither of these fitted the sense in which my father had used the word, for there had been a hint of disgust in his tone. (Selvadurai: 17)

This disgust is also at the heart of Arjie’s subsequent encounter with Black Tie, the vice principal of Queen Victoria Academy, the epitome of the absence of fun. As his father tells Arjie, the ‘Academy will force you to

Queer laughter

155

become a man’ (Selvadurai: 205). It is at Victoria Academy that the very event which had led to Arjie’s being gazed at by his family recurs. Here too, the queer subject, in the very (f)act of being himself, is said to mock a heteronormative mainstream. Every gesture he makes is about the norm. Once again, it is through this suspicion that the norm turns itself into an audience of a performance deemed queer; an audience which the queer subject himself may be unaware of and unable to account for. For the mainstream, the Other’s self-identity is about itself, a mockery of normative signification. Black Tie’s homophobia is at once the fear of being mocked; a queer mockery which parallels Bhabha’s reading of colonial mimicry. By the act of mimicry, the colonial subject turns himself into an object which is ‘almost the same but not quite’ the colonizer himself: ‘[C]olonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha: 86). In Arjie’s queer Tamil performance, this colonial mimicry is paralleled by a mimicry of heteronormative assumptions. In Bhabha’s account, mimicry upsets the dichotomy between self and Other, between colonizer and colonized, or, for my purposes here, between queer subject and heteronormative self. The colonizer sees himself in the brown mirror image of the colonial. Yet, crucially, the colonized subject is only himself; he is not the colonizer in brownface but simply happens to have a brown face. Looking at the faces of his subordinates, then, the colonizer sees himself being mocked; a mockery, however, that may only be in the eyes of the observer. There emerges a curious suspension of agency. Without even moving, by the mere act of being there (and of having a brown face), the colonial is seen to mock his master. It is this space, then, that the (post)colonial as queer performer can choose to appropriate. Crucially, the slightest gesture of subversion may suffice. By seeing himself mocked without the Other’s moving a muscle, the colonizer is already on edge. It is this (homophobic) edge which is at once a fear of the homosexual threat which keeps Black Tie on the lookout as he surveys the boys under his charge. His brother warns Arjie: ‘One of the boys had hair that was too long and he wore his top two shirt buttons open. The other blinked too hard and Black Tie thought he was winking at him.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Never blink too hard in front of him, and most of all, don’t lick your lips. If you do that, for sure he’ll think you’re trying to mock him.’ (Selvadurai: 206)

As Bhabha has emphasized, there is thus a slippage between mimicry and mockery, a slippage in which homophobia may parallel racist attitudes. When he is chosen to recite a poem on which Black Tie’s official speech will be based, Arjie is poised on the brink of the ultimate counter-performance. It is in this performance, I would argue, that Arjie jumbles all differences into a single performance of non-sense: the difference between

156

Mita Banerjee

the colonial and the postcolonial, as well as that between queerness and ‘straight’ sexual orientation. Yet, this jumbling of normative signification is itself predicated on becoming aware of the fragility of mainstream assumptions. For the poems celebrate a colonial rhetoric that rings empty to Arjie’s ears; Victoria Academy is thus seen, by his queer eyes, to engage in a colonial mimicry which is hypocritical. By being made to recite the poems, moreover, Arjie is in fact made to mimic a signification which turns him into an outsider: [The first poem] said that through playing cricket one learned to be honest and brave and patriotic. This was not true at Victoria Academy. Cricket, here, consisted of trying to make it on the first-eleven team by any means, often by cheating or by fawning over the cricket master. Cricket was anything but honest. ‘The Best School of All’ was no better. In this poem, the poet looked back on his school days as the best days of his life. I found it puzzling that one would be nostalgic for something one had longed to escape. (Selvadurai: 227-8)

At the same time, the norm seeks to ensure the perfection of colonial mimicry, a perfection, however, which, as Bhabha has pointed out, would also be a threat. For once the colonial has become the perfect Englishman, the difference between self and Other has become nonexistent; an absence that could hardly be more threatening. The aim of colonial education, paradoxically, must thus be a flawed mimesis. Bhabha speaks of ‘the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English’ (Bhabha: 87). Similarly, Arjie’s perfect mastery of the discourse Black Tie makes him memorize would have run the risk of mockery: the perfect panegyric of a school he could hardly have cherished. The queer subject is caught in a game he cannot seem to win; perfection will be punished, and so will the failure to memorize normativity: ‘Then he caught me by the ear and led me out onto the balcony, I was to kneel there until such time as I learned the poems. I felt worse when Shehan, too, was brought out and made to kneel on the balcony with me’ (Selvadurai: 238). At the recital, then, Arjie has multiple audiences. He is watched by both Black Tie himself and the festival audience. The balancing act, however, consists in the fact that the audience must not realize it is being mocked; the slippage between mimicry and mockery must be imperceptible. It is in this sense that Arjie finally appropriates the laughter which has hitherto been perpetrated at his own expense. By forcing the audience to laugh at himself, Arjie manipulates the spectacle which is himself. Yet, this manipulation is at the heart of returning the gaze or rather, the laughter. For if the audience laughs at his recital, it will also have to laugh at Black Tie’s speech based on this recital. The very man who polices the school’s corridors and severely punishes the licking of lips is turned into the laughing stock of the entire

Queer laughter

157

school by a queer subject. Yet, it is significant that Arjie retaliates not in explicit, but in comic, non-sensical terms. For if he had openly criticized Black Tie’s homophobia, the audience of this criticism may have detected its own involvement in this charge: no longer spectators of Arjie’s mockery of Black Tie, the audience would then have been forced to laugh about itself being mocked. In this case, Arjie’s fate may have been the same as that of the Turkish German political cabaret group ‘Knobi-Bonbons’: the audience would simply have left the theatre or rather, the school yard. By turning his critique of Black Tie’s homophobia into an upsetting of colonial signification, however, Arjie suspends the object of criticism. Even as Black Tie is being mocked, the reason for this mockery is known only to Arjie and himself. Moreover, the audience is mocked in this performance only insofar as it sees its own colonial mimicry ridiculed. Yet, it is crucial that the audience can choose to side either with Arjie or the poems he mocks by distortion. It can choose to laugh with him about the incongruity of colonial signification in the context of postcolonial Sri Lanka; or it can laugh at itself because it too may be steeped in this mimicry. Yet, what is crucial is the ambivalence which is at stake here. For the audience does not quite know whether it is being made to laugh at itself, its own colonial mimicry, or those outside the school yard who are as yet unaware of the incongruity of this mimicry. Unlike the art of ‘Knobi-Bonbon,’ Arjie’s performance thus upholds the unity characteristic of traditional Kabarett which Terkessidis has characterized thus. What matters is the possibility of a shared enlightened vision between performer and audience. As Terkessidis points out: Mit ihrem grundlegenden Ansatz bleiben Kabarett und Satire von Autoren mit Migrationshintergrund letztlich dem Prinzip der Aufklärung verhaftet: Sie thematisieren die ‘Vorurteile’ als Bruchstellen des erworbenen Wissenszusammenhangs und drängen auf eine Integration des Wissens. Dies verweist selbstverständlich auch auf die Beseitigung der gesellschaftlichen Mißstände, die mit dem ‘rassistischen Wissen’ verleugnet oder legitimiert werden. (Terkessidis: 300) (In their basic approach, comedy and satire by authors with a background of migration ultimately remain committed to the principle of the enlightenment: They thematize ‘prejudices’ as the ruptures of received knowledge and call for an integration of knowledge. Naturally, this also implies the overcoming of social wrongs which are denied by or justified through racist knowledge.) (Terkessidis: 300)

It is thus perhaps paradoxical that Arjie should choose to enlighten his audience through the subversive enunciation of – nonsense: A diabolical plan occurred to me. It was such a wicked idea I was shocked that I had actually thought of it. The plan was simple. Instead of trying to get out of reciting the poems, I would do them. But I would do them wrong. Confuse them, jumble lines, take entire stanzas from one poem and place them in the other until the poems were rendered

158

Mita Banerjee

senseless. Black Tie who […] would write a speech based on these poems, would be forced to make a speech that made no sense. (Terkessidis: 270-1)

By turning himself into a perpetrator of non-sense, Arjie thus both appropriates and upsets the meaning of just what is queer: queerness signals his own difference in the sense of sexual orientation, but it can also encompass other facts of incongruity. What is queer is also a postcolonial nation celebrating, not the postcoloniality of cricket which Arjun Appadurai has emphasized, but its Britishness. It is by opening up this definition of queerness – an opening up which reflects a universalizing turn in queer activist politics – that Arjie manages to turn his audience queer. It is this implicit and open-ended queerness which ensures that the audience will not leave the theatre: if the audience itself can fill the markers of incongruity – of nonsense, or queerness – with its own meaning, the performer’s criticism becomes an act of self-criticism on the audience’s part. The queer subject hardly moves a muscle as he gives his audience cause for introspection. It is the audience which is made to speculate about just what quality in itself the performer on stage could be laughing at. The audience laughs at Arjie laughing at Black Tie (for no apparent reason, since it is unaware of either Black Tie’s homophobia or the queerness of the subject on stage); but it also laughs at itself, suspecting its own implication in the spectacle. It is by creating a displacement or suspension of the ‘real’ object of laughter that Arjie prevents the outcome of his earlier performance as a goddess of Sri Lankan cinema. In this reprise of the original performance, the audience does not quite suspect it is being mocked. This is all the more remarkable since mockery, this time, does apply. Where before Arjie had only been himself in a sari, he has since advanced into an invisible mangler of (hetero)normative signification. I would like to end by resituating this discussion of queerness into the realm of ethnic studies. For as Native American critic Gerald Vizenor has argued, the Other has often been relegated to the domain of the tragic. The telling of different stories has thus been confined to what Vizenor has called narratives of ‘victimry.’ To speak back through political cabaret, then, is at once to upset both the tragic mode itself and its essentializing ascription of difference. Vizenor writes, ‘the sources of natural reason and tribal consciousness are doubt and wonder, not nostalgia or liberal melancholy for the lost wilderness; comic not tragic, because melancholy is cultural boredom, and the tragic is causal, the closure of natural reason’ (Vizenor: 14). For whereas the tragic is predictable, Selvadurai’s narrative underscores that there is no end to the workings of political cabaret. The audience can never quite be sure what it is laughing at; comic doubt becomes the epitome of ethnic signification. Moreover, the performance of ethnic political cabaret

Queer laughter

159

is the ultimate answer to the ‘race joke.’ The Other gets up on stage and exposes the racist knowledge at the heart of the race joke as illegitimate. As Terkessidis argues: Diese Situation ist gleichzeitig aber auch immens unangenehm für das Publikum, das nicht nur mit seinen ‘Vorurteilen’, seinen rassistischen Wissensbeständen, konfrontiert wird, sondern auch dem ‘Objekt’ dieses Wissens direkt gegenübersteht. Zudem ist rassistisches Wissen ohnehin paradox: Es existiert immer nur unter der Maßgabe seiner Illegitimität […]. (Terkessidis: 299) (At the same time, this situation is also immensely uncomfortable for the audience, which is confronted not only with its racist knowledge but with the ‘object’ of this knowledge as well. Moreover, racist knowledge is paradoxical in the first place: it always exists on the premise of its own illegitimacy […].) (Terkessidis: 299)

Selvadurai’s Arjie, then, alleviates this discomfort by effacing the contours of homophobic knowledge. The audience does not know what aspect of the performer’s identity it is really laughing at. It is in this sense that Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and the queer performance within it constitute both a ‘mainstreaming’ of queerness and its subversive inscription. Because the audience is unaware just what the queerness of the performer consists in, it is made to sit through the entire show, never quite suspecting that the joke is on itself, its own repertoire of homophobic knowledge. In this paper, I have argued for a fusing of queer theory and ethnic studies analysis across national lines. For the crux of Funny Boy is the fact that like Arjie, Black Tie is a Tamil. Arjie is faced with a dilemma in which he has to privilege one facet of his identity over another: he can support Black Tie’s rhetoric as a Tamil, or he can target his homophobia as a gay subject. Arjie’s mangling of Black Tie’s rhetoric can be seen as an opting out of this dilemma. As his performance becomes ultimately unreadable, he mangles both colonial discourse and Tamil identity politics. Crucially, however, because the queer discourse emerging from this mangling is itself an unintelligible one; an implicit privileging of Arjie’s gay identity is also suspended. What Arjie performs is precisely his role as a ‘funny boy’ which he has now appropriated and turned against the respective mainstreams: his performance is aimed at disrupting multiple kinds of subordination. Like Arjie himself, I have thus deliberately jumbled differences: the difference between homophobia and racism, between Turkish German Kabarett and a Sri Lankan Canadian novel. The claim implicit in this conflation, I hope, can be a subversive one. If mainstream strategies of exclusion are highly similar, with gay bashing paralleling racist taunts in their effects, we may do well to pool our resources in order to resist these strategies. In this very sense there is no paradox in the idea that the object of laughter should turn to the humour of political cabaret instead of tragedy as a

160

Mita Banerjee

strategy of resistance. This comic resistance, however, is emphatically different from merely ‘laughing off’ racism or homophobia. Rather, it is a laughter whose true object is blissfully unaware that it is being laughed at. In this sense, then, there is indeed nothing better than having a good laugh.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Crichlow, Wesley. ‘Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities.’ In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Ed. Terry Goldie. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2001. 69-85. Goldie, Terry. Introduction. In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Ed. Terry Goldie. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2001. 1-6. –––. ‘Queer Nation?’ In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Ed. Terry Goldie. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2001. 7-26. Gopinath, Gayatri. ‘Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion.’ Positions 5.2 (1997): 467-89. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. San Diego: Harvest, 1997. Terkessidis, Mark. ‘Kabarett und Satire deutsch-türkischer Autoren.’ Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. Carmine Chiellino. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.

ASTRID FELLNER AND KLAUS HEISSENBERGER

‘I was born in East L.A.’ Humour and the displacement of nationality and ethnicity

I want to go back to East L.A. I wish I was back in East L.A. I don’t belong here in downtown T.J. Cause I was born in East L.A., olé – Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin and Tommy Chong, ‘Born in East L.A.’ (1987)

A

merican humour, whether in literature or in film, has always been connected to the problematic nature inherent in the American Dream. Ethnic humour in particular has subjected the ideals of the nation to ironic play. Fuelled by the discrepancy between the cultural ideal and the daily reality, humour exposes national ideals to be ‘hollow and hypocritical, and the fact crude and disgusting’ (Rubin: 41). This incongruity is emblematic of the American experience: on the one hand, there are the ideals of freedom, equality, and economic success, and on the other, there are racial and ethnic subordination, inequality, and poverty. American humour, as Boskin astutely notes, ‘has consistently paid homage to the ideals of the Dream while slyly bad-mouthing its underside, occasionally succumbing to gallows asides’ (Boskin: 15). While Hollywood oftentimes affirms and consolidates the dominant ideals of American public discourse, it has also produced films which criticise these ideals through the deployment of humour. In the following we will analyse the Chicano film Born in East L.A., showing how this film challenges notions of American national identity by

162

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

revealing the contradictions inherent in the American dream.1 Written and directed by Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin, Born in East L.A. (1987) approaches issues of immigration and citizenship from a humorous perspective. While most Chicano films have focused on a strategy of unmasking negative stereotypes and affirming positive counter-images, Cheech Marin’s films have taken a different path. Born in East L.A. engages especially in a strategy of self-directed stereotyping, combining humour with considerable sarcasm which borders on the grotesque. Humorous elements, in this film, fulfil cathartic functions which serve to resist hegemonic representation and ease ethnic tensions. Much of the laughter derives from slapstick comedy, exaggerated, one-dimensional character presentation, the reversal of stereotypes, and the parodic treatment of cultural codes. Reworking Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and transferring it to a Chicano context, the film parodies notions of identity, home, and citizenship and reveals their ephemeral nature in American society. In particular, Born in East L.A. offers a critique of repressive immigration laws and paradoxical deportation practices, thereby exposing the fictions of the American Dream.

National identity, ‘Chicanoness,’ and citizenship In terms of its plot, Born in East L.A. seems straightforward enough. Rudy Robles, a third-generation Chicano, is deported to Mexico after la migra, the border patrol, has arrested him during a raid on a Los Angeles factory where Rudy had gone to pick up his Mexican cousin from work. The authorities deport Rudy to Tijuana together with the ‘illegal aliens’ found in the factory; this is clearly because of his ‘Mexican’ looks. He cannot make his status as a US citizen credible to the INS since he is not carrying any ID and is thus classified as Mexican even though he does not speak Spanish. In a series of humorous scenes and episodes, the ensuing narrative depicts Rudy’s various attempts to re-cross the border into the United States, where he rightfully belongs. Born in East L.A. reveals its social and political significance if read, as we propose, as a statement about belonging and identity. Highlighting the fragility of the Chicano protagonist’s sense of belonging and throwing into relief Rudy Robles’s identity as both a Chicano and an American, the film 1

The term ‘Chicano’ refers to persons of Mexican descent residing in the United States. This label appeared in the 1960s, signifying both a specific ethnic as well as political identity. ‘Chicano’ is often used interchangeably with the term ‘Mexican American,’ which is less political, drawing attention to the hybrid nature of identity. Ethnic labels reflect a group’s self-image and are therefore always fields of cultural critique. While there is considerable debate concerning terminology from a sociological perspective, the designation ‘Chicano’ prevails in academic discourse and will thus be used in this article. Corresponding to general usage, the term ‘Anglo’ is used to refer to ‘white’ persons of non-Hispanic descent.

‘I was born in East L.A.’

163

articulates its concern with belonging through the issues of American national identity, ‘Chicanoness,’ and citizenship. It thus strategically uses humour to articulate a crisis of US citizenship and American birthright in the 1980s.2 As the narrative and the mise-en-scène relocate Rudy’s seemingly stable existence literally across the southern border of the USA, they rearticulate his Chicano and American identity beyond and across that border – in fact, on both sides of it. The border, both literal and metaphorical, is a trope that is powerfully present in both Chicano cultural production and theoretical work on the conditions of subjectivity and identity in colonial and postcolonial societies. The border, or, in Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms, the borderland – theorised from the lived experiences of Chicanas who reside in the Southwest of the USA – is a ‘vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ (Anzaldúa: 25). As Anzaldúa reminds us, the border is in a ‘constant state of transition’ (25), and because it is far from constituting the site of a set, clear-cut boundary, but rather a space that is contested, the border produces identities that are not stable or fixed but characterized by flux and change. In and through these ‘hybrid’ identities, the borderland becomes a space where the boundary of the nation state itself is thrown into question. This border(land) is a transnational space rather than a territory, which Homi Bhabha has conceptualised as a ‘third space’ in which identity becomes rearticulated across and beyond the confines of the either / or logic of the national territories that the border divides. From this perspective, the borderlands are not at the margin but rather at the very centre of the national culture. They are situated, in fact, in the very definitions of and struggles about national identity and citizenship that characterize the culture of the modern nation state. In these struggles, Bhabha explains that the ‘marginal’ or ‘minority’ is the space of a ‘substantial intervention’ into justifying narratives of the nation in modernity that secure national identity (Bhabha 1990: 4), a third space that questions the ‘totalisation’ of national culture as it undoes the ‘“closure” of textuality’ of national discourses on which the seeming fixity of the boundary of national identity depends (Bhabha 1990: 3). The third space thus reveals that the dominant national identity itself is contested and that the ‘locality of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself,’ as Bhabha makes clear (1990: 4). Because ‘the “other” is never outside or beyond us’ but ‘emerges forcefully within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously “between ourselves”’ (Bhabha 1990: 4), the third space of identity highlights 2

As Horst Tonn has stated, the ‘issues of birthright, citizenship and national vs. ethnic identification are at the core of the film’ (79).

164

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

the existence of ethnic (and other) boundaries that intersect with the seemingly unified national identity and disrupt the complacent sense of unity in which dominant identity seeks to ground itself. Humour in Born in East L.A. can be understood as an intervention into the hegemonic colonial discourses of mainstream US culture; as a countercolonial discursive strategy that seeks to undo the ways in which the cultural mainstream constructs representations of ‘minorities’ in relation to the dominant national identity.3 Within this theoretical framework, we will analyse the use of humour in Marin’s film in terms of the critical intervention it produced in the assumptions about identity and citizenship that made up the political and popular common sense in the USA in the late 1980s. Through a witty parody of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the cultural icon Springsteen himself, Marin’s film reveals that American national identity, and the status and rights of American citizenship, were not extended to American subjects quite as easily as the dominant ideology at the time (and today) would lead one to believe. The film, we will argue, criticises the apparent unity and ‘givenness’ of American national identity. It shows that the link between American identity and citizenship cannot be taken for granted; and it thus subverts the dominant culture’s ideology of America extending the rights of citizenship to all her subjects freely and on equal terms. Simultaneously, Born in East L.A. questions notions of what the ‘other’ of this American subject exactly is. Born in East L.A. is a film, as Chon A. Noriega has remarked, ‘first and foremost about the ephemeral status of Chicano citizenship’ (Noriega: 109, our emphasis). As such, the struggle of the apparently Mexican-looking Rudy to re-enter the USA makes a strong statement about the ‘relationship between race and citizenship’ in the USA during the mid-1980s (Noriega: 110). This film can be read as a critique of the link between national and racial / ethnic identity and citizenship and of ways in which this link was being forged under the Reagan administration.

‘I was born in East L.A.’ Together with his long-time comedy partner Tommy Chong, Marin originally wrote ‘Born in East L.A.’ as a parody of Bruce Springsteen’s notorious 1984 3

With J. Jorge Klor de Alva, we propose that Chicano identity be regarded as grounded in and the effect of a ‘post-colonial’ discourse that is situated in relation to the colonial discourse of dominant U.S. culture. To analyze Chicano cultural production in terms of its ‘post-coloniality’ vis-á-vis ‘colonial’ cultural discourses ‘does not require an antecedent colonial experience as a referent’ (244) but can be understood in discursive terms. Postcoloniality is ‘a form of contestatory / oppositional consciousness, emerging from either preexisting imperial, colonial or ongoing subaltern conditions, which fosters processes aimed at revising the norms and practices of antecedent or still vital forms of domination’ in the colonial discourses of the dominant culture (245).

‘I was born in East L.A.’

165

hit ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ A music video was produced to go with Marin’s song, and after the music video the feature film was conceived, which uses the song as part of its soundtrack (Maciel: 324). At its core, Born in East L.A. is a parody of Bruce Springsteen that highlights and humorously assaults the construction of American identity in the 1980s. By 1984 Springsteen was a popular rock star, having already enjoyed a nationwide audience for almost a decade. His seventh album, Born in the U.S.A., achieved even greater commercial success in the one-and-a-half years after its release.4 That the singer became a cultural force whose presence was all but restricted to rock fans was due to more than sales figures. Through his music and the persona that he cultivated throughout his career, Springsteen came to embody the average American; he was perceived as prototypically ‘all-American.’ As an icon of American culture at large, Springsteen found himself in the midst of the country’s ongoing culture wars, squarely placed in the struggle over defining American national identity that Ronald Reagan had put at the top of his agenda. Already during Ronald Reagan’s first term of office, his administration had boosted a publicly displayed determination to restore American pride and patriotism (Brinkley: 880, 884). As the President himself put it in 1982, ‘we must mobilize every asset we have – spiritual, moral, educational, and military – in a crusade for national renewal’ (qtd. in Marcus: 235). The urgent sense of patrolling national identity and the heightened visibility of nationalist rhetoric in official discourse signalled that ‘Americanness’ was not to be taken for granted. Always fraught with multiple differences and the threat these differences posed to the unity in which America had time and again been constructed, national identity was in fact highly dependent on its various others in order to manifest itself. Significantly, the Republicans themselves revealed the ideological content of their vision of ‘America’ in the degree to which their idea of national identity was dependent on the exclusion of its others. Republican success in the elections of 1980 and 1984 depended on, among other factors, the strategy of ‘stoking the resentments of working-class whites uneasy about black gains since the Civil Rights Movement’ (Cullen: 4). It was the white working class that was ‘the keystone of Reagan’s electoral coalition, the bloc that turned the Republicans into the nation’s governing party in the 1980s’ (Cullen: 4). In the sense of National Renewal, and in a parallel manner, in most of the popular struggles over American national identity, that identity was far from being conceived as unmarked by race and ethnicity or class. On the contrary, 4

Born in the U.S.A. made it to number one on the U.S. album charts, remaining in the top ten for two years; it yielded seven top-ten singles; and it eventually sold about twenty million copies in the U.S. and ten million more abroad (cf. Cullen: 234-5).

166

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

‘Americanness’ was obviously coded as white and working-class, and to a considerable degree as male. To those who cared to probe into the ambivalent red-white-and-blue iconography of Springsteen’s self-representations and to listen to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ for more than the deceiving simplicity of its anthemic chorus, Springsteen’s work revealed a healthy dose of criticism of the USA under Reagan.5 To be sure, for many of his fans, Springsteen’s work amounted to a frank rebuttal of conservative visions in which American identity was guaranteed by the uncritical belief in work ethic taken to its extreme. However, Springsteen’s critique was not deep-seated enough to unmask the processes of ethnic / racial, sex and class identification that were at the core of the 1980s discourses on ‘Americanness.’ Ambivalently signifying ‘white male working class,’ Springsteen left the ideological underpinnings of the identity politics in the cultural mainstream untouched. Cheech Marin did not. Born in East L.A. is a truly caustic parody of the way in which national identity was constructed in Springsteen’s songs and persona at the time. In the sense in which Linda Hutcheon has characterized parody as a prime characteristic of a number of contemporary cultural practices, the film is a ‘repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the heart of similarity’ (1988: 26). By ‘presupposing both a law and its transgression’ (1985: 101), parody highlights the complex relation between the ‘original’ and its ‘imitation.’ Through hyperbole and slapstick comedy and the subtle but effective shifts in signification they produce, Born in East L.A. both repeats Springsteen’s construction of allAmerican characters and critically distinguishes itself from it. Just as Springsteen’s preferred characters, Rudy Robles, the protagonist of Born in East L.A., is a working man. In a scene at the beginning of the film, Rudy is shown heading to work at an autobody shop, where he is a car mechanic. While cruising through East LA at 8 a.m., he spots a beautiful white woman in a green dress and tries to follow her in his car. Whistling after her and crying out to her in the most machismo manner, he tries to attract her attention and make a pass at her in a number of brief but grotesquely comical scenes. The woman is in fact one of his clients in the small auto repair shop, where Rudy instructs her on the new stereo system he 5

At that time, Springsteen presented himself posing in front of the American flag in a white shirt and blue jeans on the Born in the U.S.A. album cover, and he had a huge star-spangled banner draped across the background of the stage during his live shows. For many fans, however, the seemingly straightforward patriotism of such imagery was undercut and made highly ambivalent by Springsteen’s lyrics – narratives of working-class characters alienated from the society they lived in, such as that of the Vietnam veteran of ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ who, ten years after his return from the war, still finds himself drifting down the road without a job or a purpose.

‘I was born in East L.A.’

167

has installed in her car. The woman, Rudy’s desire for her, his profession, and the scene in the garage can be read as a rather funny parody of Springsteen’s music video to ‘I’m On Fire,’ one of the hit singles of the Born in the U.S.A. album. In the song, the narrator, who is ‘on fire’ in his sexual desire for a woman, is not identified in terms of his age, ethnicity, social background, or occupation. In the music video, Springsteen plays the part of the narrator, making him a white male in his mid-thirties and, significantly, working-class – he is an auto mechanic. Before the music sets in, the video has Springsteen peek out from underneath a car at a white convertible rolling into the garage, and then at the legs of a white woman stepping out of it. The woman, obviously an acquaintance of the mechanic, turns over the car keys to him and leaves after having turned down his offer to drive the car out to her place once it is repaired. The class difference between mechanic and client is enhanced in the protagonist’s desiring gaze, which the viewer of the video is made to share. In this gaze, sexual desire is marked by social difference which itself is set up by a stark contrast between the bright white paint of the convertible and the white of the woman’s dress on the one hand, and the dirt of the garage on the other. The ‘white’ skin colour of the woman’s hand (with nails painted a bright red and golden jewelry glittering, extended in a close-up to hand over the car keys) is contrasted with the dirt and grease on the hand of the mechanic (who, in addition, looks up at her practically from the garage floor as she is standing tall above him). As the sexual desire in the video to ‘I’m On Fire’ is thus evoked by a gap of class as much as of sex, the spectacle of visual difference mainly serves to inscribe the protagonist (and through him, Springsteen) as working-class, i.e. as the all-American working man. Significantly, his being ‘white’ was, in the cultural mainstream of the time, never an issue. In contrast to Springsteen’s protagonist, though, Rudy is not only decidedly working-class, but also unmistakenly ‘ethnic.’ His Chicano identity codes the dimension of ethnicity into the dynamics of national identification. And importantly, ethnic identity is shown as invariably linked to class identity. What marks Rudy as different from his female client is not only gender identity and class status, but also skin colour. In the critical distance with which the parody ‘repeats’ the original, Marin’s slightly ‘dark’ complexion can be read as a metaphor for the dirt and grease displayed on Springsteen’s face in the video – and vice versa. ‘Dark’ or ‘nonwhite’ skin colour as a marker of ethnicity and dirt as marker of class become interchangeable; the dark colour on Springsteen’s face becomes the dark colour of Marin’s face. As dirt and grease can be supplanted by skin colour as a marker of class, Born in East L.A. reveals a sarcastic yet highly insightful twist on the dynamics of identity as articulated in the Springsteen video.

168

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

Class is no longer unmarked by ethnicity or race – uncritically and ‘naturally’ white, as with Springsteen – but is revealed as itself marked as racial / ethnic, and vice versa. The fact that Rudy and the white woman are separated not only by class difference but also by the gulf of ethnicity / race adds an even more ironic dimension to his comical desire for her. Unmasking the dynamics of ethnic and class identification at work in the multicultural realities of Los Angeles in the 1980s and, metonymically, the USA at large, Born in East L.A., through the back door of the Springsteen parody, sneaked into a cultural mainstream that was rather unwilling to accept that the American working class – the backbone or prototype of ‘Americanness’ in the 1980s, according to the cultural mainstream of the time6 – was not necessarily primarily white. In the space in which Marin’s film thus enacted its critical distancing from the ‘original,’ it highlighted what was left out in Springsteen’s version and in the culture at large. The film affects an ideological critique that runs deeper than Springsteen’s song; a critique that not only managed to fill in the blind spots of Springsteen’s ideological road map of 1980s America, but also, significantly, confronted that America with what it stubbornly preferred to overlook in its quest for national identity – the significant presence of others who were as much part of America as they were excluded from or misrepresented in its popular selfimagination.

‘Orale vato, waas sappening?’ In addition to the subversion of American national identity through the Springsteen parody, the film also offers a critique of essentialist notions of ethnic identity. Race and ethnicity are intertwined with language, and in the USA the English language, although not the official language, serves as a marker of national identity. When Born in East L.A. was first released, the English-Only movement was at its height, and the film can be directly read as a critique of nativist tendencies which espouse the idea of melting-pot ethnicity, in which unity of language goes hand-in-hand with cultural uniformity and assimilationist notions of Americanism.7 The film ridicules 6

7

One need only think of the representations of ‘America’ and American identity through the working class protagonists of a number of immensely popular films, e.g. in Sylvester Stallone’s character Rocky in the sequence of the same title, or in the representation of the trauma the American working class – and thus the U.S.A. – suffered through the Vietnam war in the wave of ‘Vietnam films’ of the 1980s. That Reagan’s success was founded on white working class voters (cf. Cullen: 4) was a significant parallel to such mainstream cultural representations. In 1981 the question of an official language in the U.S. became a national concern when the then senator of California Samuel I. Hayakawa proposed the English Language Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which did not pass. In California, however, voters passed a

‘I was born in East L.A.’

169

these assumptions as it shows that there is no direct relation between language and nationality. Though a native speaker of English, Rudy cannot convince the border patrol that he is American. He does not even speak Spanish, and the film shows his linguistic efforts to get by in Mexico. In Tijuana he works in a pool hall run by an American expatriate named Jimmy, who promises to smuggle him back into the USA. Rudy accepts a job teaching a group of Asian workers – referred to as ‘OTMs’ or Other Than Mexican, by Jimmy – how to pass as Chicano in the USA. Apart from the irony in this scene – Rudy teaches other people to pass as Chicano in East LA when he himself could not pass – this scene is also profoundly funny, as Rudy only practices the Chicano phrase ‘Orale vato, waas sappening’ (literally translated ‘Hey dude, what’s happening?’). This sentence, which reappears several times during the film and in the end, after they have successfully crossed the border into California, saves the Asian immigrants from deportation, serves as a stereotypical marker of Chicano ethnicity. The presence of these Asian workers in the film, which is underscored by stereotypical ‘Chinese’ music, alludes to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, adding yet another critique of restrictive immigration laws.8 Examining ‘Chicanoness’ in relation to and through the fragile status of citizenship of Chicanos in the USA, the film thus renegotiates Chicano identity both in its status relative to the dominant national subject and to the ‘otherness’ of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, as well as other ethnic minorities. It rearticulates a critical version of ‘Chicanoness’ in and as a third space in American national culture. As Noriega states, ‘unlike earlier accommodationist politics among Mexican-Americans in which American citizenship and Mexican immigration were placed in opposition, Born in East L.A. conflates Chicano nationalism (which is inherently pro-immigration) with the national ideology of America as a land of immigrants’ (Noriega: 109-10). While Chicano identity, as it was defined by the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, replicated a rhetoric of inner cohesion which was turned into an oppositional consciousness against the dominant Anglo social order, Born in East L.A. focuses on the problems of such essentialist identity conceptions. In many cultural representations, being Chicano is still related to concepts of la raza (the race or people) and thus the establishment of group solidarity based on racial terms. The idea of Latinos as the ‘brown race’ provides ‘a discursively powerful category of struggle and resistance

8

referendum in November 1986, known as Proposition 63, which made English the official language of that state. For further details, see Baron: 1-26. As Noriega states, there is a correlation between the Chinese Exclusion Act and Mexican migrant workers, as Mexicans replaced Chinese as a cheap labour pool in the Southwest in the period between 1880 and 1920 (cf. Noriega: 116).

170

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

upon which to build in-group identity and cross-group solidarity with African Americans’ (Darder and Torres: 9). Connected with this nationalist discourse is the legend of Aztlán, the mythical homeland of Chicanos, which became the battle cry of the Chicano Movement and which was frequently employed in many texts of the 1960s and 70s. Aztlán, the Edenic place of origin of the Aztecs located somewhere in what is now the American Southwest, serves as a common point of descent, distinguishing and separating Chicanos from both Anglos and Mexicans south of the border. Marin’s film does not call for a nationalist homeland for Chicanos, but establishes a metonymic relation between the barrio East LA and the entire country by rearticulating Springsteen’s chorus ‘I was born in the U.S.A.’ as ‘I was born in East L.A.’ Chicano identity is thus shown as neither existing in opposition to nor in isolation from American national identity, but as being inextricably related to it – specifically ethnic and yet, at the same time, American. The film also criticises essentialist conceptions of Chicano identity by laying bare the internal contradictions within Chicano culture, in particular the discourses of carnalismo and compadres (brotherhood and brothers), which were celebrated during the Chicano Movement. The film in general engages in a strategy of ‘self-directed stereotyping,’ combining humour with considerable sarcasm. As Christine List argues, ethnic boundaries are constantly defused in Marin’s film as stereotyping, which is usually directed at the ‘other,’ becomes reversed. Humour and laughter thus depend on the foregrounding of ethnicity as the film forces the viewer to recognize otherness (cf. List 184-6). While at first glance Born in East L.A. seems to affirm preconceived negative stereotypes of Mexican Americans, a closer look reveals that the film uses these stereotypes subversively. According to Bhabha, the stereotype is the ‘major discursive category’ of colonial discourse. It is a ‘form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place,” already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ in order to inscribe its ambivalent ‘truth’ (Bhabha 1994: 66).9 The film constitutes such an anxious repetition, mimicking the stereotype of the pachuco, the street-wise, young, urban, working-class Chicano, and evoking a parodic laughter through the use of hyperbole. The utterance of the sentence ‘Orale vato, waas sappening,’ which suggests a certain male bonding, together with highly stylized bodily ‘masculine’ gestures, immediately evokes the stereotype of the pachuco. As a symbol of defiance, the pachuco exaggerates American culture and produces himself as a cultural hybrid, as he combines Mexican as well as US Anglo 9

Homi Bhabha speaks of the ‘productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse – that “otherness” which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity’ (1994: 67).

‘I was born in East L.A.’

171

elements in the way he dresses, speaks and acts. Marin translates this stereotype into visual hyperbole when in a scene towards the beginning of the film, we see Rudy leave his house in a lowrider-fashioned pink Volkswagen Bug with the licence plate ‘Pink Luv.’ Debunking the stereotype of the oversexed macho, Rudy starts to chase a white woman in a green dress. This woman, who is also the parodic woman of Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire,’ is identified as French by her heavy accent. When Rudy loses sight of her, he asks other men in the barrio if they have seen a tall, red-headed woman in a green dress. They all point in one direction, freezing in their gaze at the French woman who is beyond their reach. Then we see the woman pass in front of a mural, looking at another man squatted in front of a lowrider painted on the wall.10 This scene is followed by a shot of a wildly bouncing lowrider – a phallic symbol – when the woman crosses the street. While the appearance of this woman does not seem to have any immediate significance for the plot of the film, she clearly serves as a leitmotif as she walks through the barrio at the beginning and the end of the film, framing the episodes in between. The use of a stereotypical French woman in this film ridicules the discourse of carnalismo by juxtaposing it to an excess of femininity. In her exaggerated sexuality the French woman clearly poses a threat to Chicano masculinity. By repeating the stereotype of the pachuco and contrasting it with a stereotypical image of a ‘white’ woman, the film thus exposes essentialist discourses of sexuality. The fact that this woman is not only ‘white’ but also French deserves some observation. Through the conflation of the discourses of sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality, which intersect in the depiction of this French woman, the film not only transcends ethnic boundaries but also national ones. As Noriega has remarked, the French woman can be read as an allegory of citizenship, as her highly stylised appearance – she has alabaster skin, red hair, and a green dress – recall of the colours of the Mexican flag. As he states: These colors, in addition to her heavy French accent and reappearance during the Cinco de Mayo parade at the end of the film, link her to the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s. First, it posits an historical connection between the Chicano barrio and Mexico on the basis of colonialism, with the French woman serving as an allegorical figure for French colonialism in Mexico and, by extension, internal colonialism in East L.A. (Noriega: 114)

Symbolising colonialism, the French woman thus stresses the main themes of the film – national versus ethnic identity, immigration, and US citizenship. She embodies ‘the dual or double-edged notion of “liberty” the French acted 10

Lowriders are considered the typical cars of pachucos.

172

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

out in the Americas in the mid-1800s’ (Noriega: 114). It was after all the French who in 1886 presented the Statue of Liberty to the USA as a gift of freedom. The link between the French woman and liberty is made clear in the scene in which the French woman is positioned between the Mexican and the American flag, striking a pose similar to that of the Statue of Liberty. Referencing the Statue of Liberty, this woman thus ‘negotiates a complex relationship between Mexico and the United States, one that calls into question the symbolic purity of the Statue of Liberty in identifying the United States as a nation of immigrants’ (Noriega: 114). Standing between these two countries, her exaggerated erotic pose suggests a welcome to immigrants. But as a sexual object which is displayed for the enjoyment of men and which controls their gaze, the French woman also threatens to evoke the anxiety of castration. Connoting oppression, she becomes a powerful symbol of the threat of cultural emasculation. She not only poses a threat to Chicano masculinity, but to ‘Chicanoness’ itself, signifying the elusive character of ethnic identity. This fear of a ‘loss’ of identity constitutes itself for Rudy when he is deported to Mexico. The French woman thus also foreshadows Rudy’s deportation, the symbolic castration of his citizenship. As an object of desire, she draws attention to the desired ideal of the American Dream, which not only remains unfulfilled for most recent immigrants but also for citizens who were born in the USA.

‘They’re coming to America’ The ideological critique evinced in Born in East L.A. reaches its climax at the end of the film when all parodic repetitions merge into a powerful culminating statement about American nationalist ideals. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to cross the border back into the USA, Rudy finally manages to earn enough money to pay for a smuggler. But when he sees the misery of another family who do not have enough money to buy their way into the USA, he gives up his seat in the car which is supposed to smuggle him across the border. The film then takes a sudden turn, and, in a utopian manner not untypical of postmodern cultural productions, the last two scenes leave the level of ‘reality’ by delving into the realm of the mythical. In an image which renders Rudy a saviour, a Moses to his people, he raises his arms to initiate a massive storming of the border. A multitude of people run down the hills into the ‘promised land’ and trample the border patrol, epitomizing Anglo Americans’ worst fear about illegal aliens. This multiracial and multi-national assault on the border is accompanied by Neil Diamond’s song ‘America,’ which purports a vision of America as a land of immigrants. This song was also played at the rededication ceremony for the

‘I was born in East L.A.’

173

Statue of Liberty in 1986.11 The use of Diamond’s lyrics at this point in the film, especially the lines ‘Got a dream they come to share. They’re coming to America’ is, of course, deeply ironic because the daily reality in American immigration politics, as the film has so pointedly shown, is different. When the spectator of the film thus hears Neil Diamond’s hymn to the promised land, the gap between the ‘America’ the film has portrayed on the one hand and the naivety displayed in the song on the other becomes the very measure of the amount of irony through which the film displaces the ideology of the ‘Land of the Free.’ That there is a long way to go towards realizing this vision in US society is wittily demonstrated one more time at the very end of the film, when the song ‘Born in East L.A.’ is played. In the concluding scene, Rudy and the ‘OTMs’ emerge from a sewer amidst the Cinco de Mayo parade in East LA. The ‘OTMs’ manage to pass as Chicano by using Rudy’s formulaic ‘Orale vato, waas sappening.’ It is at this point that the French woman appears again, freezing the gaze of the camera. Ending in this freeze-frame, the song ‘Born in East L.A.’ sets in, completing the parodic game. The final scenes thus synthesise the dominant themes and the major symbols of the film. In referencing two Anglo American popular songs, Marin’s parody expands the discourses of immigration to nonEuropean-descent immigrants, hinting at the inevitable cultural hybridisation of the USA. Born in East L.A. thus critically rearticulates different discourses of nationality, citizenship, ethnicity / race, etc. in relation to each other. It highlights their historically specific use and presents a strategic counter-use of these discourses in constructing Rudy as both an American and Chicano subject. The film articulates a complex notion of identity for Rudy – and by extension for Chicanos in general – that explodes any simple, essentialist notion of American identity, such as the 1980s version of the liberal ideology of American-citizenship-through-birth. It propagates a notion of identity that refuses to be delimited by popular sentiments of ‘Americanness’ based on the assumption of English language and Anglo culture, and that, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to essentialist nationalist versions of ‘Chicanoness’ that seek to ground Chicano identity in ‘Mexicanness’ or fix it in relating it to concepts of la Raza, or the return to an imaginary homeland. In this way, Born in East L.A. opens up a space for an alternative, critical version of American / Chicano identity. The film opts for a vision of identity that leaves the gap in American ideology open and visible, while pointing out the 11

After five years of renovation, the Statue of Liberty was rededicated on 4 July 1986 by President Ronald Reagan. The festivities lasted for four days and featured performances by various artists, including Neil Diamond. For further details, see Jason Manning at http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id306.htm (accessed 20 May 2004).

174

Astrid Fellner / Klaus Heissenberger

discrepancies in different constructions of Chicano identity as well, and at the same time determinedly claiming a space for Chicano identity within American identity at large. Summarising the narrative, the song ‘Born in East L.A.’ once more underscores the film’s ironic deconstruction of the American Dream, 1980s-style. In contrast to Springsteen’s original song, however, Marin’s parody is not an angry, defiant, but rather a humorous, sly observation of the America of its day and on the fate of the American subject involuntarily gone astray. Hearing ‘Born in East L.A.’ as the credits roll, the spectator may empathise with the singer – and with Rudy Robles – when he professes, tongue-in-cheek, that he finally ‘know[s] what it’s like to be born to run,’ and that he is glad to be ‘back in East L.A.,’ in the ‘promised land,’ even though this promise is still ‘shining like a star just beyond my hand.’

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Spinster, Aunt Lute, 1999. Baron, Dennis. The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. –––, ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Born in East L.A. Dir. Richard Marin. 1987. DVD video. Goodtimes Home Video, 2001. Boskin, Joseph. Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. New York: Knopf, 1993. Cullen, Jim. Born in the U.S.A. Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. Darder, Antonia, and Rodolfo D. Torres. ‘Latinos and Society: Culture, Politics, and Class.’ The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society. Ed. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 3-26. Diamond, Neil. ‘America.’ The Jazz Singer. Sony Records, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. –––. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London: Methuen, 1985.

‘I was born in East L.A.’

175

Klor de Alva, J. Jorge. ‘The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of “Colonialism,” “Postcolonialism,” and “Mestizaje.”’ After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Ed. Gyan Prakash. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. 241-75. List, Christine. ‘Self-Directed Stereotyping in the Films of Cheech Marin.’ Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 183-94. Maciel, David R. ‘Latino Cinema.’ Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art. Ed. Nicolás Kanellos and Claudio Esteva-Fabregat. Houston: Arte Público P, 1993. 314-25. Manning, Jason. ‘Miss Liberty Gets a Face Lift.’ 20 May 2004 . Marcus, Greil. In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Noriega, Chon A. ‘“Waas Sappening?”: Narrative Structure and Iconography in Born In East L.A.’ Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 14 (1995): 107-28. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. ‘The Great American Joke.’ The Humor Prism in 20thCentury America. Ed. Joseph Boskin. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 33-45. Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ Born in the U.S.A. Columbia Records, 1984. –––. ‘I’m on Fire.’ Born in the U.S.A. Columbia Records, 1984. –––. ‘I’m on Fire.’ 1984. Music video. The Complete Video Anthology/19781988. Columbia Music Video, 2001. Tonn, Horst. ‘Hispanic Film in the United States: The Past Two Decades.’ U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures. Transnational Perspectives. Ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Karin Ikas. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000. 71-80.

This page intentionally left blank

CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE

‘The sketch’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the audience’ Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies in Britain, the United States, and Germany

There are jokes that’ll make you squirm and jokes that’ll make you laugh, and 1 jokes that’ll make you wonder why you laughed.

F

rom the advent of mass television in the 1950s until very recently, most Western audiences spent their evenings quite comfortably watching a homogeneous cast of white characters.2 Judging from the representation in the particularly popular genre of situation comedy, Britain was populated solely by people such as those featured in The Grove Family, Steptoe and Son, or To the Manor Born. Likewise, the United States, quintessentially multiethnic in its streets, came across on the television screen as a curious, lily-white family clan comprised of The Brady Bunch, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and The Golden Girls.3 The few deviations from this norm were limited to ethnic protagonists who enlivened the cosy world of sitcom families, but did not disturb the overall propagation of whiteness, such as I 1 2 3

The epigraph is taken from an advertisement for the ABC-documentary What’s So Funny? which explores the careers of various comedians from marginalized groups. I would like to thank Alex Elliott, Michaela Hoeher, and Sabine Knott for their great help in procuring visual material. In fact, David Grote explains that the standard middle-class sitcom family of the 1950s and 1960s was so ubiquitous that a joke claimed ‘that if Hamlet were to be made into a series, he would probably marry Ophelia and have three kids and a pet bear’ (Grote: 72).

178

Christiane Schlote

Love Lucy’s Ricky Ricardo or the Jewish Goldberg-family. It was only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the ensuing political mobilisation of discriminated ethnic groups in the late 1960s, that non-white British and American actors were cast as sitcom characters. In the British context, this shift was marked by The Fosters (ITV: 1976-77) and Desmond’s (Channel 4: 1989-95). In regard to the American sitcom, The Cosby Show (NBC: 198492) functioned as the trailblazer for a change in the portrayal of African Americans on television and beyond.4 These family sitcoms were a marked improvement to rare previous representations of black characters, most infamously illustrated by the first American all-black television comedy Amos ‘n Andy (CBS: 1951-53), whose racialised and stereotyped Harlem-characters caused massive protests from parts of the African American community. Even though Desmond’s and The Cosby Show featured more multidimensional, and – formerly unheard of – successful black male protagonists (barber shop owner Desmond and obstetrician Cliff Huxtable) and their functional families, they were also criticised for their alleged striving for white middle-class values. This kind of intra-communal criticism already indicates the narrow path between the thorny issues of race and class to be tread carefully by ethnic comedians. Due to the very different immigration and labour migration history in Germany, the first German soap opera, Lindenstrasse (ARD: 1985-present), also presented the first ethnic protagonists: the Greek family Sarikakis. The proliferation of so-called ethnic comedies in various Western countries in the 1990s (e.g. Goodness Gracious Me in Britain, All-American Girl in the United States, Was guckst du? in Germany, La Famille Ramdan in France5) occurs in the wake of these earlier ethnic sitcoms and earlier ethnic stand-up comedians, such as the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and also Woody Allen (whom Meera Syal even calls ‘an honorary Punjabi;’ Vidal and Asafu-Adjaye), and at the nexus of the following two developments: on the one hand, the increased visibility of second- and third-generation artists of immigrant descent and what Stuart Hall defined as ‘new forms of cultural practice’ (Hall 1994: 393) and, on the other, the profound economic, cultural and social transformations of the last three decades (e.g. mass migration, income polarisation, transnational spaces), as described by urban theorists.6

4

5 6

For detailed analyses of Black British representations on television see Pines and Ross. See also Susanne Mühleisen’s contribution in this volume. For a critique of African American television history, see Gray and Jhally and Lewis. For an analysis of this Maghrebian sitcom see Hargreaves. See, for example, Sassen and Soja.

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

179

As early as 1989, David Harvey argued that mobility and flexibility in terms of labour and consumer markets do not necessarily indicate that capitalism becomes more ‘disorganized’ but that it can be seen as strengthening its already tight organisation due to economic globalisation and the commodification of information and knowledge through controlled channels such as the media and advertisement (Harvey: 159-61). Even a brief survey of the cultural industry, whether we look at the market for postcolonial literatures or for ‘World Music,’ clearly shows that these industries have recognised the symptoms of our times. Not surprisingly, television as the major entertainment medium of our age has also been searching for more globally adequate marketing strategies. On the whole, this presents the advanced and postmodernized version of emphasizing consumer spending within television shows, which, as George Lipsitz has shown, already began in the 1950s, when American television ‘was charged with special responsibilities for making new economic and social relations credible and legitimate’ and functioned as a ‘mediator between the family and the economy’ (Lipsitz: 42, 53). The genre of the ethnic comedy can be seen as one attempt of today’s television programme makers to respond to demographic and cultural changes as well as to tap into mostly young, consumer-oriented segments of the audience for their advertisers. Regarding the classification of these sitcoms as ‘ethnic comedy,’ it should be noted that ethnicity continues to be a contested concept, and Irving Howe’s well-known remark, ‘[n]o one quite knows what ethnicity means: that is why it’s so useful a term’ (Howe: 19), remains true, particularly, as both socially constructed categories, ethnicity and ‘race,’ are in constant flux. As a social construct, ethnicity commonly refers to a variety of social practices and traditions (i.e. language, religion, national origin, etc.) shared by one group (Kivisto: 44ff.); as such it is applicable to minority and majority cultures and can be used both as means for discrimination as well as empowerment (as in the case of ethnic comedy). Nevertheless it should be remembered, as Shirley Geok-lin Lim und Amy Ling point out, that the concept of a ‘voluntary or multiple-choice ethnicity’ (as in the case of Irish or German Americans, for example) cannot simply be applied to non-white people. Referring to the internment of Japanese American citizens in the United States in 1942, they state ‘ethnicity as a marker of difference – containing already and always the possibility of socio-political content (as in discriminatory acts, violence, prejudices, unequal treatment, whether positive or negative, enacted legislation and so on) – was and remains an active cultural yeast’ (Lim and Ling: 25f.). In the same vein, Bonnie TuSmith explains: ‘What got lost in the shuffle was the truism that “ethnicity is often a matter of choice for whites;” with nonwhites, however, this was not possible,

180

Christiane Schlote

because their skin color, hair texture, and stature made them easily recognizable [...]. While ethnicity might prove a passing phase for the white population in America, it is here to stay for the easily identifiable other’ (TuSmith: 13). In view of the aforementioned developments and even at the risk of sounding somewhat trite, it is worth reiterating that television comedy in particular is not necessarily a funny, but by all accounts a big business, as witnessed most sensationally in the price for thirty seconds-advertising slots during the last episode of the American sitcom Seinfeld, which reportedly cost two million dollars (Walker: 95). This might be partly explained with the specific nature of American network television and its syndication system, where the success of a show is measured ruthlessly by its ratings (Grote: 64), but it is also important in the British and German contexts. So far, analyses of ethnic comedies have mainly focused on the question whether the comedians use their cultural and national heritages to confront and eventually subvert ethnic and racial stereotypes, or whether their, although satirical, incorporation of these stereotypes into their sketches does not, in fact, lead to their reinforcement (Price; Weedon). In this essay, I suggest to partly move beyond this debate through a comparative analysis of the specific strategies and risks involved in three Western ethnic television comedies: the first South Asian sketch show on British television, Goodness Gracious Me (BBC2: 1998-2000), the pioneering Asian American sitcom All-American Girl (ABC: 1994-95), and the first German Turkish comedy show Was guckst du?7 (SAT1: January 2001-present). As in the case of music by artists from marginalised groups (e.g. Rap or Bhangra), ethnic comedy, through its appropriation by pop and youth cultures, is easily affected by mechanisms of commodification. Furthermore, I am only too aware of the markedly different historical, cultural and socio-political contexts these shows and their protagonists are situated in, pertaining, for instance, to the comedians’ descent from postcolonial, minority, or labour migrant groups, and the different national constructions of race-relations. Thus, this analysis seeks to firmly contextualise all three examples within their particular environments as well as within the crucible of post-industrial societies, new patterns of consumption, and identity politics. Goodness Gracious Me was first broadcast as a series on BBC Radio Four in 1996. After its transformation into a television series and its subsequent tour in a stage version, it quickly became to be seen as a flagship for British Asian comedy, garnering enthusiastic reviews and media awards and attracting a large audience across ethnic groups. The young, yet veteran 7

Jordan Bonfante’s translation of the title as ‘Whaddaya Looking At?’ best captures the phrase’s colloquial and provocative character (Bonfante).

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

181

British Asian actors and comedians Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal, and Nina Wadia make up the show’s main cast and also co-write the script.8 Goodness Gracious Me operates on a formula which can be roughly divided into ‘universally appealing’ sketches (e.g. featuring intergenerational family conflicts), intertextual parodies of British, American, and Indian television and movie formats, as well as ‘reversal’ sketches, which are mainly employed for the exposure of overt and covert racism and xenophobia within British society. One example of the latter would be a sketch which reverses the racial discrimination in recruitment and employment experienced by South Asians, by depicting a white British man who is being introduced as a new colleague in an Indian company. His persistent refusal to ‘Indianise’ his ‘long and complicated English name’ (Jonathan), thus to assimilate, is countered by his colleagues with the implicit threat of discrimination at work and no career advancement.9 The Asian American sitcom All-American Girl evolved out of the comedy act of the Korean American stand-up comedienne Margaret Cho in 1994. AllAmerican Girl displays the characteristic formula of American family sitcoms mainly dealing with problems between parents and their adolescent children. In this case, it is father and mother Kim, whose sons Stewart and Eric have turned out to their satisfaction, but who have a hard time coming to terms with the rebellious antics of their daughter Margaret (played by Margaret Cho). The paternal grandmother figure complements the family setup located in San Francisco. The sitcom (and Cho’s ‘valley girl’-like character) is a far cry from Cho’s brash, confrontational stand-up act and her provocative self-definition as a ‘fag hag’ and former alcoholic, drug addict and promiscuous ‘slut’ in one of her live performances titled I’m The One That I Want (2000). Significantly, it illustrates the importance of the structural contexts ethnic comedy is situated in, which will be analysed more closely below. The German comedy show Was guckst du? was also developed out of a stand-up performance. Kaya Yanar, born in Germany of Turko-Syrian descent, was performing at national fairs and comedy clubs, before being offered his own comedy show on the private television station SAT1, which thereby put new life into its waning German comedy fare. Yanar, a former

8

9

Following Goodness Gracious Me, Sanjeev Bhaskar wrote The Kumars at Number 42, a spoof chat show (with prominent guests), featuring Bhaskar as a British Asian chat show host, broadcasting his show from a studio built for him by his parents in their backyard, and Meera Syal as his grandmother Sushila. The show is broadcast on BBC2 and has also developed into a hit comedy, picking up many awards (such as the Emmy 2002) along the way. For a closer analysis of individual sketches see the studies by Schlote and Weedon.

182

Christiane Schlote

student of phonetics, who speaks neither Turkish nor Arabic, specialises in presenting linguistic caricatures of a broad number of immigrants of various national descents in Germany. The show’s website greets its fans with Yanar’s signature question ‘Was guckst du?’ in thirty-four languages from Afghan to Urdu and offers ‘everything you ever wanted to know about foreigners.’ There is a recurring cast of characters, such as the Indian cab driver Ranjid, the Turkish radio host Suleyman, or the journalist Tarek employed by the TV-station Dubai 2, reminiscent of (and sometimes even clearly copied from) such Goodness Gracious Me-stock characters as the young man who always appears with different female companions in a restaurant, only to insult each and every one of them. Although all three shows differ substantially in terms of form, content, and context, they also share common experiences of group expectations, media celebrations, and communal criticism, which form the cornerstones of the discourse they are performing in. Judging from the divided reception within their communities and national mainstream societies, respectively, time seems to have come to a standstill since the early 1950s, when the African American community was strongly divided in their reception of the aforementioned all-black sitcom Amos ‘n Andy. Some black community leaders went as far as the federal court to protest its broadcast, since they felt ‘it made the only televised presentation of Afro-American life an insulting one.’ Others, however, among them the black actors involved in the show, argued that the sitcom was a ‘harmless satire’ which brought ‘much needed exposure to black actors’ (Lipsitz: 65). Almost the same arguments have resurfaced in the context of Goodness Gracious Me, All-American Girl, and Was guckst du? All three shows have been criticised by members of the British Asian, the Asian (and more specifically Korean) American, and the Turkish German community, respectively, as well as by cultural critics, for their careless perpetuation of racial and ethnic stereotypes and their mockery of religious symbols from Islam (as when Yanar describes ‘Turko-Arabic cockroaches with full beards and prayer-beads’) and Hinduism (as when in Goodness Gracious Me the holy fire is called a ‘fondue’). In his major work, Ethnic Humour Around the World (1990), Christie Davies reminds us, that ‘to become angry about jokes and to seek to censor them because they impinge on sensitive issues is about as sensible as smashing a thermometer because it reveals how hot it is’ (Davis: 9). Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the all-important questions of who is allowed to joke about whom, the differences of laughing with, at or about specific members of a multiethnic society, and not least, as Chris Weedon emphasises, the controversial character of comedy as a tool for ‘raising issues of cultural difference and challenging racism and ethnocentrism’ (Weedon:

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

183

262), need to be addressed thoroughly. At the same time, the shows’ complicated position between exaggerated expectations for greater media exposure and extreme scrutiny from all sides in an era of tense race-relations, should not be underestimated. Given the fact that all three shows mark a milestone with regard to comedy representations of British Asian, Korean American and Turkish German people, it is perhaps not surprising that they have been confronted with the same debates as Black sitcoms and comedy shows before them. In this respect, critics often seem to neglect to take into account the different phases in the development of black cultural politics in postwar Britain as well as in the United States. In his seminal essay ‘New Ethnicities,’ Hall clearly identified the black experience as the common political framework of the 1970s and 1980s but also noted its ensuing necessary deconstruction due to the rejection of the socially constructed umbrella term ‘black’ by British Asians and a further split into different religious and linguistic groups (Hall 1996: 163-72). This development is analogous to the history of political activism of Asian, Latina/o and Native American groups and their efforts of deconstructing essentialised notions of non-white subjects. On the whole, these groups initiated a significant shift away from the binary black-and-white discourse.10 The step into prime time limelight undertaken by the casts of Goodness Gracious Me and All-American Girl and by Kaya Yanar has established two important points: first, they emphasised television’s need to catch up with the demographic and cultural changes of the last three decades, or, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown tells us: ‘The point of having a Lenny Henry, or the hugely successful Goodness Gracious Me comedy series [...] is that they serve to educate the white populations on the British nation as it is today’ (AlibhaiBrown: 145). In this respect, they are mirroring the appearance of Jewish comedians on postwar American television announcing ‘mir zeinen doh (we are here)’ (Dorinson and Boskin: 169, original emphasis). Second, they repudiated certain stereotypical conceptions, such as that of the ‘unfunny Asians,’ as during the pitching of both shows, Goodness Gracious Me and All-American Girl, television executives’ comments such as ‘where are we going to find five funny Asians?’ (Southgate: 54) and ‘I have to confess [...] comedy wasn’t the first word that came into my head when I thought of Britain’s Asian community. [...] You think of curry and corner shops’ (Mirth of a Nation 1999) were common. In the context of All-American Girl, Martha Southgate observes: Every time a new culture is admitted to this shiny world [of TV], it’s a form of validation. This cultural moment happened for African-Americans with [...] ‘The Cosby

10

For an exploration of the representation of Asian Americans on television, see Hamamoto.

184

Christiane Schlote

Show.’ A lot of people connected with ‘All-American Girl’ and a lot of people outside of it are hoping, with some trepidation, that the show can do the same for the AsianAmerican community. (Southgate: 54)

Cho herself confesses to her audiences during one of her stand-up routines, that when in 1994 the president of Walt Disney Studios called to tell her that her pilot episode of All-American Girl had been accepted by ABC for their upcoming television season, she felt accepted, real, and visible for the first time in her life. Inevitably, this new, much sought-after exposure of being the first British Asian, the first Asian American and the first Turkish German comedy show comes with its own ‘burden of representation,’ what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls ‘the ruinous desire to be representative, to collectivize the first person’ (Gates, qtd. in Tapping: 290). As in the case of postcolonial and migrant writers and artists, the shows are taken as representative of very heterogeneous and highly stratified cultural segments of society. They are not only expected to redeem these groups’ former enforced invisibilities, but also to correct any current stereotyped representations. Any ‘mistakes’ (always more than likely in the case of new television formats) are being registered and admonished immediately. As Hall ascertains, non-white artists and cultural workers ‘have to struggle, not on one, but on two fronts’ (Hall 1996: 165, original emphasis), that is, their desire to comply with the expectations of marginalized and mainstream audiences requires continuous efforts to entertain both without offending either. While Dwight MacDonald tells us, that ‘humor is like guerrilla warfare. Success depends on travelling light, striking unexpectedly and getting away fast’ (MacDonald, qtd. in Dorinson and Boskin: 179), the three shows also rely on a different strategy. In order to catch the attention (if not always the conscience) of their audiences across ethnic lines without direct offence, all three shows have been employing a strategy which might be called ‘humorous appeasement.’ As Goodness Gracious Me-producer Anil Gupta explains: ‘If [we] had an agenda at all, it was to be accommodating to white sensitivities. I was very conscious of being not confrontational’ (Mirth of the Nation: 1999). Again, this has also to be seen within the economic framework of network and commercial television and within a climate of excessive political correctness. In an interview Cho talks about the network’s ‘intense paranoia’ about whether the Kim family was ‘Asian enough,’ and ‘the right kind of Asian,’ but, thus Cho, ‘at the same time they were trying to sell advertising time. I mean it’s all a big business to sell dishwashing liquid’ (Caswell). Similarly Yanar, whose show has been particularly successful with the important target group of fourteen to forty-nine-year-olds (Kaiser: 30), declares that his caricatures ‘are really declarations of love’ and that they

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

185

only work when distributed even-handedly to all segments of German society (Bonfante). This ‘politics of sensitivity’ could be read in two related ways. On the one hand, it might indicate that in view of the ongoing scarcity of jobs for nonwhite actors, stand-up comedy and personality shows remain their only option of working in their fields. Furthermore, in order to succeed in any kind of media, they might still have to adhere to the ‘Cosby model,’ thus presenting themselves as likeable, unthreatening characters. In a provocative analysis of outspoken and ‘silent’ African American writers (stretching back to Ralph Ellison), Houston A. Baker, Jr. suggests that ‘what makes black public figures in the United States likable to arbiters of power and taste is precisely their failures of black critical memory.’ Thus, Baker claims, whereas Richard Wright developed an intellectual awareness of the interrelations, particularly in the United States, among race, social inequality, politics, and technological advancement, informed by his own experiences of racism, Ralph Ellison failed to acknowledge the political and intellectual potential of the African American racial experience (Baker: 24). On the other hand, strategies of ‘humorous appeasement’ could be interpreted as postmodern perpetuations of traditional minstrelsy, thus confirming the suspicion that issues of race and race-relations can still only be approached in terms of satire and comedy. As for Was guckst du?, again, the show is marked by the specific demographic situation in postwar Germany, where immigration discourses have not necessarily been as racialised as in Britain and the United States. However, in one sketch Yanar parodies the German government’s plan to hire Indian computer programmers, while refusing political asylum to other immigrants. In view of the – partly ambiguous – sketches referring to British colonialism and current xenophobia in Britain, it can be observed that Goodness Gracious Me’s faculties of critical memory are used regularly. There are also repeated attempts at deconstructing the widely circulated myth of racial identity as simply another component of a self-chosen, multifaceted identity, as when despite all their assimilationist endeavours the Kapoors (who call themselves Coopers) are threatened by bricks with the note ‘Pakis go home’ thrown through their suburban home. Whereas Cho’s even more hard-hitting explorations of discriminations of any kind, whether based on race, gender, religion, or class, have been main staples of her live performances, AllAmerican Girl avoided entering into any race discourses for fear of ‘being blasted in America’s racial “minefield”’ (Price) altogether. According to Darby Li Po Price, the Asian American sitcom served as ‘a conveyor for tenets of the American Dream that justify cultural, economic, and political inequalities and otherwise obscure pressing social problems’ (Price). This is

186

Christiane Schlote

also clearly indicated in the show’s title All-American Girl (particularly when contrasted with the ironical phrases forming the titles of Goodness Gracious Me and Was guckst du?). One of the crucial points for a sustainable critical comedy seems to me the involvement of the respective actor / comedian in all stages of the production process, starting from the writing of the script.11 This is illustrated most painfully on the basis of Margaret Cho’s career as a stand-up comedienne and as the star of her ill-fated sitcom. In her autobiographical Off-Broadway hit show with the defiant title I’m the One That I Want, Cho frankly relates her frightening experiences with American network television. In the tradition of Jewish comedians who used their stand-up acts therapeutically, and who defined humor as ‘a way to keep from killing yourself’ and laughter as a protection against pain and ‘an oppressive world’ (Dorinson and Boskin: 168, 171), Cho begins her tale with the comforting sentence ‘Once upon a time, I had my own TV show,’ only to tell us a few minutes later, that it was canceled after its first season because of poor ratings. In between she recalls how the network asked her to lose thirty pounds within two weeks, which resulted in her hospitalisation due to kidney failure. Furthermore, an Asian consultant was hired, because the producers felt that she wasn’t ‘Asian enough’ (‘she would follow me around and say, “Margaret, use chopsticks, and when you’re done, you can put ’em in your hair”’), and Cho’s stand-up material, on which the sitcom was supposed to be based, was sanitized. Asked whether she had any artistic control, Cho answers: No, none at all. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if I had had it. I was so far gone at that point with the work I was doing and the pressure they were putting on me to lose weight [...] I was twenty-three. [...] I didn’t have a real sense of my own power because I felt I could be fired at any second. (Caswell)

After the show was finally canceled, Cho describes herself as a ‘Hollywood casualty’ with no self-esteem left but with anorexia, a drug addiction, and the plan ‘to drink myself to death,’ which she almost succeeded in doing. In the end, she returned to stand-up comedy, and, again, her shows have been highly successful. To be in artistic control also includes the comedians’ own choices of dealing with, admittedly often very problematic, stereotypes. Thus, Cho declares in her show: ‘I think that most gay men have hot bodies. I know, it’s a stereotype but I think we should perpetuate that stereotype,’ and Jordan Bonfante describes Yanar’s show as ‘practically celebrat[ing] stereotypes’ 11

The Black British sitcom Desmond’s, for example, has been particularly praised for its scripts, written by the Caribbean British actor and writer Trix Worrell.

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

187

and ‘a plunge into political incorrectness’ (Bonfante). Likewise, at an ‘Asian Inspiration Event’ at Cambridge University in 2000, Syal and Bhaskar emphasised the importance of starting with stereotypes as indispensable tools for comedy. In this context, as Weedon points out, it depends on the ethnic, cultural, religious, and class background of the audiences, whether they recognize the subversive uses of stereotypes or take them at face value. Much has been made of the fact that around eighty percent of the viewers of Goodness Gracious Me are white (there is a high percentage of white viewers for ethnic programmes in general). The Guardian explains this more with ‘a function of arithmetic than any racial conundrum’ and also emphasises the fact that more than half of the British Asian community watch the programme as well (Mirth of a Nation 1999). In terms of audience make up, All-American Girl failed to draw significant numbers from any segment of society, while Cho’s stand-up performances attract large, mostly urban crowds of ethnically mixed people as well as a high percentage from gay and lesbian communities. Was guckst du? mainly appeals to younger viewers, but apparently is also watched by most of the communities which are being caricatured, not least illustrated by the fact that the Greek German community felt left out and demanded that Yanar make fun of them too (Bonfante). While there have been recent audience reception studies, perceptions of individual shows by ethnically different audiences remain to be investigated.12 Even though most comedians might agree with Syal, who declares: ‘We’re actors, not social workers’ (Vidal and Asafu-Adjaye), some also acknowledge and even propagate their role as spokespersons for specific subjects or communities. One comedian goes so far as to describe himself as an anthropologist of sorts: ‘My job is to watch people and notice all of the quaint, strange things they do. I will not take anything for granted about people. I will study them patiently and sooner or later I will discover absurdities’ (Olson 123). This kind of anthropological mission takes on a particular relevance in the work of contemporary British and American comedians of Arab descent and / or Muslim belief, such as the Pakistani American part-time comedian Saad Sarwana, Britain’s much-hailed ‘only female Muslim comic,’ the British Pakistani newcomer Shazia Mirza, who has been taking London by storm with her brazen jokes on Islamic fundamentalism, and the similarly popular British Iranian stand-up comedian and actor Omid Djalili, about whose politically conscious shows The Guardian writes: ‘If we dropped Omid Djalilis all over the west instead of bombs across the middle east, the world would be a far happier place’

12

See, for example, Ruddock and Tulloch.

188

Christiane Schlote

(Logan). In the end, as Christopher Walker reminds us, there is only one yardstick: ‘If a comedy isn’t funny – or is not perceived to be funny by the audience – then it has failed’ (Walker: 99). Thus passing judgement on ethnic television comedies is finally up to the individual viewer.

Bibliography Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin. Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain. London: Penguin Books, 2000/2001. All-American Girl. Dir. Gary Jacobs. Walt Disney, 1994. Baker, Jr., Houston A. Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. Bonfante, Jordan. ‘Whaddaya Looking At?’ TIME Pacific 26. 2 July 2001 . Caswell, Michelle. ‘Interview with Margaret Cho.’ AsiaSource Aug. 2000. 28 Oct. 2002. . Davis, Christie. Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Dorinson, Joseph, and Joseph Boskin. ‘Racial and Ethnic Humor.’ Humor in America. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. New York: Greenwood, 1988. 163-93. Goodness Gracious Me. Dir. Nick Wood. BBCV 6545. 1998. Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for ‘Blackness.’ Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Grote, David. The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora.’ Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. 392-403. –––. ‘New Ethnicities.’ Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 163-72. Hamamoto, Darrell Y. Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Hargreaves, Alec G. ‘La Famille Ramdan: Un sit-com “pur beur”?’ Hommes & Migrations 1147 (1991): 60-6. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Howe, Irving. ‘The Limits of Ethnicity.’ New Republic 25 June 1977. 19.

Strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies

189

I’m the One That I Want. Margaret Cho Filmed Live in Concert. DVD. Cho Taussig Productions. 2001. Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992. Kaiser, Andrea. ‘Noch’n Türkenwitz.’ Die Zeit [Hamburg]15 Feb. 2001: 30. Kivisto, Peter. Americans All: Race and Ethnic Relations in Historical, Structural, and Comparative Perspectives. Belmont, CA: Wadswort, 1995. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Amy Ling, eds. Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Logan, Brian. ‘Omid Djalili.’ The Guardian [London] 1 Oct. 2001. 10 Nov. 2002. . ‘Mirth of a Nation.’ The Guardian [London] 20 Feb. 1999. 15. Sep. 2000. . Olson, Stephanie Koziski. ‘Standup Comedy.’ Humor in America. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. New York: Greenwood, 1988. 109-36. Pines, Jim, ed. Black and White in Colour: Black British People in British Television Since 1936. London: BFI, 1992. Price, Darby Li Po. ‘“All American Girl” and the American Dream.’ Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2.1 (Winter 1994). 15 Sep. 2000. . Ross, Karen. Black and White Media: Black Images in Popular Film and Television. London: Polity, 1996. Ruddock, Andy. Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. London: Sage, 2001. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Schlote, Christiane. ‘Satire and Sociology: The Performing Powers of Meera Syal and Anna Deavere Smith.’ Intercultural Theatre and Drama at the Turn of the Millennium. Ed. Bernhard Reitz and Alyce von Rothkirch. Trier: WVT, 2001. 49-59. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Southgate, Martha. ‘A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Prime Time.’ The New York Times Magazine 30 Oct. 1994: 52-5. Tapping, Craig. ‘South Asia Writes North America: Prose Fictions and Autobiographies from the Indian Diaspora.’ Reading the Literatures of

190

Christiane Schlote

Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. 285-301. Tulloch, John. Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods. London: Arnold, 2001. TuSmith, Bonnie. All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. Vidal, Gayle, and Jacqueline Asafu-Adjaye. ‘Goodness Gracious Meera.’ EMMA 2001. 10 Nov. 2002. . Walker, Christopher. ‘A Funny Business: Producing Situation Comedy.’ Mediated Drama / Dramatized Media. Ed. Eckart Voigts-Virchow. Trier: WVT, 2000. 95-9. Was Guckst Du? TV comedy series. SAT 1. 2001 to date. Weedon, Chris. ‘Goodness Gracious Me: Comedy as a Tool for Contesting Racism and Ethnocentrism.’ Culture and Power: Challenging Discourses. Ed. María José Coperías Aguiler. Valencia: Servei de Publicacions Universitáries, 2000. 261-9. Yanar, Kaya. Suchst Du? CD. Universal. 2001.

IV. The language of humour – The humour of language

This page intentionally left blank

MARGIT OZVALDA

Worlds apart Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

Introduction: Schools stranger than fiction

S

chools and schooling have had a special relationship to Indian and Anglo-Indian contexts for quite some time. In 1996 (to begin with the more recent instance), Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which induced panellist Germaine Greer to comment on how she felt Bombay was misrepresented by this novel. She suspected that Mistry had given his portrayal from a Canadian perspective, which she felt inadequate compared to her own experience as a teacher at a women’s college in Bombay. In his rejoinder Mistry implied that Greer’s powers of observation were not too far off those of a grey, long-eared animal, and, less famously but more importantly for what I wish to illustrate, that teaching four months at a women’s college does not exactly provide a reliable yardstick to judge authentic Bombay experience since a presumably well-off college is a world apart from the Bombay he got to know in the first twenty-three years of his life (cf. Jaggi).1 The second piece of evidence dates back to the early nineteenth century. Macaulay with his Minute of 1835 has been commonly recognised as having established India as the testing ground for educational policies that were to be implemented throughout the Empire and in Britain, clearly establishing a link between education and political control.2 Not surprisingly, education in 1 2

A more detailed account of this controversy can be found at http://www.canoe.ca/ JamBooksFeatures/mistry-rohinton.html (26 November 2002). See Phillipson: 110; Bhabha: 87; Spolsky: 7; Pennycook 1998: 71.

194

Margit Ozvalda

colonial Indian settings has been the starting point of Bhabha’s elaborations on ambivalence. Ambivalence was in its original psychoanalytic form a ‘fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite’ (Ashcroft et al 1998: 12), a concept employed for explaining psychological conflicts of love and of love lost (Freud, Ich und Es: 181). It also lies at the heart of Freud’s treatment of humour in the form of aggression against, and resignation to, society, although this is not fully explored by him, as Peter Gay in the introduction to the German edition of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious observes (Freud: 21; cf. also Billig: 454). Like many later researchers in the field of humour, Freud concentrated on the joke, but followed it up by a brief study on humour in 1927. While he identified libido and aggression as the two prime motifs of jokes (Freud: 255), humour was to him a way of overcoming adverse circumstances and of gaining pleasure from this activity (254). In postcolonial contexts, humour is strongly linked to the notion of ambivalence. Ambivalence in Bhabha’s understanding results from mimicry of the colonisers’ behaviour. What the imitating postcolonial subjects achieve, however, is something close to but not absolutely identical with the colonisers (‘the difference between being English and being Anglicized’). It is an ‘ironic compromise’ as it is never complete imitation (‘almost the same but not quite;’ Bhabha: 86, original emphasis) but only partial presence (89f.). This ‘metonymy of presence’ is linked to humour in the form of mockery, irony (86), and parody (Ashcroft et al 1998: 139). Yet at the same time it also produces more threatening effects, the ‘menace of ambivalence’ – ‘a difference that is almost total but not quite’ (Bhabha: 91). For my purposes the paraphrases of these terms are even more useful than the terms themselves since the depiction of schools in the chosen novels can be characterised along these degrees of difference. There is one major thematic cluster for which ambivalence and humour arise from a difference hardly noticeable (‘almost the same’), and another one where humour can be traced to a ‘difference almost total.’ These two degrees of difference can be related to the two anecdotes I have cited at the beginning. School and education are experienced either as a far-reaching influence on people’s lives (in Macaulay’s sense of teaching as governing, and also in Foucault’s interpretation of discipline) that transforms people into useful and disciplinary entities. Its other side, a difference almost complete, is illustrated by the Mistry-Greer anecdote, with school and education having no direct worldly link to people’s lives outside. Those two opposites will frame my analysis of the representations of schools, education, and teachers in several novels. All selected novels are

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

195

‘postcolonial’ in the broadest sense.3 As for postcolonial Indian novels, this refers to author-based, biographical definitions of ‘Indianness.’ Another, textbased, aspect is included as well to make space for a novel like White Teeth by Zadie Smith, who herself is of Jamaican-English descent, but whose novel deals with the Indian4 experience of first and second generations in London (for a similar approach cf. Sommer: 7). Hardly any of the selected Indian novels contain teachers and schools as their major characters or locations, with only few exceptions, such as A Suitable Boy (Pran Kapoor) and Family Matters.5 Schools, teachers, and education are significant in the novels nonetheless, which may partly have to do with the fact that many of the novels can be described either as family novels or as Bildungsromane.6 Moreover, schools appear connected to the same themes and motifs. In this essay I will show how some facets of verbal humour arise from the ambivalence with which schools and teachers are associated in postcolonial contexts.

Verbal aspects of humour Bhabha’s treatment of ambivalence (especially in ‘Of Men and Mimicry’ and ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’) seems to concentrate on aspects of mimicry rather than on mockery as the latter aspect is not dealt with in the same detailed manner. The relation of mimicry to the technique of metonymy is incidentally another point where psychoanalytical and linguistic analyses of humour meet; metonymy is also one of the techniques Freud identified for the joke, i.e. the whole and its parts (‘Ganzes und Teile’), when parts of the same material are employed again (Freud: 57). To write about the language of humour means probably capturing the most elusive aspect of humour. Humour is conveniently linked to themes, motifs, situations, and characters, thus to situational humour, as is borne out 3 4

5

6

Cf. Ashcroft et al. 1989: ‘Criticism (Overview);’ Young: 4. ‘Indian’ is of course not totally correct, either. Samad Iqbal and his wife Alsana are from pre-partition Bengal (Smith: 62, 133), so I am taking the licence of subsuming their experience under the heading ‘Indian’ as ‘just about the same stadium, yes’ (Smith: 133). Apart from references to the literature Nariman used to read, his former status hardly figures in the novel. Adam Mars-Jones deals with the intertextual passages of the novel quite succinctly in his review (Mars-Jones). In Anita and Me, Meena’s mother, one of the main characters in the novel, is a nursery school teacher, which is not central to the novel, however. Meera Syal’s novel has expressly been labelled a ‘Black British Bildungsroman,’ which, like the classic genre of the Bildungsroman, has the element of the protagonist obtaining formal or informal education as one of its thematic requirements. The Black British Bildungsroman goes beyond being a novel of formation, however, and also contains a strong element of transformation (Stein: 34-5, 37; cf. also Reichl: 34).

196

Margit Ozvalda

by reference guides to humour studies (Nilsen, Davies). Studies of verbal humour very often focus on jokes and puns (cf. Freud: 57, Alexander, Attardo 2001), and less on longer humorous texts (with the exception of Attardo 1994: 254-69; and Attardo 2001). Before deciding on one approach towards analysing verbal humour it is probably necessary to glance briefly at some of the available options. Grouped among the incongruity7 theories of humour (Attardo 1994: 49; Perlmutter: 155), linguistic theories of humour range from semiotic and text theories,8 semantic script-based theories,9 to register-based theories. Registerbased theories of humour, as exemplified by Alexander’s study, will prove more fruitful for longer texts10 with their emphasis on Hallidayan register (as defined in e.g. Halliday: 111) and the comic effects that result from the confusion, or deliberate juxtaposition, of two diverging or opposing registers. The combination of script and register by introducing connotation will be of considerable use for my analyses as well because it allows for a main nonhumorous sense of a text while register associations (‘weak activations’) generate humour in it (Attardo 1994: 253). Working at a macro-level, Alexander’s graded scale comprises social (or sociosemiotic) system, situation, types of verbal humour, lexicogrammatical levels, and acts of humour (5); on a micro-level, he differentiates lexicogrammar into graphological, several grammatical, and into contextual properties (6). He bases his distinction of several types of verbal humour on several criteria (for example, intention, consciousness, malevolence or benevolence, purpose to amuse etc.; Alexander: 10). I will particularly draw on the lexicalsemantic sub-categories in my analyses: lexical ambiguity, polysemy-induced puns, hard words, malapropisms, collocation, lexical sets, idioms and puns (51-5). They are more readily identified in short humorous texts but can also be detected in extracts from longer texts. These taxonomies are supposed to Classified according to the main purpose of humour, there are three major theories of humour: incongruity and contrast; hostility and aggression; and release and sublimation. Freud’s analyses of humour, which proved influential in all three fields (Attardo 1994: 47, 53), are grouped with the incongruity theories for their linguistic elements (Attardo 1994: 49, 56). 8 Among others, Koestler’s bisociation theory (1964) and Eco’s account of the ‘comic’ (1981), based on incompatible ‘frames of reference’ (Koestler: 35; cf. also Attardo 1994: 175; Eco: 7) are counted among this group. 9 The Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH) cannot account for multi-layered meanings of humour in longer texts (Attardo 1994: 261) and will therefore not be followed up here. Its revised version, the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH; cf. Attardo 2001) combines narrative strategies, borrowing from literary genre analysis, and linguistic areas other than semantics (Attardo 1994: 224), in order to categorise jokes. 10 Despite their capacity for analysing longer texts (cf. also Attardo 1994: 263), most registerbased studies still concentrate on jokes and puns. 7

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

197

only assist in the analysis of texts and not to substitute them, however (cf. Attardo 1994: 112, 114). There is some overlap of Alexander’s categories with the techniques Freud observed to be at work, although they depart from different theoretical points. Freud’s main strategies are condensation, substitution (e.g. metonymy), and double meaning (Freud: 57), similar to those operating in dreams, for example (Billig: 453), whereas Alexander’s system is based on grammatical features. In the fictional texts I am going to deal with here, in which schools feature as Alexander’s ‘situation,’ I will present several thematic clusters in which humorous presentation is discernible and link them with the categories derived from linguistic analyses of verbal aspects of humour (e.g. register humour in combination with the notion of a script, and connotation). Wherever feasible, the techniques identified for jokes will also come into play. These clusters of themes can be split up as follows: schools which attract people as places where knowledge is imparted but that also function as places of temptation and of (subverted) discipline, thus not quite attracting people the way they are intended to, and schools as worlds apart, as places of almost-meetings with other cultures. The themes are not necessarily depicted humorously but where they are this will be due to incongruity in registers, genres, or, postcolonially even more relevant, of languages. This incongruity in turn can have its causes in postcolonial and psychoanalytic ambivalence. The analyses of the elements of verbal humour within the themes mentioned above will be complemented by the description of teacher-characters as the object of ridicule.

‘Almost the same but not quite’: Schools as sites of attraction Schools (as well as other disciplinary institutions) are key in the distribution of two things: knowledge and discipline (cf. Foucault). Schools are ideally sought out for obtaining qualifications, and, as a consequence, a prestigious job (or power). With several female protagonists, formal and domestic qualifications are equally indispensable in procuring a husband. The importance of education notwithstanding, many women characters fail to complete their education, which in itself attracts some criticism in humorous form in Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (29). Despite their academic shortcomings, school is an attractive place for women characters where they like to take refuge from the world outside (for example, Uma in Fasting, Feasting, ‘Poor Chila’ in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, and Dina Dalal in A Fine Balance). Their positive attitudes towards the school they are made to leave against their will do not evoke humorous register-use.

198

Margit Ozvalda

Confusion of registers only becomes discernible when schools prove attractive in other ways which are tinged by temptation (including erotic fantasies) and corruption. These influences work on students (Family Matters), parents (Family Matters, White Teeth), and on teachers (A Suitable Boy) alike. Jehangir, the younger son in Mistry’s latest novel Family Matters, who is in charge of the homework monitoring system11 set up by the Goan teacher Miss Alvarez, succumbs to the pressures of his family’s dire financial circumstances and of peer corruption at school. His uncle Jal anticipates this development earlier in the novel when he states: ‘Now if this Homework Monitoring system was a Government of India scheme [...] rich boys wouldn’t do homework, and offer bribes to the teachers’ (Mistry 2002: 30). The first time when Jehangir gives in and accepts a bribe is relayed in a serious manner but the scene is set for farce when, later on, he acquires more routine and abuses his licence to choose his own, far-fetched, questions to make sure his fellow-students do not answer correctly by chance. One phrase breaks into the dominant register of the exam-like situation as a weak activation of another register: ‘Jehangir assaulted him with a similar question of a numerical nature’ (Mistry 2002: 237, my emphasis). Schools also come forth as places of potential erotic temptation, to which students as well as teachers and parents are susceptible in various ways. In Family Matters, the erotic fantasies regarding the Goan teacher Miss Alvarez are initially Jehangir’s, who directs his pre-pubescent glances at the pretty teacher (209), mixing erotic and child-like admiration, as when he imagines the pattern the cane seat leaves on her body: Especially when she ascended the two steps to the platform, settled in her chair, and crossed her incredibly smooth legs. The straight-backed chair had a cane seat. If Miss Alvarez stood up after sitting for a few minutes, the pattern of the weave was impressed upon her tight skirt. [...] [The boys] wondered if the geometric design went deep enough to leave its imprint on her lovely bum. (Mistry 2002: 209-10)

Jehangir’s father feels faintly attracted to Miss Alvarez as well, but her appearance only triggers a trip down memory lane into his own past as a pupil at the same school when there was ‘nothing resembling a Helen Alvarez’ (271). The reason why he returns to his former school has to do with another motif of temptation in this novel, i.e. Jehangir’s role in the Homework Monitoring system.12 This monitoring system is incidentally firmly rooted in the European history of military and disciplinary institutions Foucault unravels in Surveiller et punir (Foucault: 227). 12 Short-stories are not part of my present corpus of fiction but one can easily detect the interweaving of school and erotic phantasies, and hence the mixing of registers, in some of Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), e.g. in ‘Auspicious Occasion,’ ‘The Collectors’ and ‘Exercisers’ as well. 11

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

199

Unlike the erotic fantasies triggered by teachers in Mistry’s novel and short-stories, those in White Teeth are consumed and thus given much more room in the novel. The school council meeting sets the scene for the ‘temptation of Samad Iqbal.’ Samad and the music teacher of his sons, Poppy Burt-Jones, may appear to follow different agendas at first: she talks about his twin sons’ academic achievements, while he is getting more and more sexually aroused by the minute. Yet it is Poppy who takes the first step and ‘accosted him in the corridor’ (Smith: 131, my emphasis), ‘accost’ having connotations of attack as well as of prostitution. As we learn a bit later from her reaction, Poppy may indeed have a hidden agenda as well, considering the double meaning of ‘getting really excited,’ when she starts complimenting him on his genes and his good looks. The juxtaposition of his thoughts and the conversation contributes significantly to the mixing of registers here, heightened by the war-time spoonerism of Samad’s surname (‘Ick-Ball’), which is brought up by Samad’s old friend, Archie, who seems to have realised his friend’s state of arousal so that the old nick-name may have been used by him to activate sexual connotations intentionally or unintentionally, i.e. as a spoonerism (cf. Alexander: 10). Seemingly diverging agendas, expressed in diverging registers, mark Poppy and Samad’s second meeting, too (Smith: 158). Juxtaposition is again the main technique, which on the one hand serves to offer information about the unknown culture, such as on Muslim religious holidays, with Poppy buying into the idea of vocal fasting, which is made up by Samad as an explanation of his son’s silence at school (159) and on the other to provide insight into Samad’s interior monologue which is characterised by the reverse of the (male) coloniser’s gaze at Poppy’s body. The mixing of languages in this situation provides comic contrast (Reichl: 94), which leads to Poppy’s final misunderstanding about somebody else’s culture, i.e. her praise of ‘abstinence, [of] self-restraint’ of ‘your people,’ which brings about the defeat thereof: ‘At which point Samad kicked the stool from under him like a man hanging himself, and met the loquacious lips of Poppy Burt-Jones with his own feverish pair’ (Smith: 160, my emphasis). In this scene formal and informal registers mix to create a comic effect, which is supported by the alliteration (‘loquacious lips’). Among all the teacher-characters, it is Professor Mishra in A Suitable Boy who represents corruption most aptly as he mixes academic politics and general politics to his own advantage. The target of Pran’s dislike (Seth i: 67) and of his roguish brother Maan’s practical joke during the Holi festivities (103), he is also the butt of verbal humour in these scenes. While he tries to manipulate his colleagues to sway them into rejecting Pran’s motion for including Joyce in the syllabus, Mishra’s subtle rhetorical moves during the

200

Margit Ozvalda

meeting contrast with his fastidious coffee ceremony, which is observed by Pran (73). Maan’s manner of addressing him at the Holi festival with mock ceremoniousness is a great example of illustrating irony as resting on, and exploiting, the principle of politeness, a definition of irony that has been offered in pragmatics (Leech: 82). Maan uses conventional introductory phrases like ‘How wonderful to meet,’ which are reinforced by friendly facial expressions and body language, if only to spike them with adjectives and epithets that belong to a different register: ‘So you are the notorious Professor Mishra,’ he said in a delighted welcome. ‘How wonderful to meet so infamous a man.’ He embraced him warmly. ‘Tell me, are you really an Enemy of the People?’ He asked encouragingly. ‘What a remarkable face, what a mobile expression!’ he murmured in awed appreciation as Professor Mishra’s jaw dropped. [...] ‘So nefarious!’ said Maan, in whole-hearted approval. Professor Mishra stared at him. ‘My brother calls you Moby-Dick, the great white whale,’ continued Maan in a friendly way. ‘Now I see why. Come for a swim.’ (Seth i: 103, my emphasis)

The submersion that follows may still seem unfair treatment in volume one – after all, he is entitled to differ in his views on modern literature from other members of the department. It is telling, however, that it is one of the most sweet-tempered main characters of the entire novel, Pran, who dislikes him so strongly. In the light of later events in the third volume, when Professor Mishra thoroughly mingles university and general politics (and only starts supporting Pran’s academic career when he learns that the political fortunes of Pran’s father swing around again), manipulating colleagues for his own ends, he emerges as the chief corrupting teacher-character in the novels discussed. The uneasiness that he has the power to decide other people’s careers is vented via the humorous treatment of his shenanigans on the phone. Teacher-characters in White Teeth, who are objects of narrative ridicule such as ‘Ms’ Katie Miniver, Mrs Owens, and Poppy Burt-Jones, lack that corruptive dimension. Descriptions of their appearances are characterised by opposing adjectives, such as ‘genteel’ versus ‘fiercely cut bob’ in the case of Mrs Owens (Smith: 129). In A Fine Balance, Dina Dalal reminisces about ‘Miss Lamb’ and ‘Mademoiselle Bouledogue,’ on whom she and her friends lovingly bestowed the telling nicknames (Mistry 1996: 202). Schools are thus portrayed in thematic contexts that are not exclusively postcolonial. You may well argue that all people poke fun at school once they have passed the school gates for good, and that even former students of nonpostcolonial convent schools are not unsusceptible to a good laugh at the expense of the formerly feared institution and its unworldly teachers. Nor is it

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

201

a uniquely ‘postcolonial’ phenomenon that pupils develop a crush on their teachers, to take up just one of the themes discussed. Minute differences between postcolonial humorous treatment of school as outlined above and other treatment may lie in the fact that students do not only feel alienated on the purely personal level but also on the socio-cultural level. In a postcolonial setting, a convent school is representative of a religion that is historically not the students’ or the one of their immediate surroundings. Teachers in particular very often do not belong to the same religious or cultural groups as their students (Goan Catholic teachers in Family Matters with its Parsi protagonists, Catholic nuns and fathers in many other novels featuring Hindu characters, such as Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard; Fasting, Feasting etc.) and are thus prone to mutual stereotyping. The location of the convent school, the most obvious but not the only example of a world apart, will demonstrate an even more striking degree of difference, which is not so much a difference between postcolonial schools and schools in non-postcolonial contexts and by no means an absolute one, however, for what could with absolute certainty be described as the purpose of a school? What is to follow is thus an illustration of features in which postcolonial schools differ markedly from their surroundings, which is the source of ambivalence and of humour.

‘A Difference Almost Total’: Convent schools and other worlds apart The attempts of schoolteachers to mediate between the school’s culture and that of its students, to make schools worldly13 institutions, fail in most novels. Some of these instances are portrayed in a humorous fashion that rests again on incongruities of registers, for example in the school council meetings of White Teeth, where Samad’s worldviews clash with those of other parents and teachers. This clash is intimated by mixing genres and registers (Smith: 127) as the passage opens with the minutes of the meeting, distancing the reader at first from what is going on by referring to what was going on, i.e. to the several motions tabled by Samad on educational and cultural differences between the East and the West, which cause considerable dismay with the presiding teacher, Ms Miniver: 13.2 Mr Iqbal wishes to know why the Western education system privileges activity of the body over activity of the mind and soul. 13.3 The Chairwoman wonders if this is quite relevant. (Smith: 127)

Misunderstandings in the cultural sphere continue (regarding Ms Miniver’s marital status and the religious significance of the harvest festival); and the 13

I owe this understanding of ‘worldliness’ to Said’s (1983: 33; 1993: 13) and Pennycook’s elaborations (1994: 26, 1998).

202

Margit Ozvalda

strategy of mixing registers or a mixing of a seemingly trivial event and formal style (cf. Attardo 1994: 263) also continues, as exemplified in the phrase, ‘the nether wobblings of Katie Miniver’s bottom lip’ (Smith: 131). However strongly the school prides itself on respecting all cultures and religions alike, true understanding of other cultures is called into question from the narrator’s stance, for example by the reference to the Chalfens’ ‘pseudo Indian garb’ (131), and the typecasting of Alsana as a ‘traditional subjugated Muslim wife’ in the eyes of two English feminist teachers present. Samad and Poppy’s second meeting at school, culminating in their loveaffair, emphasises Poppy’s lack of understanding of non-English cultures despite her well-meaning. She starts lecturing the children on not making fun of somebody else’s culture, which is once again rendered in a juxtaposition of school and erotic register (155). This is followed up by the unintentional punch-line ‘[b]ecause Freddy Mercury is from your culture’ (155), which even the besotted Samad cannot quite accept as a winning argument before dismissing the whole matter for a greater, amorous, cause. Misconceptions about what the other or one’s own culture is like work both ways: when Millat is expected to represent his culture by dancing a traditional Indian dance, he, after some coaxing by Samad, responds by a Michael Jackson imitation (156). Schools as places where jokes from a different cultural sphere fall flat due to a lack of shared cultural background feature most prominently in Anita and Me. Meena, the nine-year old protagonist, is programmatic about jokes and lies (at least in narrative retrospect): ‘I’ve always been a sucker for a good double entendre: the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied is a place in which I have always found myself’ (Syal 1997: 10).14 So far the re-inventing aspects have been foregrounded (cf. Reichl: 162) at the expense of Meena’s propensity for telling jokes, which I would like to emphasise here. Her identity-creating strategy is totally misinterpreted by her surroundings: while her parents consider her a compulsive liar, her jokes at school fail to win her acclaim as the school wit.15 This failure is due to the complete lack of knowledge about Indian cultures among teachers and pupils at her Tollington school: ‘When I repeated the joke in the playground the next day, I realised it lost a lot in translation’ (Syal 1997: 56). Ultimately, the educational system does not only fail to acknowledge the students’ home culture. They do not even acknowledge the students’ needs This is clearly resonant of Bhabha’s site of interdiction of postcolonial discourse, inter dicta, between the lines (Bhabha: 89). 15 Examples are the Black Country joke (Syal 1997: 22) and the Woe Woe pun in Punjabi, where ‘woe’ means ‘shit’ in English (56). 14

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

203

they are supposed to cater for. Education is shown to happen anywhere but in school: in improvised Urdu lessons and in raag classes (A Suitable Boy), even in the ‘Chalfenist’ study group set up for student correction (which works at least for Irie; Smith: 335), but certainly not in the remedial classes ‘for Special Children’ to which Chila, in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (20), and Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia are sent, experiences that are the butt of some acid one-liners: ‘We did a lot of woodwork at the school because they didn’t think we could deal with books’ (Kureishi: 63). Even on those rare occasions in which school lessons are portrayed in the novels, school neither offers any answers to e.g. Hari-jan’s questioning of free will and fate (Randhawa: 110), nor does it know how to deal with ‘extremely polite’ but anti-social Rahel in The God of Small Things, who does ‘not know how to be a girl’ (Roy: 17). The remedial treatment she is subjected to again reveals the technique of juxtaposition: the genre of the dictionary, when she is made to read out the ‘depravity’ entry in front of the entire class to improve herself (16) is embedded in the narrative genre. In Uma’s case in Fasting, Feasting, the convent school is a positive world apart, a kind of refuge when the marriage plans of her surroundings close in on her. In depicting what makes the convent school so appealing, the mixing of registers is barely noticeable. The dominant register used to describe the daily school routine is that of religious practice, in which occasionally words from another register with less venerable connotations are interspersed (‘banged out the hymns with such pounding certainty;’ Desai 1999: 19, my emphasis). This is the only instance in which the hermetically separated world, peopled by teachers of another culture and another religion, is seen in positive terms. In the end, however, Uma does not gain anything from that world, either. The only thing to be had from school other than useful Latin proverbs and reasoning16 are appealing but ultimately useless objects such as the huge doll for little Roshan in Such a Long Journey. Roshan makes quite an effort to win the doll in the school raffle but it turns into a nuisance in the cramped family flat owing to its dimensions and, verging on the grotesque, ends up as the object of village idiot Tehmul’s affection (Mistry 1991: 302). The story of the doll is, incidentally, introduced by another clash of style and referent in using ‘hard words’ of Latinate origin (Alexander: 53), which are coupled in a pun at the expense of another teacher figure: ‘This is the problem with convent schools. Money, all the time, money for Mother Superior with her big wide posterior’ (Mistry 1991: 80, my emphasis).

16

See Desai 1998: 43-5, and also Mistry 1987: 10.

204

Margit Ozvalda

Concluding remarks The passages selected from a handful of novels are neither central in each novel (with the exception of the catalyst function of the one in White Teeth), and yet their presence in each novel is too significant to be ignored. Many of them thus fall neatly into the category of the weak, connotative activation within a non-humorous text. Along with this, the notion of incongruity and a clash of registers has proved valuable for analysis, but it clearly has its limitations as it does not allow to distinguish between, say, parody and irony. Pragmatics with its co-operative maxims could offer valuable assistance in distinguishing between types of incongruities beyond the scope of this essay.17 Since my analysis of humour is based on theories that do not bear any obvious link to postcolonial theory one may wonder what the postcolonial element of humour is. The parallel between humour and ethnology may help to explain what postcolonial humour does. A situation in which common sense is broken, and familiar themes are put in unexpected (or even unsettling) contexts, becomes the source of humour (Driessen: 172). The reactions which are rendered in various humorous modes are not far from those reported by Canagarajah about Sri Lankan students confronted with specimens of mainstream pedagogy (Canagarajah: 11). The novels under scrutiny, however, did not provide enough depictions of school lessons to follow up this trace of humour as a reaction to misplaced mainstream pedagogy from the Centre of linguistic imperialism. Finally, a declaration of intent in retrospect: I have tried to steer a middle course between dissecting every incidence of humour to the extent of killing it and providing merely impressionistic analysis of titbits. Thus I have aimed for a consistent enough application of the theories and taxonomies introduced to be exempt from the accusation of impressionism. Although I am fully aware this does not meet the technical requirements of condensation in jokes according to Freud, I would like this to be my punch line.

Bibliography Alexander, Richard J. Aspects of Verbal Humour in English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1997. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. 17

See Attardo 1994: 271-92; Leech: 82, Perlmutter: 155.

Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction

205

–––. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Attardo, Salvatore. Humorous Texts. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001. –––. Linguistic Theories of Humour. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Billig, Michael. ‘Freud and the Language of Humour.’ The Psychologist 15.9 (2002): 452-5. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: OUP, 1999. Cuddon, John Anthony. ‘Bildungsroman.’ A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd ed. Ed. J.A. Cuddon. Oxford: Blackwell 1991. Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990. Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. London: Chatto&Windus, 1999. Desai, Kiran. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Driesen, Henk. ‘Humor und Lachen in der Ethnologie.’ A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. 167-83. Eco, Umberto. ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom.”’ Carnival! Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton, 1984. 1-9. Foucault, Michel. Überwachen und Strafen: Die Geburt des Gefängnisses. 1975. Trans. Walter Seitter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften. 1923. Studienausgabe III. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001. –––. Der Humor. 1927. Studienausgabe IV. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001. –––. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. 1905. Studienausgabe IV. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2001. Halliday, Michael A.K. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Jaggi, Maya. ‘Everyday Miracles.’ The Guardian [London] 13 Apr. 2002. 26 Nov. 2002 . Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Leech, Geoffrey N. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Mars-Jones, Adam. ‘It’s all a Bit of a Mystery.’ The Observer [London] 21 Apr. 2002. 5 Aug. 2002 . Mistry, Rohinton. Such a Long Journey. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. –––. A Fine Balance. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

206

Margit Ozvalda

–––. Family Matters. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Nilsen, Don L.F. Humor in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Pennycook, Alastair. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman, 1994. –––. English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Perlmutter, Daniel P. ‘On Incongruities and Logical Inconsistencies in Humor: The Delicate Balance.’ Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 15.2 (2002): 155-68. Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: OUP, 1992. Randhawa, Ravinder. Hari-jan. London: Mantra, 1992. Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in the Black British Novel. Trier: WVT, 2002. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1997. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. 1983. London: Vintage, 1991. –––. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Seth, Vikram. A Suitable Boy. 3 vols. London: Phoenix House, 1995. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Sommer, Roy. Fictions of Migrations: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: WTV, 2001. Spolsky, Bernard. Measured Words. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2004. Syal, Meera. Anita and Me. London: Flamingo, 1997. –––. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. 1999. London: Black Swan, 2000. Young, Robert J.C. ‘Ideologies of the Postcolonial.’ Interventions 1.1 (1998): 4-8.

SUSANNE PICHLER

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet

Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations. – Douglas qtd. in Palmer (1994) For many of us, [humour] is more than an amiable decoration on life; it is a complex piece of equipment for living, a mode of attack and a line of defence, a method of raising questions and criticizing arguments, a protest against the inequality of the struggle to live, a way of atonement and reconciliation, a treaty with all that is wilful, impaired, beyond our power to control. – Nash (1985)

T

hese statements by Walter Nash and Mary Douglas capture the multifacetedness and many of the implications of humour. Humour can be used to attack classification and hierarchy, criticize arguments and it is, as Nash puts it, part of our lives. Despite the fact that Nash does not explicitly refer to the use of humour in literature, it is clear that humour has played a predominant role in literary works throughout the centuries. The famous satirists such as Jonathan Swift, whose works ‘cover the whole gamut from gentle ridicule to swingeing contempt’ (Barnard: 62), or Alexander Pope, whose satires are ‘personal, bitter, and sometimes unduly vindictive’ (Barnard: 64), perfectly exemplify this. Both Swift’s and Pope’s aim was to satirize and criticize the follies and vices of society, people’s behaviours and

208

Susanne Pichler

tastes, and they strongly voiced contempt and derision1 upon aberrations from a desirable civilized norm. Genres like satire, comedy, farce – by their very definition – include humorous elements, either manifested in the authors’ use of language, or in their particular treatment of themes, in which case the emphasis is on the ‘funniness’ of the plot. Of course, humorous language use and humorous themes cannot be strictly separated from each other. The first usually determines the latter and vice versa. It can safely be said that humour is essential not only for satires, comedies, or farces, but also for other genres, such as the realist novel. In this particular context one may again think of writers of bygone days, like Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, but definitely also of contemporary ones like David Lodge, Nick Hornby, and A. S. Byatt – to name but a few. Their aim is undoubtedly comparable to Swift and Pope’s: to raise issues in a subversive way so as to leave the readership disoriented and puzzled about certain states of affairs. Evidently, the use of humour is not only limited to writers from the English literary tradition per se. A great number of so-called postcolonial writers,2 whose themes often revolve around issues of culture contact, acculturation, and questions of the cultural / social / individual identity of their characters, choose the comic mode to examine the conditions of modern life. Timothy Mo, whose novel Sour Sweet (1982) will be at the centre of interest here, is a postcolonial author who perfectly exemplifies this.

1

2

According to Thomas Hobbes, humour is always essentially the act of derision directed at somebody but he adds the proviso that the derision may also be directed at a quality in the abstract, not attached to an identified individual. The denigration of some value or other is an act of self-aggrandisment on the part of the joker (cf. Hobbes: 101-3). The term ‘postcolonial’ is riddled with contradictions. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, for example, use the term to refer to ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’ (2). McLeod argues from another perspective, saying that postcolonialism involves a number of different aspects with regard to the literary context. ‘Reading texts produced by writers from countries with a history of colonialism [...]. Reading texts produced by those that have migrated from countries with a history of colonialism, or those descendent from migrant families, which deal in the main with diaspora experience and its many consequences’ (33). The contested label ‘Black British’ has been used for postcolonial writers in the UK. ‘Black British,’ as Nowak sees it, is a blanket term for ‘the three million people of African or Asian descent presently living in Britain’ (74). But the attempt ‘to create from a mosaic of communities a social unity which, in certain ways, simply is not there’ (Walvin: 156) seems to be highly problematical. Yet Stein argues that ‘black’ is a ‘political category’ whose ‘lack of cultural specificity – black referring to Asia, Africa and the Caribbean – was deemed to be of strategic value [...] [It] emphasizes a related predicament in Britain of [different] migrant groups and their descendants’ (Stein: 77). For a detailed discussion of the labels used in criticism see also Thieme (1-9); Pichler (19-27).

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

209

One could be tempted to suggest a link between culture contact and humour, given the fact that humour is one of the means for immigrant characters to help them alleviate their often stressful condition in a new cultural environment and also to resolve conflicts (cf. Braunschmid: 21). At times, however, the comic results from cultural misunderstandings, in which case an incompatibility of cultural norms and values between host society and immigrants is at stake. Consequently, the humorous mode threatens as it amuses, and it disorients as it evokes our laughter. Such humour constitutes what one critic has called ‘the comedy of the inappropriate response’ (Greiner: 22). We are presented with situations that both evoke laughter at and sympathy for a character’s painful plight. Bergson grasps this sensation using the expression ‘anesthésie momentanée du coeur’ (4).3 This anaesthesia is necessary for all laughter which, as he argues, should be simultaneously accompanied by a heartfelt pity for the character (Bergson: 4). Looking more generally into immigrant characters’ lives and postcolonial authors’ use of humour, many specific questions arise: Are we – and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Western’ readers4 of postcolonial texts – able to easily recognize humour when we are most of the time unfamiliar with the postcolonial writers’ cultural and social background? Is humour primarily embedded in the ambiguity of language, and deviation from a linguistic norm? If this is the case, is it a means of facilitating the reader’s apprehension of something as funny or as a joke? Why should we not regard comedy as something else, e.g. social criticism? Are the portrayed characters being mocked or ridiculed? Do we laugh with or at them and their behaviour on the new, alien soil? In this paper I will attempt to answer these questions by analyzing different levels of signification of humour and interculturality, and the link between the two in Timothy Mo’s novel. First, we will have to think about humour, its function(s), and the language of humour generally, before facing the issue of humour in intercultural understanding itself.

Humour and its function(s) In cultural terms, there is every point in taking humour seriously. What people laugh at, how and when they laugh is central to their culture. What is at stake is a well-known argument: Do meaning and value derive from the self-contained systems of cultures? This, for example, is suggested in Alison Ross’s statement, ‘[i]t is hard for humour to cross boundaries of time and social groups – humour [...] is often dependent on particular cultures and 3 4

‘A momentary anaesthesia of the heart,’ my translation. I am perfectly aware of the reductionist and essentialist implications of ‘Westerners.’ I would like to draw attention to the fact that for want of more appropriate terms I use them to denote individuals coming from individualist cultures.

210

Susanne Pichler

contexts’ (2). Yet, is there not some universality in history that makes the judgement across and beyond cultural boundaries possible? Jokes about stupidity and meanness no doubt suggest the validity of an anti-relativist stance. However, the theme of a joke – and by consequence of humour – is only one of its dimensions. The occasion on which it is told and both the identity of the teller / author and audience / reader constitute another dimension. In this respect it would seem as if there is a significant difference between our and former times, or a European and a Chinese setting, for example. In fact, the discussion about universalism and relativism (in culture) is not one to be grasped in a few words. Yet it emerges that distinguishing between different dimensions of a joke – its theme; identity of the author and reader; occasion for humour: i.e. joke as a relief from tension, anxiety, or fear; breach of inhibitions; celebration of consociality – is one possibility of transcending the simple either / or dichotomy of universalism and relativism. Regardless of whether this is correct or not, the instances in which certain types of jokes are appropriate, i.e. understood as such, and permitted as such (cf. Douglas: 366), vary considerably between different societies, between different regions, across different cultures, and they vary also from social class to social class, and from person to person. Humour has countless definitions and its implications are manifold. Regardless of whether we are dealing with an anthropology of humour, a psychology or sociology of humour, or theories on humour covering film and literary criticism, most of them base the notion of the comic in the deviation from a stable norm. Humour has its basis in ambiguity, discrepancy, and incongruity: ‘[I]t has something to do with the exercise of some sort of perception which enables us to see things for the first time, to reconsider our categories’ (Miller, qtd. in Palmer: 57).5 Sociologists have argued that humour ‘reinforces the social controls within the group and expresses its members’ shared resistance to the social pressures and tensions […] created by the wider environment’ (Powell and Paton: xvii). Thus, Powell and Paton see humour as both a form of social control and as deviance. Sociologists also underline the fact that the mechanisms of social resistance and control are highly important in conflict and solidarity and, above all, in the maintenance of group boundaries. Surprisingly enough, it was only two decades ago that sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and literary critics began to work on humour 5

Besides, one should be aware of the fact that there are other humour theories as well. Morreal has summarised theories of humour in the following way: a) where humour is derived from a sensation of superiority over what is laughed at; b) where humour derives from a sensation of psychological relief and c) where humour derives from the perception of incongruity in what is laughed at (Morreal: 38).

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

211

in an interdisciplinary way. Conceptual difficulties have inevitably arisen since the disciplines based on textual studies – film studies, and literary criticism, for example – start out from the idea that there are textual features that are responsible for humour, whereas other disciplines are more concerned with context and pragmatics. For textual analyses, it is crucial to know whether there is ambiguity in the use of images, words, or in the structure of language. For example, one can look at structural ambiguity on various levels, such as phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis, and syntax (cf. Ross: 8), each of which, in different ways, contributes to the ‘funniness’ of a text. In creative use of language, new combinations of words and linguistic structures extend the range of possible meanings and may cause a sudden shift in perception. Moreover, one should consider that the way humorous elements are placed in a narrative, for example, could be responsible for laughter. So humour does indeed exist in a series of different dimensions, and it is only in analyzing each of them, in its own right, that we can try to approach the subject comprehensively.

Intercultural understanding and humour In the last couple of decades, various branches of research have paid considerable attention to the interdependence between cultures and the behaviour of individuals; this includes the behaviour of individuals within one culture as well as across cultures (cf. Adler: 104).6 The apparent interdependence of culture and its individuals is highly significant for both intra- and interculturality, since the interplay shapes the individual human being’s way of acting, behaving, and interacting, whilst it also leaves an imprint on culture. Broadly speaking, interculturality has to do with the contact of and between cultures, cultural norms and cultural specifics, of which humour7 is certainly one. A crucial prerequisite for understanding another culture and its cultural specifics is ‘sensitivity to the context in which the ideas are expressed’ (Mall: 87, my translation). For Edward and Mildred Reed Hall, ‘context’ signifies ‘the information that surrounds an event. The elements that combine to produce a given meaning – events and context – are in different proportions depending on the culture’ (6). Halls’ views provide us with a very important 6

7

The study of particular cultures and cultural groups to determine the relationship between the structures, belief systems, values, languages, and practices of the culture and the behaviour of individuals living in that culture is the general focus of cultural anthropology, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology. See Veroff and Goldberger (7). Besides humour, there are other cultural specifics that vary between cultures. Let me just mention a few: the culture’s social structure, philosophical outlook, basic values, interaction, in-group and out-group distinction, high-context vs. low-context cultures, collectivist vs. individualist cultures etc. For a discussion of these notions see the following: Triandis et al, Hofstede, Hall, and Pichler.

212

Susanne Pichler

insight into the art of intercultural understanding – of any sort: That what we understand from another culture strongly depends on our sensitivity to the context of the event.8 This, of course, applies to humour too. Alison Ross maintains that ‘the context [...] is crucial for determining whether an individual finds something amusing or not’ (7). Misunderstanding the reasons or motivations for people’s behaviour, or making misattributions, is a common problem in intercultural contexts. People interacting interculturally need to be aware that they engage in novel behaviour in such activities as greeting others, eating, participating in another culture’s religious services and also in participating in other people’s jokes and humour. ‘Humour,’ as Palmer has it, ‘is a fragile thing’ (147). He convincingly maintains that ‘within our own culture, we can point to circumstances which reduce the chances of [its] failure’ (147). Interestingly, the chances of failure can only be reduced but, as it seems, never be totally ruled out. In an intercultural context, however, we sometimes simply miss a joke because we miss the cultural reference. Palmer suggests that the successful reception of humour includes a tight fit between the culture out of which the joke is produced and the culture of the receiver. This is not only the case when people from the same or different cultures actually interact but also as a central element in texts, as in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet. We may have difficulty deciphering the comic particularly in scenes where it derives from reference to the author’s Cantonese culture since we may not be familiar with certain implications of specific cultural standards (Krewer: 150; Renger: 73). This undoubtedly influences and shapes our reading, analysis, and interpretation of the novel. It is apparent that the reader plays an active part in constructing the meaning of the text (cf. Iser) and in our case, in identifying passages as humorous. Of course, textual features as well as structural ambiguities and incongruities may help us to do so. Nevertheless, a certain level of subjectivity in identifying something as humorous always remains. We should therefore be very aware that there is no single valid reading of the concept. This is unsettling, yet also challenging. Thus, the interesting question is how Timothy Mo, for whom humour and humorous expressions play an essential role in his oeuvre, uses humour in Sour Sweet to achieve particular effects.

8

Cf. also: Samovar and Porter, Triandis, Brislin and Hui, Gudykunst, Luger, Weaver.

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

213

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet The son of an English mother and a Cantonese father, Timothy Mo9 is a transcultural writer of international acclaim. His novel Sour Sweet (1982) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize in 1982, and won the Hawthornden Prize the same year. In his novels, Timothy Mo makes good use of the fact that he has been exposed to and lived in both cultures. Like many other writers with a hybrid identity, Mo is particularly fascinated by the ‘interstitial’ spaces (cf. Bhabha: 4) and intercultural exchanges that emerge at the intersection of cultures. Mo’s ‘stereophonic, bilingual and bifocal’ (Gilroy: 3) perspective allows him not only to achieve a clearer view of his original, Cantonese culture and see things from a ‘Western’ point of view, but also to scrutinize and evaluate English circumstances from a Cantonese point of view. The very first sentence of the novel introduces the overall topic of interculturality. ‘The Chens had been living in the UK for four years, which was long enough to have lost their place in the society from which they had emigrated but not long enough to feel comfortable in the new’ (Mo: 1). Dwelling in an in-between space, where the sense of being and feeling at home has not yet been fully achieved, constitutes a challenge for the Chinese family since they live ‘on alien soil’ (168) among people who are ‘loud and rowdy’ (29), who ‘fence with chopsticks and […] mix their food on their plates in a disgusting way’ (29). Bruce King holds that the novel refers to ‘the adaptation of Chinese food to Western tastes – on another level it refers to the adaptation of the Chinese immigrants to the British cultural setting in the London of the 1960s’ (204). His use of the concept ‘adaptation’ is highly problematic since adaptation does not correctly reflect the Chen family’s condition. Acculturation would be a better term since it ‘comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups’ (Redfield et al, qtd. in: Berry: 458). What is at stake here is a commonly agreed upon finding in intercultural psychology, that the encounter of representatives of different cultures leaves an imprint on the migrant as well as the host culture and society. Sour Sweet has been praised for its vivid and highly realistic recreation of life in the Chinese immigrant community and of life in the larger context of the host society, in which Mo captures the sounds, sights, smells of the various environments, and cleverly combines them with daily activities like 9

He was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and came to Britain when he was ten. Since 1990, he has lived in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Bangkog and Phnom Penh (cf. Ramraj: 475; Jaggi).

214

Susanne Pichler

cooking, gardening, and working. These impressions are coupled with the immigrants’ anxieties, joys, and desires, mainly rendered by Chen and Lily to emphasize the Cantonese, as opposed to the English experience.10 Parallel to and interlaced with this main plot line of the Chen family is the story of gang warfare in the notorious Triad society, a corrupt organization among the Chinese community. For Lewis there is an ‘apparent discrepancy between […] modern England and a largely self-contained and alien society functioning within it’ (502). Unfortunately, Chen encounters this alien society of the Triad when he needs money. The gang wrongly accuses him of having misappropriated packages of their illegal drugs and eventually kill him. Thus, we have two narratives, two depicted worlds, and different layers of interculturality and humour. Apart from the thematic layer of interculturality, we also find a linguistic one, reflected in Mo’s use of language. He intersperses the English text with Canontese words, at times translating them, at others leaving them untranslated. Mo frequently leaves it to the reader to figure out the meaning of words and phrases in Cantonese from the context. The reason why Mo prefers Cantonese expressions may well be that the English equivalents do not convey exactly the same sentiments (see also Reichl: 187-97). Mo’s text represents three options for the Chens and other Chinese immigrants to bridge the gap between Cantonese and British culture: first, sticking to their traditional, ancestral way of life, which clearly obstructs integration11 into the host society; second, abandoning their former traditional cultural identity and assimilating to the new cultural milieu; and third, bridging what Gilroy suggestively calls the ‘two great cultural assemblages’ (1). Undoubtedly, the last option is the most challenging one since it implies finding the point of ‘equilibrium’ (Mo: 88), as Lily, the heroine of Mo’s novel, puts it. At the beginning, Chen sees himself as ‘an interloper […], who had stayed too long and been identified’ (Mo: 1). Surprisingly, it is not that he had any obvious reason for feeling like this since ‘no one had yet assaulted, insulted, so much as looked twice at him’ (1). This reveals that the Britons in no way make life difficult for him. It is his attitude towards his situation that manoeuvres him into believing that he is not welcomed by ‘others’ and that his stay is only temporary. However, his state of mind changes considerably once Lily, Mui and he set up their take-away restaurant. Lily is the one to question British values, norms, and paradigms most intensely: she is horrified Mo also uses an omniscient narrator but the reflector characters Lily and Chen dominate the narrative. 11 Integration is one of the four varieties of acculturation. When there is interest in both maintaining one’s original culture and interacting with others, we talk about integration. The other options are assimilation, separation and marginalization. For a discussion of these concepts cf. Berry: 457-87. 10

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

215

at how the English treat the old, she is horrified at the school system, yet she also manages to find a space and a place for herself. This is partly due to the opening of their restaurant and to her communicating with their customers. Mui, Lily’s older sister, is much more receptive to new tasks and more susceptible to change than her sister Lily; she exposes herself to the British media: She reads the Daily Telegraph, which Chen observes suspiciously, she watches British TV series, and willingly takes over certain gestures and behaviour and integrates them into her repertoire when interacting with others. At the end of the novel, we learn that Mui ‘is taking out [British] citizenship’ since ‘this is [her] home now’ (276). She opens a typical British restaurant – a fish and chip restaurant – with her husband, Mr Lo. True, many obstacles have to be overcome on the Chen family’s way to happiness, yet the narrative impressively shows that these obstacles can be overcome, not least thanks to humour and the fact that cultures merge and stimulate each other. Mo ‘combine[s] straight-faced irony and intercultural social comedy’ (King: 204). Surprisingly though, King’s view is highly contested by GeokLin Lim, who maintains that ‘Sour Sweet […] continues to be misread as a comedy’ (95). Disregarding these opposed views, I would argue that Mo’s combination of the intercultural dimension with humour renders passages of the narrative comic indeed. The comic events very often result from the Chen’s (mis)understanding of English people and vice versa. Once the Chen family has set up their Chinese take-away restaurant, repetitious comic incidents gain momentum. Particularly when the family first arrives, they have not entirely and successfully de-coded British cultural standards, which bars them from leading their lives without major frictions. The first intercultural faux pas happens when Chen, Lily, and Mui put up a plank showing the name of their restaurant. ‘DAH LING RESTAURANT – after the girls’ home village’ (Mo: 95). The reader and the English customers are highly amused because, as the narrator explains, ‘natural attrition saw it became the Darling restaurant, […] and the girls the two Darlings’ (95). It is not surprising that the English customers react to this name with ‘strange jollity’ (Mo: 95). Surely, this incident, like many others, illustrates the Chen family’s initial difficulty of translating cultural signs. The technique Mo uses in this instance is interesting in one particular respect. From a phonological point of view, ‘dah ling,’ corresponds to ‘darling,’ and Mo’s use of homophones causes ambiguity for the English customers and leads to puzzlement for Chen and Lily. This structural ambiguity (cf. Ross: 8) has several effects: First of all, due to the customers’ reaction, the Cantonese characters notice that there is apparently something wrong with ‘Dah Ling’. However, at that stage, they cannot really make sense of it and do not really care. Second, the

216

Susanne Pichler

English customers are diverted since they seem to extend the meaning to include a further semantic dimension it obviously does not have for the Chens and thus implicitly make fun of the Cantonese family. Third, the name also has a comic effect on the reader since we make sense of this linguistic ambiguity with the narrator’s additional piece of information. We can see that this kind of humour leaves Chen and Lily in a state of indifference but not so Mui. She is apprehensive of the faux pas and avoids telling the others so as not to upset them. Therefore, the misunderstanding is embarrassing for one character (the most acculturated of the three) and amusing for the English people and the reader. There are not many scenes in the novel where we have a face-to-face interaction between English people and the Chen family. This is quite remarkable given that interculturality is in fact a major theme in the book, yet, for Mo interculturality transcends the interpersonal interaction at times, reducing the contact to contact with institutions or their representatives. The first time that the Chens meet an ‘Englishman’ (Mo: 104) is when the garage owner, Mr Constantinides, shows up to complain about the fact that the lorry drivers park their cars in front of his garage. To refer to Mr Constantinides as ‘an example of an Englishman’ (104) is highly ironic since his very name suggests that he is a Greek immigrant or the descendant of Greek immigrants. Obviously, Mo plays with the concept of who passes as British and who does not and thereby (subtly) criticizes people’s perception of themselves and their ‘others.’ The scene with Mr Constantinides achieves an additional funny aspect by the narrator’s description of this man and the impression he leaves on Lily and Mui. Mo plays with images here that entertain the reader very much. Mr Constantinides is a man with a ‘hairy paw,’ a ‘flesh and blood Englishman’ (104). To use paw instead of hand is undoubtedly ironic, and to a certain extent also outspokenly pejorative; Lily and Mui seem to be overwhelmed by Mr Constantinides’ (physical) presence. On the one hand, they are impressed by his red face, his hairy arms – the embodiment of the English species (cf. Mo: 104) – on the other hand, they are somewhat irritated since they do not know how to respond to his behaviour and complaint. Lily ‘smile[s] at him’ (103) and Mui ‘titter[s]’ (104). For the reader it is not too easy to find out whether the women’s behaviour reflects relief from tension, or fear in that their laughing expresses insecurity, ‘nervousness and excitement’ (104), or whether laughing results from being unable to grasp the context sensibly and entirely. Chen tries to find a way out of this rather embarrassing situation by apologizing for the two. ‘Just stupid girl doing laughings. She didn’t mean anything’ (104). Again, humour is multi-dimensional and offers a number of possible instances of identification for the reader. Mr Constantinides cannot make sense of the giggling and

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

217

tittering; he is puzzled, feels insecure and the reader realizes that he is not at all used to being laughed at. So, initially, the characters do not really know how to deal with each other; however, in the course of the novel we see that their relationship is honest and warm-hearted after they have interacted more frequently and thus have managed to bridge the intercultural gap – also by means of encounters that turn out to be funny in the end. Not all encounters are friendly ones, as when representatives of the English bureaucracy appear. Here, Mo uses humour to caricature these representatives and also to display a character’s sensation of superiority over what is criticized. Surprisingly, it is Lily who manages to do so in some situations whenever she feels threatened by the English authorities. The first official representative of an English institution we encounter is a woman who wants to put the Chen family on the electoral register. Lily is extremely upset that this woman as well as the social worker come to ‘prey on ordinary people’ (Mo: 163). She pretends that she can neither speak English properly, nor understand a single question the women ask, nor that Chen is her husband and Man Kee her son. By reacting to the women’s behaviour, which she considers to be ‘licensed brigandry’ (163), in such a clever and witty way, Lily consciously makes fun of them, i.e. she laughs at them behind their back, and thereby achieves superiority. The fun inherent in this example is an act of derision directed at ‘important’ English people.12 In such situations it seems that Lily knows perfectly well how and when to make use of her ‘Chineseness’ to achieve what she wants – not being bothered with bureaucracy. But is Lily’s distancing vis-à-vis the English authorities a useful strategy? Lily is convinced that her displayed ignorance spares her many inconveniences but at the same time, ironically, it also creates problems. Had Lily not pretended not to understand a single question the woman had asked her, the woman might in fact have put the Chen family on the electoral register. As a consequence, they would have been granted rights they do not gain in this case. Lily has misinterpreted cultural signs – again. Lily may be successful in distancing herself from ‘important’ English people, but she cannot do so when working at the restaurant. There, she is forced to deal with the customers. As we have access to her thoughts, we know that Lily would have wished to say ‘how would you like it if I leant on your wall with my head, Mr Pink Face Young Devil’ (Mo: 135). Lily’s terms of reference for the English people such as ‘Mr Pink Face Young Devil,’13 Ross argues that much humour is an attack on people in a superior position of power and influence. In a sense, it is the fight-back of the victim who has only words to use against status and might. Interestingly, in Lily’s case it is her lack of words has the same effect. 13 Normally, we tend to expect the opposite, i.e. that ethnic minorities are the butt of the joke. Christie Davies argues that ‘in the Western industrial countries jokes [told at the expense of 12

218

Susanne Pichler

‘foreign devil[s]’ (236), ‘[p]hlegmatists all’ (234), ‘uncultured outer barbarians’ (225) are certainly sarcastic. Apart from being entertaining, they are meant to express Lily’s anger and mark cultural difference (cf. Cushner and Brislin). Lily attributes labels to her hosts and thus puts them into specific categories,14 which are based on her subjective judgements. Judging from the narrative, we can hold that Lily’s attributions are false; she lacks sufficient information about the other culture, or about its people to draw correct and unbiased conclusions (cf. Gudykunst). Mo’s narrator criticizes Lily for her prejudices and implies that she had better rethink her perspective at times. Her biting humour is meant to protect her in instances like the above, justifying her way of thinking; but in the long run, it does not do so, as we find out towards the end of the novel, when she has come to adjust some of her cultural standards to the host society. Lily is not only taken aback by the fact that the English people’s ‘tastebuds must be as degraded as their care for their parents’ (Mo: 105), but also by the English school system. The way Mo depicts the school and how it is run is perfectly comprehensible for ‘Western’ readers – true, the narrator exaggerates in his depiction at times – but it is definitely not so for Lily, who fails to realize, quite obstinately though, that she has to learn to engage in novel behaviour and to be open enough to at least understand the ‘other’ point of view. Lily perceives the school as an ‘Academy of Misrule’ (Mo: 229) with no discipline. For Lily the only possible way for her son is to fight his way through the school system – not figuratively speaking but quite literally. It doesn’t take long till the teacher accuses Man Kee of ‘[d]irty fighting’ (234). The concept of dirty fighting is unfamiliar to Lily since ‘you fought to win and you won any way you could’ (235). This is an attitude she was brought up with. Thinking that it might indeed help Man Kee, she wants him to take on this value, not taking into account that it is out of place in the new context. Therefore it is understandable from Lily’s perspective that she forces Man Kee to take additional Chinese classes, much to the objection of Mui and Chen. As it turns out, Man Kee enjoys the English classes much more and even takes an intense liking to ‘mince, jam tart and custard’ (174) and throws away ‘winter green’ (174). The situation gets more comic and absurd for the reader when Lily instructs Man Kee to take cash from the customers. ‘One item equals one brown cash, two items equals one green cash […].’ ‘Now son, how much brown cash equals one green cash?’ The allegedly stupid groups of people] are usually told about an ethnic group or minority’ (qtd. in Powell and Paton: 1). As we can see, Mo reverses this assumption. 14 Categories frequently become stereotypes. Stereotyping, as Susan T. Fiske argues, is a ‘category-based cognitive response to another person. […] It describes people’s beliefs (cognitions) about an individual based on group-membership’ (442).

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

219

answer is: ‘Twice ten shillings is one pound’ (194). Lily cannot believe her ears when Man Kee tells her that they are learning these things at school: ‘Bad to tell lies’ (194). The incident perfectly illustrates that Lily is struck by Man Kee’s acculturation. She finds it difficult to accept this development and, consequently, is laughed at not only by the reader but also by Mui (cf. Mo: 234). In Timothy Mo’s novel, intercultural misunderstandings are nearly always comic, yet the results of these are not always so – particularly not for Lily. This is most evident when Mo describes her pain in her process of cultural, emotional, and psychological acculturation to Britain. Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and emotional turmoil sometimes arise when she cannot express herself the way she wishes she could. ‘She lacked not the vocabulary but the inflection which might request or admonish without causing offence. Her voice, so expressive […] in her native Cantonese, became […] strangely lifeless when she spoke English. She would have sounded hostile and nervous’ (135). Being adept at a foreign language implies a knowledge of the culture(s) involved. Lily’s command of the language is far lower than Mui’s, who is already familiar with colloquialisms and ambiguities (cf. Mo: 140). Thus, Mui is often very quick to avert major embarrassment, for instance when Lily talks with the lorry drivers, by trying to prevent her from becoming the laughing stock due to her incorrect pronunciation of words, incorrect grammatical structures or the use of Cantonese idioms in conversation. True, some of the instances in which this happens are indeed highly comic – the humorous mode threatens as it amuses and disorients as it evokes our laughter; but these events are highly painful for Lily and they also show that the English characters should in fact be more tolerant towards the ‘other’ and accept linguistic difference.15 Let us not forget that the pain decreases the longer the immigrants are exposed to British cultural signs, and the longer the English become used to the Chens’ presence. Thus, both parties eventually engage in learning processes. Towards the end of the novel, even Lily has achieved a modus vivendi, both in terms of language and culture. Of course, funny scenes continue to occur but they lose their painful dimension. The whole family is in fact changed by their experience in England; they have come to acquire the skill of cross-cooking and have even come to like English food, just like the English have come to like theirs. Lily and the others no longer abhor mince, jam tart, and custard, on the contrary (cf. Mo: 142, 159). The food metaphors and imagery in the novel therefore seem to support a plural mosaic model of intercultural exchange where adaptability and flexibility are achieved through 15

This example perfectly exemplifies the main idea behind interculturality, i.e. the willingness to understand and, at the same time, the willingness to being understood (cf. Mall: 33).

220

Susanne Pichler

an acceptance of differences. At the end it turns out that Lily ‘was content with what her life had become. […] She thought she had found a balance of things for the first time, […], she found the still point of equilibrium’ (278). Mo’s different layers of humour in Sour Sweet enable him to ‘achieve a necessary measure of aesthetic distancing and detachment as he sympathetically writes from within the lives of individuals who struggle to accommodate their antithetical cultures’ (Ramraj: 478). Ramraj further argues that humorous scenes resulting from cultural misunderstandings ‘lean towards farce rather than satire’ (478). All of the instances in which humour occurs, in any case, have to do with ambiguity, with incongruity, and with deviation from norms, be they linguistic or cultural ones. Since there is no unambiguous definition of humour and it also depends on personal taste, the classification of comic events and the functions of humour differ from person to person. Yet, we should not forget that Mo provides direct clues (comments by the narrator in brackets) as well as indirect ones (like the images he uses), which facilitate the reader’s identification of instances in the novel as humorous, ironic, or satirical. The fact that Mo combines humour and intercultural dimensions not only makes the reading of this novel great fun – many scenes are amusing for amusement’s sake; it also underscores that his characters’ existence on alien soil is a great challenge which they meet and master – at times more successfully than at others. Chen is murdered by the Triad at the end of the novel, which suggests that he has not in fact mastered the interaction of the two cultures; Lily’s positive outlook on life, however, indicates that the surviving members of the Chen family are beginning to find their place.

Bibliography Adler, Nancy J. ‘Domestic Multiculturalism: Cross-Cultural Management in the Public Sector.’ Culture, Communication and Conflict: Readings in Intercultural Relations. Ed. Gary R. Weaver. Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 95-113. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Barnard, Robert. A Short History of English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Bergson, Henri. Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. 1900. Paris: Presses Univérsitaires de France, 1940.

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

221

Berry, J.W. "Psychology of Acculturation." The Culture and Psychology Reader. Ed. Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jody Bennet Veroff. New York: New York UP, 1995. 457-487. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Braunschmid, Angelika. Das Phänomen Humor: Die heilende Wirkung des Lachens wird wieder entdeckt. Linz: Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner, 2001. Cushner, Kenneth, and Richard W. Brislin. Intercultural Interactions: A Practical Guide. 2nd ed. London: SAGE, 1996. Davies, Christie. ‘Stupidity and Rationality: Jokes from the Iron Cage.’ Humour in Society: Resistance and Control. Ed. Chris Powell and George E. Paton. London: Macmillan, 1988. 1-32. Douglas, Mary. ‘The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Recognition.’ Man 3 (1968): 361-76. Fiske, Susan T. ‘Controlling Other People: The Impact of Power on Stereotyping.’ The Culture and Psychology Reader. Ed. Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jody Bennet Veroff. New York: New York UP, 1995. 438-56. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Greiner, Donald J. Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1973. Gudykunst, William B. Bridging Differences: Effective Intergroup Communication. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. Hall, Edward, and Mildred Reed Hall. Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans. Yarmouth: Intercultural, 1990. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. London: Penguin, 1968. Hofstede, Geert. ‘The Cultural Relativity and the Quality of Life Concept.’ Culture, Communication and Conflict: Readings in Intercultural Relations. Ed. Gary R. Weaver. Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 131-42. Iser, Wolfgang. Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. München: UTB, 1972. Jaggi, Maya. ‘Mixtures Like Candied Napalm.’ Interview with Timothy Mo. Guardian Unlimited 7 Oct. 2000. 6 Apr. 2005 . King, Bruce. ‘The New Internationalism: Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro.’ The British and Irish Novel Since 1960. Ed. James Acheson. London: Macmillan, 1991. 192-211.

222

Susanne Pichler

Krewer, Bernd. ‘Kulturstandards als Mittel der Selbst- und Fremdreflexion in interkulturellen Begegnungen.’ Psychologie interkulturellen Handelns. Ed. Alexander Thomas. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1996. 147-64. Lewis, Peter. “Hong Kong London.” Rev. of Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo. In: TLS, 7 May 1982. 502. Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. ‘Race, National Identity, and the Subject in Timothy Mo’s Novels.’ Fusion of Cultures. Ed. Peter O. Stummer and Christopher Balme. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 91-102. Luger, Kurt. ‘Offene Grenzen in der Kommunikationswissenschaft. Über die Notwendigkeit eines interkulturellen Forschungsansatzes.’ Dialog der Kulturen: Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft und die Medien. Ed. Kurt Luger and Rudi Renger. Wien: Österreichischer Kunst- und Kulturverlag, 1994. 23-65. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: MUP, 2001. Mo, Timothy. Sour Sweet. London: Vintage, 1982. Mall, Ram Adhar. Philosophie im Vergleich der Kulturen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Morreall, J. Taking Laughter Seriously. New York: SUNY Press, 1983. Nash, Walter. The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman, 1985. Nowak, Helge. ‘Black British Literature – Unity and Diversity?’ Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s. Ed. Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999. 71-87. Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Pichler, Susanne. Buchi Emecheta’s ‘London Novels’: An Intercultural Approach. Trier: WVT, 2001. Powell, Chris, and George E. Paton, eds. Humour in Society: Resistance and Control. London: Macmillan, 1988. Ramraj, Victor. J. ‘Timothy Mo.’ International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Ed. Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland, 1991. 475-85. Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature. Trier: WVT, 2002. Renger, Rudi. ‘Der Kultur auf der Spur. Materialien zur Interkulturellen Forschung.’ Dialog der Kulturen: Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft und die Medien. Ed. Kurt Luger and Rudi Renger. Wien: Österreichischer Kunst- und Kulturverlag, 1994. 66-83. Ross, Alison. The Language of Humour. London: Routledge, 1998. Samovar, Louis, and Robert Porter, eds. Intercultural Communication: A Reader. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1991.

Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo’s ‘Sour Sweet’

223

Stein, Mark. ‘Cultures of Hybridity: Reading Black British Literature.’ Kunapipi 20.2 (1998): 76-89. Thieme, John. Introduction. The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Ed. Thieme. London: Arnold, 1996. 1-9. Triandis, Harry C., Robert Bontempo, and Marcelo J. Villareal. ‘Individualism and Collectivism: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on SelfIngroup Relationships.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.2 (1988): 323-38. Triandis, Harry C., Richard W. Brislin, and C.H. Hui. Crosscultural Training Across the Individualism-Collectivism Divide. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1991. Veroff, Jody Bennet, and Nancy Rule Goldberger, eds. The Culture and Psychology Reader. New York: New York UP, 1995. Walvin, James. Passage to Britain: Immigration in British History and Politics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Weaver, Gary R. ‘Culture and Communication.’ Culture, Communication and Conflict: Readings in Intercultural Relations. Ed. Gary R. Weaver. Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 1-3.

This page intentionally left blank

SUSANNE MÜHLEISEN

What makes an accent funny, and why? Black British Englishes and humour televised

Introduction: Accents and stereotypes

A

ccents are a great source of humour. A look at the verbal repertoire of any self-respecting stand-up comedian, for instance, will display a wealth of linguistic styles and pronunciation patterns, commonly referred to as ‘accents,’1 of particular groups or famous individual persons. Variation of language, according to social and regional groups as well as to situation (‘register’), is one of the facts of language and life. What’s so funny about it, then? The source of humour drawn from the imitation of speech patterns of particular segments of society is, of course, not the accent itself, but its power to evoke characteristics stereotypically associated with that group. Sociolects, dialects and registers are intimately connected in their capacity to draw on such cultural images, as Judith Irvine points out: The concept of register, then, although initially defined in terms of situation rather than person or group, in fact draws on cultural images of persons as well as situations and activities. The reverse is also the case. Social dialects, no matter how they come into existence, may become imagined as connected with focal individuals and scenes, or with characteristic activities and ways of being; and in consequence they may be drawn upon (or imitated by persons outside the group-of-reference) to display attitudes or define situations. (Irvine: 31)

1

‘Accent’ is, in fact, a rather vague linguistic concept. In everyday language, it usually means the systematic phonological and prosodic features of a particular variety of speech by a native or non-native speaker. Thus, one might speak of a Yorkshire or Cockney accent, a ‘posh accent’ as well as of an American or British accent or a (non-native speaker) French or Italian accent.

226

Susanne Mühleisen

Stereotypes connected with a particular accent or linguistic style may thus be taken as features and qualities associated with particular linguistic groups or with specific situations. Such language attitudes are rarely individual phenomena but rather, they display long-standing favourable or unfavourable dispositions as part of a society’s cultural memory. Both second language speaker (‘foreign’) accents and dialects / sociolects denote group membership and the positive or negative features that are associated with it. While dialects or sociolects may also be used for in-group references and may function as a basis of belonging, the non-native speaker accent is usually a feature of nonbelonging or of exclusion. Changes as well as fossilizations and reinforcements of language attitudes are reflected in the use they are made of in the popular media. ‘Foreign accents’ may be cited here as a particular example of how cultural images, here from World War II, persist in the British media: Allo Allo, a BBC series set in wartime France which ran from 1982 to 1992, draws a lot of its potential for fun from the mispronunciation of vowels and diphthongs in English by the French protagonists. The imitation of a German accent – usually combined with some war-related lexical items – plays an important role for the humour derived from the seasonal football or beach towel combat in the British gutter press. The power of the popular media is here neither a merely reproductive one, nor are the production structures part of a closed system beyond outside influence. Stuart Hall describes the production structures of the media, especially television, and claims that they draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. […] circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television and are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured ‘feedbacks’, into the production process itself. […] Production and reception of the television message are not, therefore, identical, but they are related: they are differentiated moments within the totality formed by the social relations of the communicated process as a whole. (Hall: 509)

Sometimes the media actually create images of ‘focal individuals’ whose verbal characteristics become a source of reference in their own right. A good case in point for this would be, for instance, the invention of ‘Manuel, the waiter from Barcelona’ from the popular 1970s comedy series Fawlty Towers. For decades, an imitation of the central features of the speech of this television figure – a ‘Spanish accent’ or even a simple ‘Que?’ – has been sufficient as a cue to set generations of British television viewers laughing. Here, the media event is itself the origin of the humorous effect of the foreign accent.

What makes an accent funny, and why?

227

In an illuminating article on racist humour in British television, Husband explains why the use of ethnic jokes is not merely compatible with the British self-image of tolerance but that the two issues are actually interlinked. The fact that both humour and tolerance are positive social activities lead to the equation that ‘ethnic humour is a quintessential manifestation of tolerance in praxis’ (152). As a consequence of that, any criticism of ethnic jokes is excluded: The effect of this is to make unassailable the position of the ethnic joke-teller. To challenge the propriety of their actions is not only to be damned as a bad sport who cannot take a joke, it is also to define yourself as an extremist who is beyond the decency of the consensus politics of race relations; where tolerance is all things to all people, you are political. (Husband: 152)

But in the wake of political correctness, the imitation of an accent as a source of humour has come under attack as a cheap way of exploiting stereotypes, especially when the accent in question relates to an ethnic group – and quite rightly so. Does this mean that the cultural images behind it have disappeared from public consciousness? This paper will look at the way language patterns and styles of a particular ethnic group – the West Indian community in Britain – have been portrayed and made use of in British television series and soap operas. After a brief survey on the various functions of reproducing and imitating accents in the media, I will briefly summarize the history of the varieties spoken by first, second, and third generation Jamaican, Trinidadian, or Guyanese immigrants and their public image. The subsequent part will then take issue with selected examples of Black British Englishes in television series and soap operas from the 1970s onwards.

The reproduction of accents on TV: Caricature, mimicry or claim to authenticity? The question asked initially, why should it be funny if somebody reproduces a particular accent on television (or other popular media), has several aspects. As we have seen above, a crucial feature concerns the reference group of the variety imitated, another one, which will be dealt with in this section, has to do with the purpose or function of the reproduction of the accent in the particular situation. In his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud cites several special means of making things comic: Among these, for instance, is mimicry, which gives quite extraordinary pleasure to the hearer and makes its object comic even if it is still far from the exaggeration of a caricature. It is much easier to find a reason for the comic effect of caricature than for that of mere mimicry. Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical

228

Susanne Mühleisen

counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect. (Freud: 200, emphases in original)

The latter group seems to be sharing two different qualities: the effect of caricature, parody, and travesty rests on exaggeration, and all three types achieve the degradation of a person of assumed authority. The differences are subtle and relate to the kind of exaggeration exercised in the task. Whereas caricature ‘brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked so long as it was only perceivable in the general picture’ (Freud: 201), parody and travesty achieve this effect differently, ‘by destroying the unity that exists between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches and actions, by replacing either the exalted figure or their utterances by inferior ones’ (Freud: 201). In other words, where caricature emphasizes the appearance of a persona – and makes fun of a particular trait – parody and travesty demolish it. As a special form which uses the same mechanism Freud cites ‘unmasking, which only applies where someone has seized dignity and authority by a deception and these have to be taken from him in reality’ (201, emphasis in original). If we take Freud’s definitions and apply them to the effects achieved by imitating accents, we might say that, for instance, the exaggeration and highlighting of particular phonological and lexical features2 of RP, or of the manner of speaking3 might be taken as caricature. To put on a ‘posh accent’ and, at the same time, display behaviour associated with a lower social class could then be labelled parody or, vice versa, to imitate upper middle-class conduct and assume an authority with this behaviour, which is betrayed by a working class accent, might be taken as a strategy of unmasking. While the approaches described above are easy to spot and to illustrate, mimicry, the remaining strategy Freud mentions in his text, is somewhat more subtle and trickier to analyse. Mimicry, as Freud explains it (208), is permeated with certain elements of caricature in that it also seeks to degrade its object. What we laugh at here is not so much the exaggeration but, rather, the faithfulness of the imitation. Mimicry only works if the object of comparison is intimately known, if the actions are already anticipated by the audience. The source of humour here is derived from the expectation rather than the behaviour itself. Mimicry, Freud notes, goes back

2 3

As, for instance, the quality of diphthongs in words like ‘near’ /ıə/, ‘fair’ /eə/, ‘show’ /oʊ/, or ‘cure’ /ʊə/. An example for this might be, for instance, excessive ‘hedging’ and, more generally, ‘hesitant speech.’

What makes an accent funny, and why?

229

to a comparison between the expenditure on expectation and the expenditure actually required for an understanding of something that has remained the same; and the larger amount needed for expectation would be based on observation of the multiplicity and plasticity of living things. In the case of mimicry, accordingly, the source of comic pleasure would be not the comic of situation but of expectation […]. (Freud: 209)

Though Freud’s examination of what actually makes things comic still has validity, his study on the joke, and especially the Jewish joke, has also been subject to critical analysis and historical classification (cf., for instance, Döring, Billig) of Freud’s own repressed self-denigration in the anti-Semitic climate in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. The fact that mimicry is not an innocent concept – none of the strategies described above are – has also been taken up by postcolonial theory. In Homi Bhabha’s treatment of mimicry in relation to the authority of colonial discourse, the subversive force of mimicry is pointed out. The ambivalence of colonial imitation, according to Bhabha, results in an uncertainty ‘which fixes the colonial subject as a “partial” presence’ and therefore also acknowledges it. Bhabha notes that mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers. (Bhabha: 86)

In the colonial context, mimicry has often functioned as a strategy of survival – for both the colonial subject and colonial authority. Imitating the white plantation society in the Caribbean carnival, for instance, carries both an element of subverting authority and, at the same time, confirming and stabilizing this authority. Laughter may therefore be seen as the safety valve which levels the pressure of power difference. But the reformative aspect should also not be neglected: social criticism is best disguised in comedy,4 and quite a few African American comedians, like Sammy Davis, Jr., were at liberty to criticize white America long before the civil rights movement gave fellow African Americans a public voice. If mimicry was a strategy of survival and a source of subversive humour in colonial and postcolonial discourse – especially on Black and White relationships in the United States and in the Caribbean – the caricature of mimicry was one of the earliest representations of Black figures in the popular media. A good case in point are the so-called Minstrel Shows. 4

In the Caribbean, for instance, there is a long tradition of combining social commentary with humorous Calypso tunes. In Trinidad, the annual Calypso contests are part of the carnival.

230

Susanne Mühleisen

Originally a stage performance in nineteenth-century United States, this type of show was revived as a television variety series for British television in 1958 where it won enormous popularity.5 The Black and White Minstrel Show was a sing and dance program where white artists were ‘blacked-up’ to appear as Black singers and dancers who were, in turn, depicted as ‘playing white.’ Here, the mimicry of Blacks, imitating style of dress, speech and manners of Whites, is exaggerated and caricatured. The element of caricature is intensified by the obvious fact and the knowledge of the audience that the artists are, in fact, not black. In the wake of a heightened awareness of racism in an increasingly multi-cultural Britain, the ‘minstrel humour’ was criticized as depicting black people as stupid,6 but it took until 1978 until the programme was finally removed from British television. This example also shows that one of the crucial elements of a successful comic effect of both caricature and mimicry is a certain complicity with the audience, the shared knowledge that what is represented on stage is, in fact, not a realistic or authentic image. Irony as the shared knowledge that something is ‘not true’ is thus required for all of the strategies so far described and stands in contrast to a representation which is supposed to be taken as ‘realistic’ or ‘authentic.’ Consequently, to come back to the question of linguistic sources of humour, presenting an accent on stage or television as part of a realistic persona in an unexaggerated manner is not funny.

Black British Englishes and their public image on television Around the time when the Black and White Minstrel Show was launched on British television in 1958, Caribbean immigration to Britain reached its peak.7 The model of representation in the variety shows was not the West Indian, however, but rather the African-American of the American South. Other than that, there were few images of black people on television (for an overview, cf. Pines, Bourne). Even though the ‘dark strangers’ (Patterson) 5

6

7

The Black and White Minstrel Show is reported to have had audiences between sixteen and eighteen million, establishing the variety program as one of the most successful musical programmes worldwide (Malik 2003b). The music from the show broke sales records and the stage show was just as popular. In 1961, The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux. ‘Many were angry at the fact that during this time there were very few other representations of black people on British television. On 18 May 1967, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination delivered a petition to the BBC signed by both black and white people, which requested that the programme be taken off television. Despite the controversy, the programme continued until 1 July 1978. Ultimately, its removal from the air coincided with the demise of the popularity of the variety genre on British television’ (Malik 2003b). Estimates of the total Caribbean migration to Britain between 1951 and 1961 vary from 230,000 to 280,000. Of those approximately 200,000 West Indians arriving in Britain during the peak of the migration wave, between 1955 and 1961, the majority were from Jamaica.

What makes an accent funny, and why?

231

from the Caribbean had not made it into the popular media then, their presence in the society itself was certainly seen, felt, and heard. The linguistic varieties they came with, Creole languages like Guyanese or Jamaican Creole (sometimes referred to as Patois),8 often added to the many problems for these new Britons. Despite their linguistic autonomy, these English-lexicon Creoles were often seen as inferior varieties of English. The fact that they strongly resembled English – the main part of the lexicon is drawn from English – contributed to the impression held by wider British society that the grammar of the speech of West Indians was wrong instead of different, and that their ‘accent’ was unintelligible. Given this negative image, the second generation of West Indian immigrants was under considerable pressure to change their speech and to become ‘less audible’ as West Indians. Changes in the verbal behaviour of the younger generation of West Indians were already observed in the early 1960s: Among the second generation, audibility is also less, since most [West Indians, S.M.] now speak with a cockney accent. A welfare worker with over ten years experience of the area commented in late 1960 on the probable consequences of this decreased audibility and increased intelligibility: ‘It furthers good relations and acceptance because most of the locals really don’t understand what the older ones are saying. I had trouble myself at first until I got used to the accent, but I still can’t follow if they switch into dialect. Small wonder that some locals think that English isn’t their mother tongue.’ (Patterson: 250)

However, this did not lead to a disappearance of Creoles in Britain, but rather to bilingualism (English-Patois), to the emergence of new forms which ‘mix’ Cockney and Jamaican speech elements (‘London Jamaican,’ cf. Sebba), as well as to a difference in usage (cf. Mühleisen 2002: 135-80) for second and third generation West Indian immigrants.

Black images on British television How did the media, especially television, deal with the West Indian presence, including linguistic presence, in Britain? Apart from the presentation of a few individual black faces to some of the established programmes – the longrunning series Coronation Street, for instance, added a black bus driver to its cast in 19639 – there was hardly any black presence on British television in the 1950s and 1960s. 8 9

For a brief overview of characteristics and development of Creole languages like Jamaican, and a summary of their history in Britain, cf. Mühleisen 2000, 2001a, 2001b. It took, in fact, 30 years until another major black character came into the series: Angela Griffin, a hairdresser, was introduced in 1993. In between there were few black faces in Coronation Street: in 1978, there was a ten-episode story involving a black waitress (Angela

232

Susanne Mühleisen

One of the most controversial comedy programmes during this period of an increasing ethnic tension in Britain was certainly Till Death Us Do Part. The central character of this series, Alf Garnett, is portrayed as a narrowminded bigot whose frequent openly racist comments were supposed to serve as an attack on bigotry. However, as Husband (158) points out, this resulted more in a reinforcement of intolerance rather than a challenge to it in that many of the white audience actually identified with the values of this working man who actually said what others thought.10 The reintroduction of the word ‘coon’ to the British popular lexicon, and stimulating its use on the urban streets of Britain was but one of the more visible consequences of this series. For the black audience, the willingness of the BBC to continue the series after public expressions of outrage and concern had come from the black communities in Britain, represented an extension of the white-controlled media’s facility for denying black integrity and distorting black experience. (Husband: 159)

In November 1971, Jamaican-born media critic Stuart Hall contributed a statement on ‘Black Men, White Media’ to a BBC television debate on racial images and told the audience that ‘there is something radically wrong with the way black immigrants – West Indians, Asians, Africans – are handled by and presented on the mass media’ (Hall, as cited in chronicleworld, n.p.). Hall criticized not only the scarcity of the black appearances in mass media but also the situations which were presented, for instance, in relationship with some ‘immigrant issue’: Blacks participate, then, in broadcasts defined by the media as ‘black’ problems: and they do so within constraints, given in the very professional definition of what constitutes ‘good television’, by the producers themselves. It is very rare indeed to see a programme where blacks themselves have defined the problem as they see it. Now it matters a great deal whether studio discussions are based on the premise that black people constitute a problem for Mr Enoch Powell, or that Enoch Powell constitutes a problem for black people. (Hall, as cited in chronicleworld, n.p.)

Considering the crucial role of mass media in the shaping of issues of public concern, of transmitting stereotypes, and of attaching feelings and emotions to problems, Hall laments the lack of ‘drama, documentary or features to explore and express the rich, complex, diverse and troubled experience of blacks. There have been few, if any, programmes sufficiently in touch with Bruce); between 1983 and 1989 factory worker Shirley Armitage (Lisa Lewis) had a small part in the series. 10 In 1972, the BBC carried out research on audience response to Alf’s views in Till Death Us Do Part. The statement ‘Although his views are too extreme most of the time, some things he says are true’ was supported by a majority of the audience, with a marked difference between the agreement with this statement by regular viewers (84 %), as opposed to nonviewers (50%).

What makes an accent funny, and why?

233

the grass roots of black opinion to recreate in broadcasting terms how the world looks from that position’ (ibid). The media, Hall points out, has both an educational and an emotional effect on public opinion: The important point about television entertainment is that it educates the popular consciousness informally; by dealing with real-life problems and situations in fictional terms, it creates images without appearing to do so. And it powerfully attaches feelings and emotions to these images – feelings which can then be triggered off in more explosive situations. (ibid)

One of the responses to this (and other) criticisms was the creation of Black soaps for television which were supposed to be both educational and a source of emotional identification. One of the first attempts in that direction was the program The Fosters (1976-77),11 followed by the more successful Empire Road (1978-79), hailed as the ‘Black Coronation Street’ (Bourne: 180), and Mixed Blessings (1978-80). In the 1980s and 1990s, ‘ethnic sitcoms’ like No Problem (1983-85) and, especially, Desmond’s (1989-95) brought the different facets of Black community life into the living-room of the wider British public. Desmond’s, with Guyanese-born actor Norman Beaton in perhaps his best-remembered role as a West Indian barber in Peckham, also became a huge success in the anglophone Caribbean and in the United States, where it was referred to as an Afro-Caribbean version of the Cosby Show. The series therefore is a true landmark in the public perception of Black British images on television and shall be explored in more detail here. The basis of the comedy here is the dynamics between the core characters, West Indian barber Desmond Ambrose (Norman Beaton), his wife Shirley (Carmen Munroe), their West Indian (Porkpie, played by Ram John Holder) and African (Matthew, Gyearbuor Asante) friends, and Ambrose’s children (Michael, Geff Francis, Gloria, Kim Walker and Sean, Justin Pickett) of different age groups, lifestyles and ambitions. The setting of the programme was unique in that it was a Black sitcom based in the workplace. The series’ antecedents such as No Problem! and The Fosters tended to focus on Black family relationships within the family home. The cast of Desmond’s were not passive characters in a stagnant setting, but socially mobile people in multiracial Britain. In this context the comedy introduced new types of protagonists such as Desmond, the Black entrepreneur and his two sons, one an aspiring bank employee and the other a bright student. (Malik 2003a)

11

The Fosters was criticized for its lack of authenticity, especially by black audiences. The programme was, in fact, modelled after the US sitcom Good Times, which was itself a spinoff of several other formats.

234

Susanne Mühleisen

To some extent, characters in a comedy have to be at least types – if not stereotypes. They are never meant as truly realistic characters but always stand for something (someone) in a more general sense: the stubborn and slightly childish traditional patriarch of family and business, the loving and clever wife (who is really the one in charge of family and business), the Domino-playing West Indian ‘limer,’12 the teenage brat, etc. Recognition of the ‘type’ with all his or her predictable actions is one of the joys of comedy. Another source of humour, inevitably connected to such recognition, is when characters actually break away from their assumed typical behaviour. This ensures a certain depth and roundness of character for the more central figures, which allows us to identify with them. Other, more marginal figures in the plot are almost unidimensional. The invariability and exaggeration of some particular traits of behaviour and speech makes them caricatures in the sense described above and sets them apart from the core characters. Examples in Desmond’s for this would be, for instance, family visitors from Jamaica like Aunt Susu, or, more prominently, Matthew, the African pseudointellectual student. Sarita Malik, author of Representing Black Britain (2001), sees the motivation for depicting Matthew in this way in that ‘Worrell [the author of Desmond’s] was very keen to emphasise the differences within the African-Caribbean diaspora and so the audience was witness to racism and prejudice between for example, Matthew (Gyearbuor Asante), the African eternal student and the West Indians characters’ (2003a). After the production of Desmond’s came to an end in 1995,13 more ‘Black soaps’ followed: Brothers and Sisters (1996), for instance, was a ten-part drama series with a comic touch, but it failed to convince the audience. Criticism of the series, including criticism of the linguistic representation of the characters, was summed up as follows: This ‘gritty’ Black soap has the makings of a good show but is let down by the execution of the various plot lines, ham-fisted dialogue and the actor’s lack of ummm … er … timing! Did anyone notice they all lost their accents within two minutes of speaking? (Bobby Joseph, qtd. in Bourne: 211-2)

Black Sounds on British Television As the discussion above shows, linguistic choices of characters may be crucial for success or failure of a black soap or sitcom – for a number of reasons: choices of variety may serve to make a figure more credible and authentic in their social environment, choices of register may also serve to

12 13

‘To lime’ is a Caribbean expression for ‘hanging out with friends.’ Norman Beaton, the leading star of the series, died in 1995.

What makes an accent funny, and why?

235

achieve particular communicative effects.14 The borderline between ‘getting it right’ and ‘getting it wrong’ is very thin, as the author of the television drama Storm Damage, Lennie James, notes: One of the things I learnt doing Storm Damage is, if you write something like that, a lot of energy goes into making the ‘Yes or No’ people understand why things in the script are important, because it’s like a foreign language. They don’t get nuances, why ‘innit though’ on its own is different to when it comes at the end of a sentence. Or why, if someone kisses their teeth to their parents or their friends, it’s different. We always have to educate them. But it’s worth making that effort, because the film industry owes you nothing. (Lennie James, qtd. in Bourne: 219)

In the following, I will take a closer look at the language choices and their humorous effects in three different television productions where Black British Englishes play a role: First, Empire Road, second, Desmond’s, and third, Da Ali G Show (2000). These three productions are not exactly comparable in genre. The first is a conventional soap opera (like Coronation Street), the second a sitcom (like The Cosby Show), and the third a one-man reality TV comedy which rests on the single spoof character ‘Ali G.’ However, each one of them was highly successful at the time of production and they may be taken as innovative for the respective period.

Empire Road In Empire Road, humorous play with accents is carefully avoided. The characters of this soap opera are not particularly typified by the variety of language they use. The speech of the middle-class parent generation (Everton – Norman Beaton, Hortense – Corinne Skinner-Carter, Walter – Joe Marcell, May – Rosa Roberts) shows traces of a moderate Creole / Patois, their children speak mostly plain standard English. If anything, metalinguistic comments which mirror disapproval of West Indian accent, for instance in this conversation between the more ‘refined’ Hortense with her somewhat more coarse sister-in-law May (Episode: ‘The Wedding’). The two women are talking about the wedding of Hortense’s son Marcus. Example 1 M= May, H=Hortense 15 M: Where dey going for de honeymoon?

While the focus of analysis is on linguistic choices here, it is clear that in the audio-visual medium television these choices are interlinked with visual codes, i.e. looks, dress, gestures, etc. of the person characterized. 15 Underlined passages indicate some phonological, lexical or grammatical features of Patois. For reasons of legibility, the transcription here is kept in ordinary English orthography and is not a phonemic representation of Patois. Only some of the most prominent phonological 14

Susanne Mühleisen

236 H: M: H: M: H: M:

Spain, of course. Where else. You couldn’t pay me to go to Spain. Oh no? Dem Spanish, dey cyaan speak English! And you can, I suppose? I beg you pardon?

It seems as if one of the aims of this series, to educate a wider British audience about the lives of Black people in Britain, has led to an avoidance of stressing linguistic difference – possibly out of fear that this may be taken as stereotyping the characters. This may also be seen as a result of the prevailing negative attitudes towards Patois / Black British Englishes at the time (cf. Mühleisen 2001a). However, the figures might have lost their credibility (cf. the criticism above), if the parent generation had not used Patois to some extent. Thus, the representation of the ‘accent’ here serves the authenticity of the characters and the setting and is not intended as a source of humour.

Desmond’s In the sitcom Desmond’s, the comic aspect is much more foregrounded than in Empire Road – but this is not the only reason why the range of varieties and speech styles is quite pronounced here. While Empire Road presents a rather homogeneous respectable Black neighbourhood, Desmond’s draws a lot of its humour from intergenerational contrasts and conflicting lifestyles across a range of social circles. The principle linguistic choices of the characters are reflected in this: Characters: Desmond and Shirley Ambrose Children: Michael, assistant bank manager Gloria, student Sean, schoolboy Shopflies: Porkpie, old pal from Guyana Matthew, African student Lee, friend of the house

Guyanese English/Creole RP Cockney London Jamaican Guyanese English/ Creole stilted RP with West African phonological traces, Cockney

Intergenerational differences of language use (cf. also Mühleisen 2002: 13580) become particularly evident in a scene (Series 1, Episode 2: ‘Short and Curlies’) where Desmond wants to take out a bank loan and, to his surprise,

markers, e.g. /d/ and /t/ for /ð/ and /θ/, or a different realization of vowels (e.g. from /o:/ to /a:/) will be marked here.

What makes an accent funny, and why?

237

is referred to his son Michael, the ambitious assistant bank manager.16 Here, not only Desmond’s Patois versus Michael’s RP, but also the dichotomy between the intimate family relationship and the formal setting, which requires a register Desmond is not familiar with, account for the humorous effect. Example 2 M=Michael, D=Desmond M: […] because we always end up arguing. D: And you know why dat is, don’t you: You always get on your high harse with your air and graces. De way you behave you would tink you was barn wid a silver spoon in your mout! M: But father. D: […] don’t need dat ‘father.’ Why you cyan call me pops or dad or wha’appen. M: What’s wrong with ‘father.’ D: It, it, well, it don’t soung right. […] M: Right. Let’s just get this straight. Just because I’m black it doesn’t mean to say I cannot appreciate the finer things in life. And just because I’m black it equally doesn’t mean I cannot have ambitions or speak the Queen’s English. It wouldn’t go down too well if someone came to ask for a loan and I said ‘Wha’appen. Mi cyan give you a loan because I-man feel is a idiot.’ […] M: Now, you want a loan. D: I didn’t come here for a check-up. M: (Disapprovingly) Ah-ah. What do you require the loan for, Mr Ambrose. D: I require the loan … Look, dis is stupid. Just gimme de money.

Creole / Patois and RP are not the only varieties which stand in contrast with this sitcom. The Patois of the older generation and the youth language with Cockney and Jamaican elements the youngest son Sean uses are also a subject of misunderstanding and irritation in the scene below: Example 3 D=Desmond, S=Sean, Sh=Shirley S: (to Sh, appreciatively) That’s wicked, mom! D: Wicked? Your mom isn’t wicked. Why you can’t talk praper instead of all this hard-murder crispy-fresh nonsense? S: Because it’s saft, that’s why. D: Hard isn’t soft, and where is murder coming into it? Sh: Your father right, Sean. You really ought to talk praperly. S: What, as Michael’s doing… D: Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that.

16

I’m referring to ‘Short and Curlies,’ series 1, episode 2. On intergenerational differences of language see also Mühleisen 2002: 135-80.

238

Susanne Mühleisen

While the speech variety and style ‘assigned’ to the various characters may be taken as mimicry in the sense Freud has used it, where the source of humour is not based on exaggeration but rather on the faithfulness of the imitation and on the expectation of the audience, caricature is also used in Desmond’s, sometimes between characters. Gloria, the Cockney-speaking daughter of Desmond and Shirley, often caricatures the speech of her poshsounding brother Michael to show her disapproval of his speech and lifestyle. She also uses expressions from her parents’ speech like ‘Mi know’ for particular effects, for instance to signal a fatalistic agreement with their judgement. Desmond and Shirley sometimes imitate the Rap-style of their son Sean or expressions from his London Jamaican. As outlined above, there are also true caricatures in this series and this is also reflected in their speech. Two factors play a role for the effect of caricature versus the mimicry of Desmond, Shirley, or the children: the exaggeration of certain features and the invariability of style and register. Matthew, for instance, the nerdish African student, is always required to give some stock responses to questions about his studies (e.g. here in Episode 1 ‘The French Lesson’). Example 4 Ma=Matthew, Sh=Shirley Ma: Is that the time? I really must go to college now, otherwise I’ll be late. Sh: What’s your lecture today, Matthew? Ma: Is tabloid journalism undermining the moral fibre of today’s urban society? (Laughing and cheering from Desmond, Porkpie and Shirley)

In subsequent episodes, the question ‘What’s your lecture today?’ is inevitably put to Matthew, who always responds with some pompous-sounding title on a topic related to the foregoing conversation.17 Generally, however, the series was successful as a platform of identification exactly because of the variety and versatility of characters, which thus defies any notion of there being an essential black British subject.

Ali G The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has created the media persona Ali G. In his Ali G-role, Cohen, a white Jewish Cambridge graduate, impersonates an urban youth who uses London Jamaican, a variety with Cockney and Jamaican elements (cf. Sebba). This variety and style of speech was first created by black urban youths – mainly second and third-generation West Indians – and has been taken up also by white and Asian adolescents as an in-

17

See for example his reply in episode 2: ‘The propensity to consume due to the changing economic infrastructure.’

What makes an accent funny, and why?

239

group variety. Some of the features may be seen in the following excerpt from his ‘film diary.’ Example 5 DAY 1: First day of filmin – hexpected to go to LA, but instead got taken just round da corner from me Nan’s. Has big row wiv Director, Mike Marlod, coz it don’t look nuffink like Souf Central. Him hexplain dat da film Aint done in da same order as da script, which iz well fick. Meet some of da ovver actors. Aint sure about Charles Dance – him keeps kissin me every time we meet and walkin into wardrobe while i iz in me pants. (Indahouse Production Diary, www. iofilm.co.uk)

But Ali G’s comic appeal does not only rest on his linguistic representation. Rather, his speciality is embarrassing public figures by interviewing them and asking incredibly stupid and rude questions which they fail to understand. The comic character appeared on television (ca. 2000-2002) in the series Da Ali G Show, and achieved cult status for a brief period of time.18 The most interesting aspect of this character is that with this crude mixture of poses, he left the public puzzled at what this character really represents. One critic describes her perplexity as follows: Our interest in him has largely been stimulated by his ability to elude any definitive identity. Is the character an imitation of a black man? Or is the spoof more complicated? Is Ali G a ‘wigger’ – a white man wanting to be black or as some viewers understand it, an Asian man trying to be black? Although we seem no closer to consensus on his identity, there can be no dispute that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G is ignorant. It is his misogyny, homophobia, materialism and lack of awareness that makes us laugh. Faced with an Orangeman in Northern Ireland asserting his Britishness, Ali G asks: ‘Is you here on holiday?’ We laugh because we are assured that we know that he does not. And we can laugh harder because we are fully confident that he would never catch us out, as he does his interviewees, with his references to ‘getting caned’, ‘batty boys’ and ‘ounces’. (Prasad)

The public was also divided of whether or not the humour in Ali G was racist and quite a few of Britain’s leading black comedians claimed that his performance was a caricature of blackness (BBC News, 11 Jan. 2000). Is Ali G therefore a modernized edition of the Minstrel Show? The strategy is, in fact, similar, in that Ali G performs a caricature of mimicry. Only this time, it is the other way round: the persona is the caricature of the mimicry of a white youth playing Black. The stubborn insistence on being black despite any physical evidence of an African or Caribbean heritage has furthermore an element of self-parody and travesty – this relies on the dichotomy of behaviour versus appearance – and leaves his interviewees and the audience 18

In 2002, a film (Ali G In Da House) was released. Ali G was also adapted for the United States but did not succeed there. At the time of writing (2003), the Ali G. hype seems to have calmed down.

240

Susanne Mühleisen

confused about the ethnic signifiers he is playing with. This might best be seen in a conversation like the following where Baron Cohen talks to a policeman at a demonstration. Example 619 A=Ali G, P=Policeman 20 A: mi is now gonna mee* da main coppa – da guy who sor*in i* all ou* – if i* comes to a rock – ‘ho do you fink’s gonna win? P: it isn’t gonna come to a rock A: bu* if i* does? P: nay – it’s not gonna come to a rock – this is being dealt with as peacefully as possible A: is i* possible for us to ge* in? P: not at this stage because it is still dangerous A: is i* cos I is black? P: not at all

As Lorper (71) notes, Ali G ‘contributes to the dissolution of ethnic barriers that seem impermeable if judgement is based only on paternity-related considerations.’ He adds that ‘Sacha Baron Cohen manages to use language in order to blur ethnic borders,’ as may also be seen in one of his staged interviews upon visiting a coal mine. His interview partner shows him old photographs of coal miners (qtd. in Lorper: Appendix: 5-6). Example 7 A=Ali G, G=interview partner Graham Grotten G: follow me now and I A: aai G: just show you some photographs A: so why is i* mainly brovvas ‘o is workin’ down ‘ere? G: brothers? A: aai – why is i* mainly da blackman? Da*’s a bi* racialist, inni*? G: oh no – no that’s sweat and dirt – that is A: so why ‘as ‘e blacked himself up and pretend’ to be like a brovva? G: but he hasn’t blacked himself up and he hasn’t – erm – pretended to be like you say a brother.

Here, the issue of who impersonates whom is shown to be absurd. Of course, one might argue that ‘blackness’ is also a political term and does not necessarily have to be tied to kinship and physical markers. But the point is that in Ali G the whole question of identity and identity choice, or who the (qtd. in Lorper: 71, Appendix 59); I am grateful for written and audio-visual material from Thomas Lorper’s highly relevant MA-thesis on Ali G. Thanks also to Edgar W. Schneider for passing this on to me. 20 * represents a ‘glottal stop,’ one of the most prominent phonological markers of Cockney. 19

What makes an accent funny, and why?

241

source of imitation is, remains unclear.21 This is mirrored in a statement from a chat debate about whether or not the humour of Ali G is racist: The whole point of Ali G as a character is that he makes people question what constitutes racism. Why should black groups be offended when he is, in effect, ridiculing white youths who wish to imitate black street culture? Surely these white youths should be up in arms? Without trying too hard, he has made a complete mockery of the whole politically correct brigade because they can’t decide whether or not it is politically correct to accuse a Jew of racism. The outrage over the film is exactly what Cohen was looking for. Anyone who is that offended has obviously failed to realise that the point of the character is to upset narrow-minded, stuck-up, officious people with no sense of humour. Jim, UK (BBC news chat, 25 March 2002)

Conclusion The material from the three different TV productions has shown that the way Black British Englishes have been represented on the screen differ vastly, not only in form but also in the purpose they have been used for. Such representations also reflect changing attitudes and functions of Black British Englishes in the wider British society: while the first productions of Black TV soaps like Empire Road are careful to avoid any use beyond the necessary markers of authenticity for fear of confirming negative attitudes towards Creole, sitcoms like Desmond’s humorously play with a mimicry of different varieties and speech styles in order to reflect tensions and differences between various generations and lifestyles. In Ali G, finally, London Jamaican is clearly caricatured. But the debate about who is being impersonated shows that Black British Englishes have long crossed ethnic boundaries. London Jamaican has become a British variety in a true sense and is no longer genealogically defined. Neither the Creoles which the first Caribbean immigrants brought with them, nor Patois or London Jamaican are funny in their own right – no ‘accent’ is. But the fact that they may be adopted to take on new forms and (also) humorous functions shows their dynamic power. Strategies like mimicry, caricature, travesty, and unmasking in the representation of linguistic codes associated with a particular population group are significant for explaining the humorous effect of the representation: they lie in the assumed shared knowledge and expectation of the audience (mimicry), in exaggeration of stereotyped character traits (caricature), or in the destruction of the unity of a person’s speech and actions as a subversion of authority (travesty and the more special form unmasking). While the latter ones all

21

It may be noted that the visual material also reflects this point: the perspectives are constantly shifting and the interview scenes are interrupted by video-clip-style sequences of other scenes.

242

Susanne Mühleisen

seek to undermine authority and power of the person / group represented, the first one stresses the familiarity of the audience with the object of representation, thus making it also a source of identification. The source of humour is therefore a serious issue and far from innocent. It reflects the attitudes towards the represented as well as its relationship of distance and intimacy with the audience. The conflicting and diverse reactions of a black and white audience to some of the Black British representations described here shows that the question of who is allowed to use which strategy in which context remains a highly sensitive issue – after all, laughter can work both as a social leveller and a means of degradation. The use of linguistic codes as a source of humour continues to play an important role in this debate.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.’ The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85-92. Billig, Michael. ‘Freud and the Language of Humour.’ The Psychologist 15.9 (2002): 452-5. Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television. London: Continuum, 2001. Döring, Tobias. ‘Freud about Laughter – Laughter about Freud.’ A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond. Ed. Manfred Pfister. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. 121-35. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Hall, Stuart. ‘Encoding, Decoding.’ The Cultural Studies Reader. 1990. Ed. Simon During. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1999. 507-17. Husband, Charles. ‘Racist Humour and Racist Ideology in British Television, or I Laughed till You Cried.’ Humour in Society: Resistance and Control. Ed. Chris Powell and George E. Paton. London: Macmillan, 1988. 149-78. Irvine, Judith T. ‘Style as Distinctiveness: the Culture and Ideology of Linguistic Differentiation.’ Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Ed. Penelope Eckert and John Rickford. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Lorper, Thomas. ‘Ali G’s Hybrid Language Use. Playing with Ethnicity and Identity in Urban British Youth Culture.’ Unpublished MA-Thesis, Universität Regensburg, 2002. Malik, Sarita. Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. London: Sage, 2001.

What makes an accent funny, and why?

243

–––. ‘Desmond’s. British Situation Comedy.’ Museum of Television. 12 Mar. 2003 . –––. ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show.’ Museum of Television. 12 Mar. 2003 . Mühleisen, Susanne. ‘Creole Goes British – Black British English und andere Migrationssprachen in Großbritannien.’ Languages in Britain: Varieties of English – Creole – Gaelic – Scots. Spec. issue of Hard Times 71 (2000): 15-23. –––. ‘Black British Englishes.’ Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Ed. Alison Donnell. London: Routledge, 2001a. 42-4. –––. ‘From Mother Tongue to Metaphor of New ‘Imagined Communities’: Creole and its Migrant Transformations.’ Postcolonial Passages: Migration and its Metaphors. Ed. M. Banerjee, M. Heide and M. Stein. Spec. issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 49.3 (2001b): 256-65. –––. Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles. Creole Linguistics Library 24. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. Patterson, Sheila. Dark Strangers: A Study of West Indians in London. London: Tavistock, 1963. Pines, Jim. Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936. London: British Film Institute, 1992. Prasad, Raekha. ‘Wandering Ali G May Not Hit the Spot.’ Guardian Unlimited 31 Mar. 2000. 12 Mar. 2003 . ‘Racism Rap for Ali G.’ BBC News 11 Jan. 2000. 12 Mar. 2003 . ‘Revealed: How UK Media Fuelled Race Prejudice.’ Chronicleworld 12 Mar. 2003 . Sebba, Mark. London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. London: Longman, 1993.

This page intentionally left blank

V. Laughing it off – Does therapeutic humour work?

This page intentionally left blank

MAGGIE ANN BOWERS

‘Ethnic glue’ Humour in Native American literatures

I

n his study Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, Kenneth Lincoln emphasises the essential role that humour plays in binding together Native American communities in the face of historical and continuing colonisation. For him, the role of humour in Native American literatures is of ‘ethnic glue’ that acts as a means to subvert the power of colonialism; his thesis is borne out by recent humorous works by writers such as Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Thomas King. However, if we look to the recent past, hard-hitting writing from the 1970s by writers such as W. P. Kinsella about Native Americans living on reservations provides a warning to the adoption of this optimistic stance. Lincoln’s study proposes that Native American humour is a threefold positive force. Firstly, it is an ethnic glue by which ‘[w]e laugh at ourselves to “play” with common ties’ (63), and, secondly, it is a celebration of survival that retrospectively laughs in the face of terror. As he states ‘[t]here is always hurt in humor, and vice versa […] It’s the way one learns the truth […] and the joy of having survived to the moment’ (87). Thirdly, Lincoln makes the strong claim that humour which plays with the frictions and differences between peoples, such as the colonized and the colonizing, is a way to release intercultural and interracial tension. He states that ‘having fun with tribal disconnections makes their dissonance into something more than snarled warnings to the “others.” In fact, such play or humour indulges the negative charge positively, reversing its field to include rather than exclude “them”’ (312).

248

Maggie Ann Bowers

These three types of humour occur in the majority of well-known contemporary Native American texts such as The Heirs of Columbus by Vizenor, Green Grass Running Water by King, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Alexie. The works contain a variety of approaches and uses of humour, from the sardonic self-deprecating joke that repeats the prejudices of the dominant culture against Native Americans, to the joyful and triumphant tales of trickster figures that gain revenge for the wrongs of colonialism. This paper will focus on the contrast between Kinsella’s failed attempts at finding humour, even ironic, in Native American life and the joyful trickster tales by King, with additional reference to Vizenor and Alexie’s writing. All Native American humour shares the context of colonialism in which it exists and to which it frequently refers. Many of these texts are based on reservation life and they include illustrations of mass unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, child abuse as well as wrongful imprisonment, racial prejudice, and degradation by dominant society. Even King’s joyful work Green Grass Running Water, which for the most part focuses on positive aspects of reservation life, has characters such as Latisha who as a working single mother relies too heavily upon her eldest son to look after her young children (190). What is common to Vizenor and Alexie’s work is the use of humour in order to defend themselves and their cultures, and to survive the attacks on their communities by the dominant colonial society. Lincoln calls this ‘dark red humor’ (58) and explains: ‘They laugh hard and deep among themselves and grimace around whites, exorcising their pain, redirecting their suffering, drawing together against the common enemy – cultural ignorance’ (Lincoln: 5). All of these books are exemplars of the Native American attitude expressed by Paula Gunn Allen in her groundbreaking 1986 study The Sacred Hoop: Certainly the time frame we presently inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humor; it is the spirit of the trickster that keeps Indians alive and vital in the face of horror. (158)

As these texts attest, Native Americans have long recognised humour as an essential element of their lives and cultures. Paula Gunn Allen explains that: Indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one’s own land necessitates. (158)

There is little recognition of this outside Native America where the stereotypical image of the inscrutable, stern-faced ‘injun’ full of wisdom and proverbs remains. In this context, these texts battle against this aspect of cultural ignorance to which Lincoln refers. For Lincoln this partly explains

Humour in Native American literatures

249

the heavy use of ironic humour in Native America. He recounts a television interview with a Native American activist, John Trudelli, who ‘consistently reversed the [white] interviewer’s questions with the straightest face possible, and warped the projections back on white consciousness’ (Lincoln: 90). However, many Native American humorous texts contain jokes that can be understood only from the perspective of a Native American person. The humour in these texts is often employed in order to reinforce a sense of community. Since humour, when referring to a particular situation or people, demands shared cultural knowledge, it is a means of reaffirming a sense of shared experience and community. As Vizenor confirms, ‘comic situations are not possible without a group, without a community experience’ (72). This of course means that they can be understood by someone who adopts a Native American perspective during the reading who is not necessarily Native American herself, but who has access to a degree of culturally specific knowledge. According to the critical commentary of Vizenor, Kimberley Blaeser and Lincoln, Native American humour is a means of healing the damage caused by colonialism through both its community building and cathartic effects. Vizenor calls his style of humorous writing, filled with puns and twists of history, ‘serious play’ (69). Indeed, Native American humour is considered to be educational, community building, exorcising, and a weapon for protection (Lincoln: 5-7). It comes as a surprise, then, to find that much of this humour is directed at Native Americans themselves. The self-mocking humour of Native American fiction often concerns the negative treatment by whites, alcoholism, and gambling. For instance, Alexie’s famously amusing writing includes a joke mocking Native American reliance on gambling: ‘“How do you get one hundred Indians to yell Oh, shit?”[…] “Say Bingo”’ (1997: 10). This self-mocking humour is heavy with irony and alerts the reader to the difficult living situations of many Native Americans, particularly on reserve lands. It acts as a form of ethnic glue in that it elicits empathy from those who recognise or share such difficulties. Moreover, the self-mocking aspect of this humour encourages those who empathise to recognise their part in the negative aspects of their lives and take action against them. However, this form of humour is subtle and complex as the heavy ironic tone indicates a recognition that such aspects are at least in part also imposed on them by the circumstance of living under colonialism. A more overtly positive and optimistic type of humour in Native American fiction, and particularly that by Vizenor and King, occurs in the form of trickster tales. The figure of the trickster is complex and multifaceted and so is its humour. The humour of trickster tales comes not only from the trickery of the character itself that often challenges authority but

250

Maggie Ann Bowers

also from frequent word play. This means that trickster tales are often filled with jokes which release the language from the strictures of closed meanings. As Blaeser explains: ‘Trickster is a marginal figure, a mediator who breaks down any hard and fast distinctions. Trickster is […] imaginative energy’ (51). Jeanne Rosier Smith explains that ‘[t]he trickster’s medium is words. A parodist, joker, liar, con-artist, and storyteller, the trickster fabricates believable illusions with words – and thus becomes author and embodiment of a fluid, flexible, and politically radical narrative form’ (11). Following this philosophy of storytelling, Alexie’s narrator claims ‘imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket’ (152). Moreover, in the works of Vizenor, King and Alexie there is an ironic humour derived from the recognition of the difference of importance given to storytelling in Native American and dominant cultures. Part of the joy of storytelling for Vizenor and King is their awareness of the power afforded to them by their stories and the storytelling process. Alexie extends this joy and ironic humour in storytelling by writing a story about a man who is arrested for telling stories. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is arrested because, as a man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs notes, he ‘has a history of this kind of behavior […] a storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth. Dangerous’ (93). Although the idea of being arrested for storytelling is in one sense comically absurd, the idea acknowledges the real Native North American perception of the power of shared imagination. It is comically ironic that a non-Native man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs shares the Native American view of the power of storytelling but the comedy of the story is contrasted by the violence of the tales that Thomas tells. Recognising himself as a target of racist prejudice which groups him together with all other Native North Americans, Thomas assumes that he is to stand trial for all the acts of defensive and retributive violence against European American settlers from the beginnings of colonization. As he comments, ‘I call myself as first and only witness to all the crimes I’m accused of and, additionally, to bring attention to all the mitigating circumstances’ (96). In Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus, almost all the Native American protagonists are storytelling tricksters. Although coming from the borderlands of Canada and the mid-west United States, they claim to be the descendents of Columbus and claim that in fact Columbus is Mayan. By creating these new historical facts, Vizenor’s text is a game of imaginative play and an attempt to persuade the reader to perceive received knowledge differently. As he states, ‘[t]he best tribal tricksters are in the best stories shared by people who trust imagination and the pleasure of language games’ (69).

Humour in Native American literatures

251

The protagonist of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus claims that his tribal band are descendents of Christopher Columbus and that Columbus himself journeyed from the ‘New World’ to the ‘Old World’ to educate the Europeans. This topsy-turvy way of thinking encourages us to playfully imagine an alternative history and an alternative cultural authority without being concerned with truth or fact. For Stone Columbus, his imaginative stories are essential to his production of a Native American historical perspective. As he explains, they are the foundation stones of his tribal culture: ‘The stone is my totem, my stories are stones, there are tribal stones, and the brother of the first trickster who created the earth was a stone…’ (King: 9). Alan Velie astutely observes that contemporary literary trickster tales often involve historical events. In this manner, Velie asserts: ‘Through their play and intellectual bantering they force a reconsideration of the processes and powers of historical reckoning and thus, essentially, liberate the reader from preconceived notions and incite an imaginative re-evaluation of history’ (39). This is particularly true of King’s Green Grass Running Water, in which King’s protagonists, similarly to Vizenor’s, are tricksters named after historical and mythologically important figures who are attempting to alter the lives of a group of Native Canadians. King’s group of narrators (a shapeshifting group of ‘old Indians’) are attempting to ‘fix up’ the world (427). What in fact they are attempting to do is to revise history and myth in order to improve the lives of Native Americans. Their names are indicative of their links to cultural myth concerning Native Americans: Lone Ranger (the partner of Tonto, the ‘Indian guide’), Robinson Crusoe (the opposite of his aboriginal man Friday), Hawkeye (the protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans) and Ishmael (the companion of the South Pacific Islander Queequeg of Moby Dick). These tricksters, rather than altering history directly, alter the way in which Native Americans are perceived and perceive themselves. They influence a video of a John Wayne-type ‘Cowboys and Indians’ film so that to the delight of the Native Canadian viewers, the ‘Indians’ win. These stories also include the heavily ironic tale of how the mythical figure of Old Woman during a creation story gains the name Hawkeye from Fenimore Cooper’s protagonist. The tale recounts a meeting between ‘Nathaniel Bumppo’ (the actual name of the character who becomes known as Hawkeye when he sides with the Mohicans in The Last of the Mohicans) and Old Woman. Bumppo (here referred to a ‘Nasty Bumppo’) mistakes Old Woman for his Mohican companion Chingachgook because she looks like a Native American. When he is shot dead (possibly by Coyote), he gives Old Woman his own name and she is then arrested for impersonating a

252

Maggie Ann Bowers

white man. The story is an absurd topsy-turvy version of the original tale in which Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo adopts the identity of a Native American and thus becomes a hero. King’s version of the story reveals the double standard of the colonial position, implies that Bumppo’s view of people is highly racialised, and also enacts fictional retribution on ‘Nasty Bumppo’ when he is killed by the trickster Coyote. The humour in both King and Vizenor’s novels relies heavily on the fictional aspect of their writing. For instance, King’s narrator recounts in a matter-of-fact tone the absurd occurrence of Nasty Bumppo dying twice so that he can comment on his own death. Moreover, the tricks and victories of the trickster figures which they include in their writing rely heavily on the reader suspending their belief in favour of the fiction during the act of reading. Their figures are a combination of traditional and adapted storytelling elements and their written fiction owes much to oral storytelling techniques. The role of the trickster in both the Heirs of Columbus and Green Grass Running Water is not constrained to the tricks of the traditional midwest tricksters Nanabozho and Coyote, although they do make their appearances in both these novels. It is the tricksters themselves who actually narrate the stories and who influence what happens during the narration. This occurs most strongly in Green Grass Running Water, in which Coyote asks questions during the telling of two simultaneous tales and, by adding commentary, he changes the course of the stories. When Coyote is told by the narrator that ‘Thought Woman’ doesn’t like coyotes he adds a transforming element to the story stating ‘there are soldiers waiting on the shore to capture Thought Woman. How do you like that?’ (324). Thus, Thought Woman is captured and imprisoned. At the end of the novel it is clear that it is Coyote who has the power to determine events. He uses his powers to positive effect when setting several elements in place which interact to bring the community together. It is Coyote who causes an earthquake leaving the protagonist of the tale, Lionel, to start his life afresh with the newly pregnant woman he loves. According to Paula Gunn Allen ‘[t]raditional tribal narratives possess a circular structure, incorporating event within event, piling meaning upon meaning, until the accretion finally results in a story’ (79). This structure is employed in King’s novel as a result of the involvement of Coyote in the narrative process. At various points in the novel the narration is interrupted by Coyote with the refrain: ‘Oh, boy, [...] It looks like we got to do this all over again’ (429). This circular and fragmented structure is used comically in King’s work, almost like a shaggy-dog story, but for the serious intent of indicating the need to continually reconsider, rebuild, and repair the world. By doing so, he creates a ‘happy ending’ for the characters of this tale and, more importantly, he takes control of the fate of the people who are released

Humour in Native American literatures

253

from the control of the conditions of colonialism under which they live. King empowers Coyote with the ability to influence these characters’ lives much as the tricksters in Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus are also able to do. Thus, the tricksters of both King and Vizenor create alternative stories, futures and lives for their Native American characters. For the duration of reading, the reader is able to experience the joy of imagining a world which is not restricted by the prejudices created by uninterrupted colonialism. Trickster stories remind Native Americans and non-Native Americans alike that ‘there is no final, ultimate answer, no infallibility that we can blindly accept and follow. Power, like life, is in motion’ (Blaeser: 57). For this reason, the humour of modern trickster tales is a powerful weapon, a challenge to colonial power. By revelling in the disruption caused by the tricksters of these tales, the reader is able to experience catharsis through their humour and also to share in a sense of joyful victory over the usually dominant holders of power. Reading such a text is a community-building experience; it serves as ethnic glue that relies upon a heightened imaginative aspect to present the possibility of overwhelming power. In this respect, these are highly optimistic fictions. However, Lincoln’s notion of ethnic glue is being tested to the limits by works such as Dance Me Outside by W. P. Kinsella. Kinsella’s tales of murder, rape, alcoholism, and damage are told in the form of humorous tales by his narrator Silas but the punch-lines are missing and the pain screeches from behind the text, working in tension with the jocular tone of the narration. Silas Ermineskin is a naïve narrator, writing stories for his local college course assignments. His tutor calls them his ‘funny stories’ and the book opens with a covert invitation to the reader to expect humorous tales: ‘Mr Nichols says I got a funny sense of humour, so I should just write about the funniest thing that ever happened to me’ (5). His first tale is indeed humorous in that Silas and his family living on the Ermineskin reservation, in trickster tradition manage to trick their white brother-in-law so that their sister, his wife, has the opportunity to become pregnant by her childhood Indian boyfriend and the brother-in-law is forced to leave his brand-new car on the reservation. The triumph of this tale is that the ‘reservation Indians’ outwit a ‘white man,’ a representative of dominant capitalist culture. To the narrator and the people on the reservation the police who come to look for the car all ‘[l]ook just like Brother Bob’ (19). Whilst this may appear to be a story of empowering colonial revenge, racial division heavily outweighs family connections, and the family reject their sister’s choice of partner even at the risk of damaging her marriage.

254

Maggie Ann Bowers

Subtly, Kinsella narrows the distance between the narrator and those readers who are troubled by the assumed comedy by eventually making Silas reflect: ‘I’m not so sure anymore that it is such a funny thing’ (20). The first line of the next story is a stark warning of the coming tension between the humorous tale form and the painful content: ‘Little Margaret Wolfchild got murdered down to Wetaskiwin one Saturday night last fall’ (21). The title story with the upbeat heading ‘Dance Me Outside,’ is actually the explanation of how revenge was taken for the death of Margaret Wolfchild. The retribution takes place at a dance where at least seven people are plotting to kill the murderer Clarence Gaskell and one of them succeeds. The police have no chance of discovering who the real killer is and so no one is charged. There is little that is overtly funny in this tale, although the success of the retribution and the fact that the colonial authorities are unable to control the situation or issue their own punishment provides a sense of a triumphant ending. On the other hand, the murder of Margaret and the sheer bloody violence of the events leave the participants traumatised and the story ends with Silas’ girlfriend asking him for human warmth and comfort. Kinsella’s work too owes something to oral storytelling. Although the narrator informs the reader that his tales are written assignments, he narrates them as though he were relating a tale orally. As he is the sole narrator, where interruptions occur in the narration they are from the narrator himself commenting on his own stories rather than from a participating audience. There is no other voice to offer alternative versions of the harsh realities that he recounts. Unlike the trickster tales, his are texts that do not offer alternatives to the effects of colonisation. His tone, like the tone of King’s narrator, is matter-of-fact, but unlike King’s work this tone is not used to contrast with the absurd elements of the story. A matter-of-fact tone is often used to tell humorous tall-tales as it heightens the humour and often the irony by contrasting the content with the narrative tone. However, Kinsella employs this device to create anticipation of a humorous tale, only to emphasise the harshness of what follows without euphemism or softening embellishment. In effect, what Kinsella’s text seems to suggest in the context of this study is that reservation life is too painful and too disparate to benefit from the use of the cathartic cultural device of humour. The irony of the text, in contrast to that of Alexie’s fiction, does not indicate a collusion concerning the negative aspects of reservation life between the colonial powers and the colonized subjects but has degenerated into defeat. In contrast to the trickster tales of Vizenor and King, where there is triumph over the colonial authorities, in Kinsella’s work, the bitterly negative effects of colonialism outweigh it. Where irony does exist in the text, it has become a metafictional irony

Humour in Native American literatures

255

created by using the form of a humorous tale in combination with depressing content. Although there is continuing need for humour in Native American literature to celebrate survival and to provide a release and a means to see things alternatively, Lincoln’s celebration of humour as ethnic glue breaks down under the weight of suffering recorded by Kinsella’s work. If, as Lincoln suggests, ‘tribal humor stitches the frayed cross-cultural fabric of multiethnic America’ (313), then Kinsella’s work reveals those stitches unravelling. In the face of ongoing colonialism, Kinsella’s work reminds us to be wary of being comforted into complaisance by the use of humour in contemporary Native American fiction.

Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. Tonto and Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven. 1994. New York: Harper, 1997. –––. The Toughest Indian in the World. London: Vintage, 2001. Coletti, Laura. ‘Gerald Vizenor: The Trickster Heir of Columbus – An Interview.’ Native American Literatures Forum 2-3 (1990-91). 101-16. Gunn Allen, Paula. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986. King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Kinsella, W.P. Dance Me Outside: More Tales from the Ermineskin Reserve. 1977. Boston: David R Godine, 1994. Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: OUP, 1993. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Vizenor, Gerald. The Heirs of Columbus. Wesleyan: UP of New England, 1991. –––. ‘Trickster Discourse: Comic and Tragic Themes in Native American Literature.’ Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History and Spirit. Ed. Mark A Lindquist and Martin Zanger. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. 162.

This page intentionally left blank

ANNIE GAGIANO

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy Three unusual African English novels

T

he Black Insider (1990) by Dambudzo Marechera of Zimbabwe, Striving for the Wind (1990) by Meja Mwangi of Kenya, and Secrets (1998) by Nuruddin Farah of Somalia are not titles likely to leap to mind when the idea of comic writing (by African authors) is broached. In this essay it will nevertheless be my argument that each of these texts requires us to adapt established conceptions of comic writing as (for instance) rambunctiously amusing, liberatory and exhilarating, or aligned with fertility rites (such as the Dionysian festivals in Ancient Greece or British preElizabethan May revels)1 – or as confined to the category of African forms of magical realism.2 Yet my title does not express ‘the conventional wisdom of the twentieth century […] that the comic is a defence against pain and suffering’ (Simon: 209) either, for I am not suggesting (nor are these three writers, in the abovementioned texts) that the kind of comic perspective discussed here protects or insulates writer, characters, or readers from facing (up to) horrendous, excruciating or profoundly sorrowful realities. Hence the idea of ‘contending with’ tragedy by means of the comic vision. Whilst acknowledging that ‘comedy […] seems to mock those who attempt to isolate and to define it,’ William Gruber avers that ‘the concept of genre […] makes sense particularly when one talks about comedy’ (Gruber 1981: 208, 207). The same writer nevertheless concedes that comedy is a

1 2

See Cornford and Barber. On African magic realism see, e.g., Cooper 1998 and 1992.

258

Annie Gagiano

‘miscellaneous genre, spawned by a variety of social motives that range from correctional satire to festive celebration’ (Gruber 1980: 259).3 Of course the suggestion of a comic vision occurring within the ambit of, or recognisably in response to, what can be considered tragic, is not unprecedented. It was particularly succinctly expressed by Søren Kierkegaard: ‘[T]he more one suffers,’ he wrote, ‘the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic’ (Kierkegaard: 231). George Meredith, a British author who has also written on comedy, makes a similar point: ‘Humour in its intense strain has a seat somewhere about the mouth of tragedy, giving it the enigmatical faint wry pull at a corner visible at times upon the dreadful mask’ (qtd. in Simon: 139). Gruber suggests that ‘from the very first [alluding here, it seems, to Ancient Greece], comic dramatic structures are intimately bound up with those of tragedy’ (Gruber 1981: 218). Particularly interesting and pertinent to my own argument in this chapter, however, is Salingar’s distinction between tragedy – as having mythos, ‘plot’ or ‘history’ – and comedy – as having logos, hypothesis or ‘argument.’ Salingar summarises the distinction in the contrast ‘fiction as opposed to history’ (Salingar: 94). According to Gruber, Adrados ‘argues [that] the genres of tragedy and comedy matured together as polarised imitations of the same fundamental reality’ (qtd. in Gruber 1980: 261). In using this distinction between genres (without losing sight of the link between comedy and tragedy), I would emphasise the idea of the comic vision as hypothesis or ‘argument’ – for all three novels described in this chapter give us forms of writing in which narrative, though partly responsible for the deployment of the text’s material, does not play a primary role. An attempt to deepen understanding of the tragic situation, or of tragic developments (as they unfold), is what takes precedence in the text; and such understanding allows the achievement of an alternative to despair, fatalism or passivity. Bakhtin says of comedy that ‘it is one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man,’ and that, without ‘hearing [the] chorus [of laughter] we cannot understand the drama [of life] as a whole’ (Bakhtin: 66, 474). To conclude this introduction I want to point out that in the three African novels addressed here, the tragic reality is not a merely personal matter or an individual experience – the tragedy of a time, a place, and a people is what each author recognises, and what each novelist uses his individual characters to work through, towards the achievement of what I call comic understanding (rather than comic escape). The characters that achieve this understanding are 3

Richard Keller Simon illustrates the huge range of ‘Western’ notions of the comic vision even more copiously (see his seventeen lines of examples on pp. 239-40 of his text).

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

259

especially the narrator (the unnamed black insider) in The Black Insider; Juda, Mama Pesa and Mutiso in Striving for the Wind; and Kalaman and Nonno in Secrets. This claim, however, will be better validated in the succeeding sections of this chapter, where each text is discussed in turn, in more detail – presenting Marechera’s comic melancholy, the painful folk comedy of Meja Mwangi, and Farah’s finally redemptive juxtaposition – of a disintegrating nation with a family that unites across fractures.

The Black Insider The extension of the notion of the comic vision that is proposed in this chapter may be thought of as perhaps most problematically applied to the case of Marechera’s The Black Insider. The horrific ending, when an invasion of the crumbling Faculty of Arts building, in which the narrator and his cohorts have been sheltering, results in the shattering of the walls in an explosion, with the narrator’s face crushed into the bloody remains of his beloved’s, can by no stretch of imagination or terminology be described as amusing and is not presented as black comedy either, but as appalling and (since this is the moment of the extinguishing, not only of several lives, but of a newly blossoming love) also as tragic. Much in this text’s vision of the fate of being ‘born black in a white environment’ (Marechera: 87) is profoundly melancholic – and it is as scathing about white racist snobbery and hate-filled contempt as it is against African inhumanity and corruption – ‘our roots,’ says the narrator in bitter denunciation, ‘have become so many banners in the wind;’ he refers also to the rise of ‘a new kind of fascism based on the “traditional” African image’ (Marechera: 82). In the unaccommodating space between white racism against blacks and African fascism (the narrator notes), ‘there was no place like home’ (Marechera: 106, emphasis added) – the cunning twist to the usually comforting expression giving it its wry edginess. In the spin that he puts upon the platitude, however, something of what the narrator himself refers to as his ‘belligerent impishness’ (Marechera: 110) emerges – the quoted expression recording a combination of anger with teasing humour. In my reading of the text, Marechera’s narrator throughout enacts the role of the eironos in Ancient Greek comedy – that is, he plays the part of an underdog who has only his intelligence to use against the bully. And in this text (as in Marechera’s others) the bully is as much the international white racist establishment as it is the incarnation of black power. The writing is brilliant in its worldly-wise wit, in the daring, insouciant stripping-off of the trappings and luxurious clothing with which power covers up its grotesquely swollen nakedness. It mocks, simul-

260

Annie Gagiano

taneously, also the lapdogs and beneficiaries who surround the post-colonial power-mongers. Since power relies to such an extent on a po-faced solemnity (giggles at the emperor being considered tantamount to attempts at toppling the state), Marechera’s mocking descriptions of the ways of power and empire can be termed political comedy – a term I prefer (for him) to political satire, because so much of his writing is wonderfully funny.4 Even the moment in the short play-within-the-novel when Marechera intertextually purloins the words of Julius Caesar (from Shakespeare’s eponymous play) – ‘Come on my right hand, bishop, for this ear is deaf’ (Marechera: 40) – is hilarious in the way it helps to portray the imperial pomposities of this ruler. Equally ridiculous are the bishop’s declarations (an undisguised allusion to Abel Muzorewa, the compromised black co-leader of the coalition government before the fall of Rhodesia) that: ‘I am the people’ (Marechera: 39). Marechera’s text is full of allusions to comic writing, ranging from Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (which the narrator reads and rereads amidst the furies of the war and the plague) to Petronius’s Satyricon and Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ from The Canterbury Tales – the latter a type of text which, we are told in Marechera’s unusual work, is far more suitable to African conditions than the typical novel from the region – in its ‘irreverent zestful treatment of values, institutions and beliefs [and its] […] go-getting specificness’ – with ‘the fabric and texture of life being scrutinised under a microscope with a no-holds-barred attempt to put people’s happiness first before anything else’ (89-90, emphasis added); a perfect description of Marechera’s own style of comedy and its fundamentally humane purpose. When the white girl Helen approaches the narrator with the suggestion that she move in with him, he says impishly that ‘Genghis Khan reading Thomas Love Peacock could not have been more astonished’ (50) – here, too, suggesting the role of comic vision in undercutting the structures and actions of power (such as racial prejudice, and wars of conquest). It is, admittedly, the type of comedy that skates daringly on very thin ice over ghastly depths, into which the text occasionally (and eventually) drops its readers. But it is strangely (perhaps hysterically) amusing to hear Marechera’s narrator blithely classifying the war’s participants by mentioning calibrated distinctions, not only between ‘the neutral and the non-aligned,’ but also between ‘the ferocious and the hyperferal’ (24)! The Black Insider contains a great deal of what might be termed tragic mockery of the post- (or rather neo-)colonial state; a condition succinctly illustrated in an off-hand reference to ‘a war-paralysed city where multitudes 4

In my own book I have identified him as ‘one of Africa’s great comic writers,’ despite ‘the tragic undertone of most of his work’ (Gagiano: 204).

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

261

each day succumb to the despair of hunger, disease and homelessness’ (32). There is a sardonic tone, but a discernible, underlying (and deep) anger in an analytical comment such as the following: ‘Advertisements, educational programmes, television, the radio, universities, general elections, wars and the very notion of progress have performed mass brain operations in the heads of peoples in Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific’ (51). Marechera’s unsparing gaze also exposes the posturings of cultural authenticity of those in exile who (in London) can be seen ‘eating impeccably African food recommended by the Guardian [newspaper]’ (66). The anarchic vitality of this author’s vision allows no reader, however, to essentialise the posturing and hypocrisy to which he draws attention as if it were a merely African condition, as is illustrated in a wonderfully, wryly amusing passage like the following: The psychology of clothes has much to do with notions of history and identity. Alex Haley now has a full wardrobe of roots. In the Iliad, the Greeks and the Trojans were all at pains to clothe themselves with armour of rhetoric, with gods and goddesses, with attitudes and values, with gore and law, with guts and poetry, with ceremony and acrimony, with ideals and the realism of victory. It is as if the Trojan War clothed the Greeks with the apparel of nationhood. […] Homer does, as it were, a strip-tease of the ancient Greeks. (81-2)

That Marechera is (as author) entirely self-aware of the kinds of (and function of the) comic techniques he employs, is proved in a passage such as the following: ‘The Decameron’s structure is really an almost natural way of combining grim reality with the art of story-telling. There is the plague outside and the storytellers inside’ (89). Sometimes the author’s ‘cracks’ have a delayed shock effect, as in the sheer daring of Marechera’s blackly comic parody of Darwinesque language when he refers to ‘the Tasmanians who could not adapt to the brutal and murderous presence of English whites’ (87). Something of the same delayed horror and grotesquery occurs when the reader recognises that the narrator’s final description of Helen’s face – ‘How white her teeth were in all that blood!’ (114) – combines the technique of parodied beauty-tribute found in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (here taken to a much further extreme, of course) with ancient memento mori effects – such as the ‘death and the maiden’ (or, here, death as the maiden) motif, and that of the grinning skull. The range of humour in Marechera’s novel is very wide. In the course of its movements it makes comic assault also on the all-too-frequently pompous spheres of Art and Literary Criticism and High Theory. For instance, in Marechera’s irreverent vision ‘a novel is like a big toe with little toes arranged down one of its sides’ (24), and his narrator can cheerfully tell the reader how much he enjoys ‘playing the role of the unfathomable black

262

Annie Gagiano

intellectual mind’ (63). Particularly daring and subtle comedy, wry as its undertone certainly is, occurs when the British academic Liz, who has worked in the African context for many years, says wonderingly: ‘I’ve never met any black writers. Are you angry and polemic or are you grim and nocturnal or are you realistic and quavering or are you indifferent and European?’ (49) Her ignorance, manifested in her condescending categorisations, is satirically mocked, here, as scathingly as is the predictability of many African writers’ falling into the dialectical traps of their political context – unlike the shimmying, unclassifiable Marechera, whose narrator (just prior to the above encounter) declares: ‘I fear death by drowning in one of T.S. Eliot’s poems’ (47). But to suggest that the hilarities of The Black Insider outshine its darker moods of melancholia, grief and rage would be to distort the complexity of the effect Marechera achieves. It is an intellectually brilliant text of profound political insight, cultural relativity, variety, and balance – and emotionally both mournful and merry (in its teasing mockery). The presence of comedy here works to achieve for the text a profound poignance – something a predominantly solemn novel is so much less likely to convey. Its final preoccupation is with deprivation and loss, particularly loss of cherishing love – at the individual, the inter-national and the national level. The narrator notes that ‘the sense of having lost our nation was indivisible from the feeling of the nation having lost us; the smack of some incompetent fate made our eyes sting’ (105). I will conclude my brief account of this text with the point that it is such painful tears and such lucid wit that give Marechera’s text its ultimately life-affirmative taste, saving it from tragic melancholia even as this sadness colours the impish comedy that is found in the novel.

Striving for the Wind Meja Mwangi’s Striving for the Wind is considerably more naturalistic in its presentation than is Marechera’s novel, yet the vision Mwangi conveys in his text is deeply and humanely comic. He uses a number of comic techniques, such as centering the figure of the comic grotesque (embodied here in the character of Baba Pesa, ‘The father of money’ – Mwangi: 1), in order to tell this micro-history. The narrative is a no-holds barred yet gentle account of rural life in a small Kenyan village called Kambi, which has ‘one school, three churches, six bars [and] […] one general store imaginatively named Settler’s Store’ (Mwangi: 31). Baba Pesa is repulsive: hugely wealthy, obese, but so strong that ‘he was known to have demolished a bar counter with one angry fist’ (2); a bully, complacent, and a schoolgirl seducer. He uses his wealth to humiliate everyone (and that is everyone in the village) who is poorer than himself, whilst insisting on a strict hierarchy of (wealth-

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

263

determined) status, particularly in the village bars where he delights in depriving poorer customers of access to beer by buying up the entire stock, or by simply demanding their ejection. His targets in these bar scenes do, however, include village functionaries who are shirking their duties, such as a health inspector who lazes away his days, drinking beer, or the butcher who sells bad meat (34). Aristotle himself of course considered it possible that the term comedy might have been derived from the word kómé, meaning a village, or from kómós – a festive procession (Norwood: 10). Striving for the Wind’s rural slant is emphasised in the last two lines of the author’s brief foreword: ‘This book is dedicated to the memory of [“a one-eyed syce from Meru”]. And to all those who plough with oxen and count their wealth in goats.’ This perspective is reiterated when he refers in his ‘Note on the Glossary’ to ‘the farmers and country folks whose story this is’ (Mwangi, both passages unpaginated). The quality of Mwangi’s comic vision here accords with Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as being ‘not a spectacle seen by the people [since] they live in it,’ and with this Russian critic’s sense of the difference between the satirist’s mockery (on the one hand) and ‘the people’s festive [or “ambivalent,” inclusive] laughter’ (on the other), in which ‘he who is laughing also belongs to it’ (Bakhtin: 7, 12). These pronouncements are remarkably apposite to Mwangi’s novel, for what makes Baba Pesa funny and the object of much of the laughter that the text provokes, rather than merely an ugly and destructive representation of the corruptive power of a money mania and a terrible arrogance, is that he lives in the midst of so many balancing factors that prevent the full deployment of his greed and brutality. These impediments occur chiefly in his own family, but also in the wider circumference of his employees, his neighbours and his peers and inferiors in the village. Mwangi’s portrayal of the village includes even the village dogs’ communal life, and their conversations are given room by the narrator in some of the most charming and quirky passages in the text. The kind of halfmodernised village Kambi is can be suggested by means of one comic detail: the village employs a social worker who, because she attempts to encourage birth control, is nicknamed ‘Jeni the castrator;’ the hopelessness of her efforts being ascribed to her having to contend with ‘terminally male chauvinist’ locals (58). It is evident that Mwangi in this novel sets out to mock the Kenyan postcolony as a type of reincarnation of the colonial dispensation, with Baba Pesa having stepped into the house, vehicles and land ownership role of the former owner, the white South African Boeserk – referred to as ‘the old Boer, Boeserk, who had sneaked out of the country at uhuru for fear of being bundled up and dumped into the Indian Ocean in revenge for the many and

264

Annie Gagiano

terrible injustices he had inflicted on his African slave labour during the fifty years he had been absolute Lord and Master over this valley and the next and the next’ (30). The smooth slide of the country into a neo-colonial condition after decolonisation occurs, Mwangi suggests, because of ‘the old misguided belief that a black man did not cheat his brother out of his heritage’ (30). As is made clear earlier, when the ‘natives’ found themselves ‘pressed by the need for hard cash to develop their newly found lands and to educate and bring up their children, the poorer of the new settlers’ discovered that they were ‘at the mercy of their wealthier brothers. Selling bit by bit they had ended up landless in Kambi Village as struggling businessmen, labourers and village beggars.’ To this Mwangi dryly adds: ‘Baba Pesa had, naturally, benefited the most from the misfortunes of his neighbours’ (15). Baba Pesa’s limitedness and vulgarity are shown up especially by his son Juda, who, having been expelled from university for his unconventional behaviour (after getting two degrees), returns to the village. The expulsion emphasises Juda’s uncontainable, anarchic spirit: ‘[T]he college administration had found it impossible to enumerate all his failings on paper. He had […] as many faults as fermented maize beer. Had he been a car he would have been in desperate need of an engine overhaul’ (13).5 Back in the village, Juda regularly makes drunken but wise speeches (encouraging a selfhelp style of development) to bemused villagers – speeches symbolically delivered from the side of an old windmill and vaguely calling to mind Cervantes’s man from La Mancha. But mostly, Juda’s presence serves to drive his possession-obsessed father wild with his particular kind of freespirited, communal, cheery, and constant drunkenness – Juda preferring mostly the company of the stray dog he adopted and christened Confucius the Thinker. But Mama Pesa (Baba’s wife; Juda’s mother) is, in her less flamboyant way, even more important as a counter-influence to her husband’s power. She is as charitable as he is harsh and as unassuming as he is arrogant, frequently discoverable ‘up to her elbows in pig food, helping […] the lame old woman whose duty it [actually] was to feed’ these beasts (Mwangi: 11). Mama Pesa’s charitable tolerance equips her to cope with Baba Pesa’s unreasonable unpleasantness in an unruffled manner, as the gently humorous description of Mama Pesa as being ‘a patient old woman

5

A point made by Palmer, that ‘in comedy our sympathies lie with […] the drunkard against the abstainer, with the rogue against the policeman, and so on’ (18), throws light on the appeal that the figure of Juda holds. To all intents and purposes a social parasite who lives off his parents without contributing anything to the family income or to his parents’ farming efforts, the affection with which he is regarded by all his fellow-characters in the novel (except his unpleasant brother) suggests that the author holds him in equally high esteem, because of the fundamentally humane nature with which he has endowed him.

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

265

and wise enough to know that an inadequate man must blame his wife for all his failures, and that of his children, [a wife who] had forgiven him these absurd accusations long before he had made them’ (20), illustrates. This tolerance is tested to the utmost and yet holds strong (and remains gentle rather than self-righteous) in the final sections of the text. Mama Pesa deeply loves and faithfully champions her son Juda: ‘[T]hat was why it saddened her so when he was arrested and locked up for expressing his thoughts as if it were possible for a person to live without thinking. That really was madness.’ To which Juda responds by saying: ‘No, Mother. […] That is, as Confucius calls it, peopleness. People call it politics’ (24) – a passage clearly illustrating the narrator’s kindly yet piercing-eyed amusement that permeates this novel. Then there is Mutiso, the goat-herd. An old, old man from a mysteriously unknown culture, perhaps a Masai, Mutiso’s presence is like that of a benign but non-interfering though all-seeing guardian angel. When disasters happen – an attempted rape of a poor matron; the killing of a poor man’s only ploughing ox (considered his friend!); the impregnation of an innocent sixteen-year-old – Mutiso is always a comforting observer, though he does little but say, mildly, that ‘dunia ni mviringo’ or ‘the world is indeed round’ (29). In all these disasters it is, of course, Baba Pesa who is the perpetrator. In all three cases the victims are members of his neighbouring family, headed by Baba Baru, a man as humiliatingly poor and unsuccessful as Pesa is rich and flourishing. Yet Baba Baru owns and refuses to sell the one small patch of land Baba Pesa obsessively craves to ‘complete’ his estate. Eventually, however, even Baba Baru is allowed to teach Baba Pesa the value of older agricultural ways, when crop growing was indeed a cultural and communal undertaking. So that when, in the unexpectedly but deeply poignant conclusion of the novel, the teenage Baru daughter whom Baba Pesa had corrupted, dies in childbirth agony, the families are somehow united, partly by the effort to get the girl to hospital – Juda having wanted to marry her to help her raise the baby. This is the scene on which the novel ends: Juda stood looking down at the floor, his shoulders sagging from sheer defeat, his loss too much to bear. There were tears in his eyes, but he clenched his jaws and bit them back so that his father would not see him weep for the girl he had grown to love like his own sister. In the end no one but his mother, who knew him better than anyone else in the world, noticed. She stood looking from one to the other of her menfolk, not certain which of them needed comforting the most; her husband whose babies they were [they are twins] or her son who had adopted them. Finally, she turned to the parents of the girl who was the mother of all this sorrow and, throwing her arm round Mama Baru’s suffering shoulders hugged her gently. ‘Have courage,’ she told her. ‘Mwathani ekaga wendo wake.’ The good God does his will. (Mwangi: 196)

266

Annie Gagiano

If it is true that ‘comedy is not […] merely a literary category [but] […] a living process, […] a way of contending with the enigmas, […] contradictions and misfortunes that are the external obstacles to happiness – and also with the vanities, follies and sheer wickedness that human beings breed within themselves’ (Cavaliero: ix), then Striving for the Wind presents us with a profoundly comic vision, even in that terrible yet tender conclusion (quoted above) in which Mama Pesa’s embrace, and her embracing, forgiving, and comforting vision, represent the tolerant inclusivity of the comic perspective.

Secrets Farah’s Secrets can be seen as a refusal to reduce the sense of the significance of Somali lives to the international media presentations of a postcolonial society that has ceased to function; a country that is merely a grotesque terrain for warlordism.6 In doing so, the text chooses an alternative to the tragic perspective. Farah acknowledges the social collapse, the ‘immanent dissolution’ (Farah 1998: 112) of a ‘land of ruin’ (48, compare 108), but he treats ‘this tragic situation’ (227) in an off-centre, even off-hand way. The old order dies as Nonno, the beloved, joyously sensual but tenderly humane grandfather, passes away at the end of the text. Talaado says of him in benediction: ‘A hardworking, honest, lovable Nonno. A century will die with him, one’s idea of tolerance, of magnanimity, these will die with him too’ (297). Cavaliero’s description of ‘the comic sense’ as ‘the reverse of the satanic’ because ‘it witnesses to a perennial source of youthfulness in human beings, of imaginative inventiveness, of tolerance and hope and an unsentimental delight in each other’s separate identities’ (244) is in every aspect embodied in Nonno as the central figure of Farah’s Secrets. Discreetly aware of some secret concerning his cherished, supposed grandson Kalaman, he totally accepts him and makes him his heir, even after finding out that Kalaman is actually the product of a gang rape of his daughter-in-law. Nonno is a resource and comfort to almost all who know him. Both ‘perennial youthfulness’ and ‘tolerance’ (terms culled from Cavaliero’s characterisation of comedy, quoted above) are abundantly illustrated in the penultimate section of Secrets, when the octogenarian Nonno sexually obliges the desperately baby-seeking Sholoongo! But there is nothing crudely comic about their copulation, symbolically imbued as the scene is with the many troubles and paradoxes of a country (mostly) failing to renew itself because socially predatory conduct is so rife.

6

In a recent interview Nuruddin Farah said: ‘My idea has always been to study the animal that is Somali. Which is a mirror-image of myself’ (Farah 2000: 132).

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

267

Sholoongo, whom Nonno (unlike Kalaman, her childhood companion) thus accommodates and entertains in his bed, is a thoroughly unsavoury character, literally as much as figuratively, and Farah has a lot of fun in putting her (the pun is irresistible!) in bad odour with the reader. He gives the adult Sholoongo such habits as keeping foul-smelling lice in a jar, and recalls for the reader how, at fourteen, she had persuaded the ten-year-old Kalaman to drink thimblefuls of her menstrual blood. Sholoongo’s claim that she was an innocent victim – in a ‘very tragic!’ (35) fashion – to Kalaman’s gifts of luxury foods, is at best disputable. In one of Kalaman’s dreams, a Nonnotype figure nevertheless acknowledges that a mere ‘moment’s lapse’ can transport us into ‘the land of tragedy’ where a child becomes criminalised or ostracised for transgressing food taboos (42). Nonno warns his daughter-inlaw, who fears and hates Sholoongo, that the latter ‘is no more and no less than you or I. She is human like you and me.’ And he reminds Damac ‘that this inhumane society […] has been most cruel to her as a child, as a human’ (140). Farah’s novel itself, although it conveys a thorough detestation of thuggery, warlordism and clannishness and particularly a horror of sexism, mistreatment of women and rape, does display a remarkable tolerance in its depiction of ‘embarrassing’ or grotesque bodily drives and peculiarities – such as childhood lust; bestiality; both hetero- and homosexual copulation; voyeurism, etcetera. Farah also intermittently lightens the tone by means of charming, funny, idiosyncratic images or word play – such as ‘she sat in a half-leaning posture, like a mop stood in a bucket’ (142 – said of Kalaman’s elegant mother Damac!) and in Kalaman’s self-description: ‘[U]ptight, I stood upright’ (52). Kalaman eventually realises that the threats to their family presented by a demanding, exploitative, predatory Sholoongo ended up ‘testing [their] capacity to remain patient during […] trying times’ (294). Cavaliero says that comedy’s object is ‘to promote endurance through the cultivation of enjoyment, and to promote enjoyment through the strengthening of endurance’ (39). Or, as Nonno says, ‘tragedies have a humour to them too’ (Farah 1998: 24). The generosity and humaneness that provide the only possible protection against dangerous secrets and the manipulative and malicious intentions of those who exploit them are embodied both in Kalaman’s gentleness and loyalty, and in Nonno’s generosity and his capacity for faithfulness, responsibility, and (above all) humour. Nonno is ‘physically vast’ (in Kalaman’s view), but, more importantly, ‘endowed with a spacious laughter’ (94, emphasis added) – an expression that perfectly captures the spirit of Farah’s novel.

268

Annie Gagiano

It is Nonno who realises that ‘you cannot help entertaining your past as you entertain an unwelcome guest’ (111) – an image clearly meant to signal the symbolic function of the demanding Sholoongo. He is also the one who insists that there is ‘no one innocent. No one of us’ (Farah 1998: 108). This, too, is a comic perspective, like the Bakhtinian recognition of a fundamental difference between the contempt of the satirist, the awe of the tragedian, and the communal acceptance – of common fleshliness and shared absurdities – found in comedy. If nabsi (in the terminology of Somali culture) is the human ability, through courtesy, to transcend instinct, then that quality (Nonno suggests) is what is needed to redeem the inescapable past. But Nonno’s nabsi also creates connections that fill the gaps of the past. Though he and Nonno are genetically unrelated, Kalaman comes to understand that ‘in place of sperm […] it was the river of [Nonno’s] humanity which flowed into [his – Kalaman’s] blood’ (254).

Conclusion The three texts discussed here are not evidently comic, but profoundly so; they are manifestations of that creative élan through which Africans (and others) can surmount their tragedies.7 If comedy presents us with an ‘argument’ rather than a ‘history’ (see my earlier reference to Salingar), then Umberto Eco’s wry yet urbane dismissal of ‘the hyper-Bakhtinian ideology of carnival as actual liberation’ (Eco: 3, emphasis in the original) is also worth bearing in mind here – lest we over-solemnise the topic with an inappropriate political earnestness. Perhaps comic wryness is the quality most evidently shared by the three texts examined here, and as Nelson declares, the ‘revolutionary potential of both comedy and festivity’ remains unproven (Nelson: 173). To acknowledge that laughter or a comic attitude or text is unlikely to rid oppressed societies of tyrants or of socially vicious systems is not to imply that the function of such writing is merely ameliorative, however – nor that, by providing a ‘safety valve’ that allows the unbearable pressure of political resentment some expression, its role perversely aids the longevity of oppressive power. What I have argued for in this essay is, instead, a recognition that in texts such as the three discussed here there is the wisdom that we may have to endure injustice and catastrophe in situations where a comic perspective can at best light up the dark crevasses of sorrow – not 7

In this, they perhaps go along with such a vision as is conveyed near the end of Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, of the contemporary African post-colonial condition: ‘[A] period of embedding, a space of proliferation that is not solely disorder, chance, and madness, but emerges from a sort of violent gust, with its languages, its beauty and ugliness, its ways of summing up the world’ (242).

Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy

269

denying its depth or validity, but making it visible, as well as emotionally balancing the dullness of grief. Nor does the intelligence of humour prevent our taking action against socially predatory forces such as those portrayed in these texts. Its perspective may, however, serve to caution us against acquiring the hubris of the would-be liberator, or the solemnity of a saviour in a world which novelists like Marechera, Mwangi, and Farah recognise as forever mixed-up, yet enduring.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Cleveland: Meridian, 1963. Cavaliero, Glen. The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Cooper, Brenda. Debates, Dilemmas and Dreams: Exploring African and Latin-American Writing. Cape Town: Heinemann-Centaur, 1992. –––. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge, 1998. Cornford, F.M. The Origin of Attic Comedy. Cambridge: CUP, 1934. Eco, Umberto. ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom.”’ Carnival! Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton, 1984. 1-9. Farah, Nuruddin. Secrets. Cape Town: David Philip, 1998. –––. Interview with Stephen Gray. English in Africa 27.1 (2000): 131-9. Gagiano, Annie. Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. Gruber, William E. ‘The Polarisation of Tragedy and Comedy.’ Genre 13 (1980): 259-74. –––. ‘The Wild Men of Comedy: Transformations in the Comic Hero from Aristophanes to Pirandello.’ Genre 14 (1981): 207-28. Kierkegaard, Søren. Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. Walter Lowry. New York: Schocken, 1967. Marechera, Dambudzo. The Black Insider. Harare: Baobab Books, 1990. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Mwangi, Meja. Striving for the Wind. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990. Nelson, T.G.A. Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema. Oxford: OUP, 1990. Norwood, Gilbert. Greek Comedy. 1931. London: Methuen, 1964.

270

Annie Gagiano

Palmer, D.J., ed. Comedy – Developments in Criticism: A Selection of Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. London: CUP, 1974. Simon, Richard Keller. The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1985.

GISELA FEURLE

Madam & Eve – Ten Wonderful Years A cartoon strip and its role in post-apartheid South Africa

M

adam & Eve, South Africa’s most popular cartoon strip, turned ten in 2002. The first Madam & Eve cartoon, created by Stephen Francis, Harry Dugmore and Rico Schacherl, appeared in the Weekly Mail in 1992, at the beginning of the post-apartheid era. Now it is read by about four million people every day. It is published regularly in seventeen publications: in South Africa these are nine daily newspapers and three weeklies covering every major city; monthly compilations of cartoons are translated into French, Danish, and Norwegian.1 Since 1993, the annual collections have become bestsellers in South Africa (Francis et al., 19932002). On the internet one can visit the Madam & Eve homepage and enjoy the daily strip, one can buy Madam & Eve T-shirts in the online-store, and join the Madam & Eve cyberclub to chat or take part in readers’ polls. An award winning TV-series, Madam and Eve, is now in its third season (Standley; Daily Travel News). Wonderful years? – certainly for Madam & Eve and their readership. The successful cartoon strip is praised in many reviews: ‘The best in S.A. humour’ (The Cape Times) – ‘Delightful and deliciously ironic’ – ‘Madam & Eve creators clearly have their finger spot on the pulse of South African life’

1

Madam & Eve regularly appears in: The Mail & Guardian, The Star, The Saturday Star, City Press, The Eastern Province Herald, The Natal Mercury, The Natal Witness, The Daily Dispatch, The Cape Times, The Diamond Fields Advertiser, Die Volksblaad, The Pretoria News, The Namibian, The S.A.Times, Vodaworld, Ernie (Bladkompaniet A.S., Oslo) and Larson (Atlantic Forlags AB, Stokholm).

272

Gisela Feurle

(The Citizen).2 The strips’ three main characters have become icons of a changing South Africa. In this essay, I will analyse reasons for this strong response and popularity. After introducing the characters, I will deal with some aspects of the historical and social context and the reception of the cartoon and will examine its different themes. Then the following questions will be discussed: What kind of humour does the cartoon strip express? Which role does it play in the society of the new South Africa and for the nation-building discourse?

‘They have won the heart of millions’3 – The characters: Madam, Eve, and Mom The three protagonists of the cartoon strip are introduced on the Madam & Eve homepage as follows: Gwen Anderson, also known as Madam, is a typical white South African madam struggling to come to terms with the new South Africa. Madam’s new year resolution is to learn the difference between the washing machine and the dish washer. Eve Sisulu, Madam’s ‘domestic maintenance assistant’, actually runs the household. Always fighting for a wage increase, Eve often sets up mini-businesses to run from home to supplement her meagre income. Madam and Eve fight a lot, but they secretly like each other, even though neither of them will admit it. Mother Anderson is Madam’s mother from England. She is a guest who arrived but has never left. Her hobbies are watching TV, drinking gin & tonics and fighting with Eve and the mielie lady. (Madam & Eve homepage)

Madam holds well-known racist stereotypes and attitudes towards her domestic worker. She upholds her own position as an employer, but she also makes some efforts to adapt to the new South Africa; the contradictions between her resolutions and her difficulty to overcome her ‘old’ behaviour and attitudes are a rich source of irony. She is also naïve and stingy, but she is not a prototypical oppressor. This is typical of the cartoon strip as it does not paint in ‘black and white’ or divide into good and bad, but instead creates characters that are human, who still have charming sides even if they or their attitude are the target of biting criticism and satire. Madam and Eve’s lives are intertwined, they fight against each other but also live and experience things together.

2 3

Francis et al. 1999: 3 and 1994: 3. Press comment in Francis et al. 1999: 3.

Madam & Eve

273

4

Fig. 1. Reprinted with the permission of the Rapid Phase (Pty) Ltd. http://www.madamandeve.co.za

Eve is clever and witty in the daily struggle for her interests, and she is sassy, which actually contrasts with the colonial image of the ‘deferential worker.’ She is cunning and has something of a trickster’s ambiguity: a struggling and sometimes victorious underdog but certainly no saint. Eve has to do all the household chores and is exploited, but decides to work at her own pace and so one often sees her having a nap on her favourite place, the ironing board – particularly nice if it is still warm. It ironically represents one of the stereotypical images held by South Africa’s madams: the ‘lazy maid,’ and, at the same time, also ambiguously implies both, that while this is justified protest by the exploited worker, there may be a grain of truth to the idea that Eve really is slightly lazy. Sometimes Eve even thinks she might be going too far, as when she plays with Madam’s stereotypes, ridicules Madam’s liberal endeavours by teaching her silly Zulu sentences, or teaches her household aerobics.5 Although Eve often – though not always – loses in her struggle for better pay and remains Madam’s domestic worker, she has a strong position and is superior to Madam because she understands what is

4 5

Illustrations (fig. 1 - fig. 4) are taken from Francis and Rico 2002 (5, 42, 8, 32). This essay’s title is taken from there also. Francis et al. 1994: 46; 1995: 95.

274

Gisela Feurle

going on in the household and in society (see, for example, the ‘rainbow nation cartoon’ (fig. 4)). As Madam gradually changes, becoming more liberal in her views, Mom, with her more persistent conservative ideas and racist prejudice, is brought in. She is an eccentric, headstrong and funny old lady, very human with popular vices – watching TV and drinking gin and tonic – who contradicts all notions of a typical granny. That she is very popular became obvious when the intention to vote her out led to big protests by readers in an internet poll. Besides these three protagonists there are other characters that turn up from time to time and extend the range of topics: Eric, Madam’s son, who regrets that the struggle is over and turns up with his black girlfriend, Liseka;6 Sol, Eve’s boyfriend, whose visits trigger Madam’s stereotypes of black men;7 little Thandi, Liseka’s sister, who pesters Mom and takes her to school on career day to have her present the ‘dream career’ of a Madam;8 the Mealie Lady, who is always chased by Mom;9 and Madam’s black psychiatrist, who often treats clients with post-apartheid or world-cup syndromes.10

‘In the beginning there was a Madam and a Maid’11 – Context and reception of the cartoon strip The cartoon strip was born at the beginning of the post-apartheid era, but the relationship between ‘white madam’ and ‘black maid’ which it depicts has been a core pattern from the very beginning of colonial and apartheid South Africa. In her study, Maids and Madams of 1980, Cock characterises the relationship between domestic workers and their employers in apartheid South Africa as a ‘microcosm of the exploitation and inequality on which the entire social order is based’ (231).12 It is also a microcosm of one of the basic contradictions of the apartheid system that stood for segregation and separate development on the one hand, but, at the same time, needed the black workers not only in its factories and mines, but also in the most intimate recesses – the white home.

E.g. Francis et al. 1993: 92f.; 1994: 20. E.g. Francis et al. 1993: 15. Francis et al. 1999: 46f. E.g. Francis et al. 2002: 17. The Mealie Lady stands for the Black woman selling maize cobs in the neighbourhood, shouting ‘mealies!’ at the top of her voice. 10 E.g. Francis et al. 1994: 70f. 11 Advertising text for the 2002 collection, see Madam & Eve homepage (section store). 12 Cock analyses the ‘ultra-exploitability’ (232) and powerlessness of the domestic worker as largely derived from the system of discrimination on the basis of ‘race,’ paired with discrimination on the basis of sex in the context of a system of class domination (318). 6 7 8 9

Madam & Eve

275

Domestic workers and their exploitative working conditions have been a ‘deeply entrenched part of the white South African life style’ (Cock: 142) since the beginning of colonialism – this is satirised in one cartoon as a prehistoric phenomenon in Eve’s ‘Domestic Museum’13 – and for generations, ‘the master-servant relationship has been the main meeting-point for blacks and whites’ in South Africa (Wilkerson: 44). Based on this, the stereotypical, racist, and paternalistic images of ‘the black servant’ as generally lazy, dishonest, incompetent, secretive, childlike, and deferential, has continuously been part of the discourse.14 It is not surprising that the ‘Madam and Maid’ relationship and ‘microcosm’ have been taken up as a theme in fiction again and again in various ways.15 Also in the new South Africa the setting ‘employer and domestic worker’ is still widespread. ‘Domestic servants are ubiquitous in South Africa,’ Harry Dugmore, one of the co-writers of the comic strip was quoted saying in 1994: ‘If you have money, you have a servant. It is the South African way’ (Wilkerson: 44).16 The cartoon strip Madam & Eve uses this core setting known to all South Africans, directly or indirectly, and makes it a fictional and satirical microcosm of the society of the new South Africa, of its changing and persisting conditions, attitudes, words, and deeds. This is certainly one of the reasons for its popularity. Evidence of this popularity can be seen in the wide distribution of the cartoon in both a great number of daily and weekly South African newspapers17 and the annual bestseller collections. Regarding the different kinds of papers – ranging from a more middle-class and intellectual weekly like the Mail & Guardian to a popular and regional Sunday paper like the City Press (in the province of Gauteng) or a business-oriented daily like The Natal Mercury – one can conclude that the estimated four million daily readers belong to various sections of society, as for their social and political background, and that they comprise both black and white readers. Besides print, the Madam & Eve characters are also made known through the successful TV-sitcom which reaches additional sections of the public.

Francis et al. 2002: 176. In her empirical in-depth research Cock interviewed both ‘maids’ and ‘madams’ how they saw each other. With regard to the current image of the deferential domestic worker she concludes that the ‘mask of deference’ was adopted as protective disguise (103f.). 15 E.g. in Nadine Gordimer’s short story ‘Ah, Woe is Me’ written from the perspective of the liberal white Madam, or in Sindiwe Magona’s book Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, which humorously takes the perspective of the domestic worker. 16 Wilkerson also quotes the following figures: ‘There are at least 1 million domestics in the country, or about one in every five black adults in the labor force.’ 17 See footnote 1. 13 14

276

Gisela Feurle

However, all this does not yet allow precise conclusions on how broad the range of Madam & Eve readers in South Africa actually is. A comprehensive picture would require a press and readership analysis and the study of aspects like the relation between the readers of the papers and the readers of the cartoon strip.18 Furthermore one has to consider the obvious fact that there are big sections of the population that are excluded from reading the cartoon. These are the urban and rural poor and sections of the working class, because the cartoon strip presupposes the accessibility of newspapers, literacy and a command of the English language. Besides quantitative also qualitative empirical reception research would be needed for a differentiated picture of the reception and the reactions to the cartoon. It would be interesting, for example, to find out precisely whether ‘the Eves’ too, i.e. domestic workers of the South African society, read the cartoon strip, whether they laugh or get angry, what they see reflected and so on. In the context of this paper not the real readers and their reception are analysed, but the ‘text,’ its themes, its humour and its implied readers, in order to find some answers to the question of the cartoon’s popularity.

‘Holds a mirror up to a divided society’19 – The themes of Madam & Eve The cartoon strip makes use of the core relationship of ‘madam and maid,’ ‘that all-pervasive and timeless feature of the South African landscape’ (Garson: 1) to mirror and satirise aspects of the changing society: its themes cover black and white relationships, domestic worker and employer relationships as well as political, social, and cultural issues and current affairs. The very first cartoon that appeared in the Weekly Mail in 1992 – reproduced above (fig. 1) – already shows the two main characters and two main themes of the first years in a nutshell: the gap between words or ideas and reality in the new South Africa, i.e. on the one hand, the liberal whites’ expression of guilt and their resolution to change versus their reluctance to give up privileges and comfortable apartheid structures, and on the other Eve’s fight for better wages and working conditions. Eve is outspoken and

Such an analysis of the different newspapers that publish Madam & Eve is not possible in the context of this essay. One would need to study their political affiliations in the past and present of South Africa and the composition of their readerships (social class, educational background, ethnicity, age, gender, English as first, second or third language etc.). One might also have to consider what it means that the cartoon does not appear in certain papers, e.g. the widely distributed paper Sowetan. 19 This quote, like the following headings, is a press comment documented in Francis et al. 1994: 3. 18

Madam & Eve

277

direct, fighting for her pay and her rights as usual, cleverly playing with the new ideology. While a lot is changing in the new South Africa, the basic economic structure and power relations and the related perspectives have remained. This theme is repeatedly taken up: When Madam hears the famous lines ‘So shout it from the roof tops, you are free at last’ on TV and Eve enthusiastically shouts ‘You hear that Madam!! Free at last!!’, Madam hardly looks up from her paper and says: ‘Well done. Don’t forget to do the dishes’ (Francis et al. 1994: 124). In her ongoing struggle, Eve sometimes wins, sometimes loses: She may achieve that Madam prepares tea for her or she may end up ironing the usual pile of clothes with her familiar comment: ‘It might be nice if someone developed a sense of humour around here.’ There has been criticism that instead of changing the stereotypes of black maids and their exploitative conditions, the cartoon perpetuates them. Gail Smith criticises that ‘Madam & Eve relies on black stereotypes that do not challenge white supremacies’ (Smith: 34) and ‘never engages in the politics of race, women and housework’ (35). She argues that ‘Eve’s illusion of liberation is fast becoming the post-apartheid version of the strong black woman’ without challenging oppressive power relations (38). This perspective expects cartoons and probably literature in general to provide an immediate tool in the struggles against oppression and for a better society, whereas this cartoon has a different approach. It ironically and satirically presents the status quo – the fact that economic and class structures have not changed with the end of apartheid – and ‘is defacto politically incorrect,’ as Harry Dugmore, one of the Madam & Eve copywriters, states: It depicts an employer / employee relationship without challenging (too overtly) the basis of this relationship. It depicts a white / black relationship without (too often) reminding its readers of how whites are ‘previously advantaged’ and blacks are ‘historically disadvantaged.’ (Dugmore in Ferreira and Tonder: 1)

Another theme, besides the ‘Madam-Maid’ relationship and Eve’s working conditions, are current affairs in politics and culture, like the local and national elections, new labour laws, affirmative action or Michael Jackson’s visit to South Africa.20 Favourite topics also are scandals, corruption affairs – the government as ‘the gravy train’ – or Winnie Mandela’s role in politics.21 Even very serious topics of South African politics, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, are taken up when a ‘family amnesty

20 21

E.g. Francis et al. 1995: 112f. and 1999: 134ff.; 1999: 114; 1995: 54; 1993: 115. E.g. Francis et al. 2002: 21; 2000: 47 and 2002: 67ff.

278

Gisela Feurle

hearing’ is set up in the Anderson household or Mom appears before the Truth Commission.22 When current affairs are projected into the Madam & Eve household, Madam’s, Mom’s and Eve’s respective reactions and comments often express distinct perspectives on the matters. In the course of the years from 1993 to 2002 a certain shift has taken place: strips that take up current affairs and focus on Madam’s and Eve’s common experience of South African politics and society have been increasing as compared to strips depicting Madam and Eve’s relationship and their distinct perspectives. In these newer strips, Madam and Eve are often mere spectators, passing comment or not; sometimes they don’t appear at all, for example in strips like Nelson Mandela’s or Thabo Mbeki’s visits to the White House.23 Furthermore, the cartoons deal with various aspects and changes of the South African society and culture. They reflect problems of crime, crime phobia and ‘armed response,’24 as well as neo-liberal economic changes, as, for example, when Eve sets up additional mini-businesses or outsources some of her domestic work to foreign migrant workers.25 A favourite topic are new technologies, like remote controls and cell phones, and media events with great impact on many people in South Africa, like the big brother programme, the rugby world cup, or certain soap operas – and it is Mom who is mainly gripped by the fever.26 The cartoon strip below (fig. 2), for example, combines and makes fun of two different aspects: the Madams’ dependence on their workers and the present addiction of many people to survivalprogrammes on TV.

Fig. 2. Reprinted with the permission of the Rapid Phase (Pty) Ltd. http://www.madamandeve.co.za

22 23 24 25 26

E.g. Francis et al. 2002: 20. E.g. Francis et al. 1994: 134; 1999: 112. E.g. Francis et al. 1993: 9f., 30, 55. E.g. Francis et al. 1999: 54, 140f.; 175. E.g. Francis et al. 1995: 14f.; 2002: 45ff.; 1995: 132f.

Madam & Eve

279

A mirror is thus held up to South African readers and to South African society. Students of Cape Town University state: ‘Madam and Eve are most of us. They are also our reflection in the looking glass’ (Madam & Eve: The Unofficial Evaluation). On the one hand, readers may engage on a personal level, seeing some of their attitudes and everyday life ironically reflected, which makes them aware of things that seem to be normal or go without saying. On the other hand, they see their own experience of South African politics and society illustrated and satirised through the strips.

‘At last, it’s time for a laugh’27 – The humour of Madam & Eve and its context The years of apartheid were grim and the themes in literature and art were serious and grave and strongly shaped by the overall oppression and divisions of apartheid society. Experience, perception, and thought often followed a binary pattern of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ of good and bad, them and us. Elleke Boehmer speaks of the ‘deadly binarity of a long history of oppression and opposition’ and the ‘State of Emergency of the mind’ (Boehmer: 45) that was also reflected in literature. For many authors, literature served as an instrument of struggle against apartheid with messages directly expressed. Lewis Nkosi states the ‘“already-read” quality of much black fiction’ of that time and ‘its inability to surprise’ (Nkosi: 79). Humorous writing was rare during those days. Political caricature underlay strict censorship and so did any satirical work criticising the government. An exception was the outstanding satirist and comedian, Peter-Dirk Uys, whose biting satire poked fun at fictional or real apartheid representatives or ‘the white Madam.’ Towards the end of apartheid, there were strong appeals by authors and critics to end an attitude and practice that reduced literature and art to a form of protest or resistance against apartheid and saw ‘culture as a weapon of struggle’ (see e.g. Sachs: 239). Already in the mid-eighties, Njabulo Ndebele had called for a different approach: the ‘rediscovery of the ordinary,’ literature dealing with everyday life and personal themes. Changed times now allow ambivalence and ambiguity, contradiction and indeterminacy in literature and the opportunity ‘to break away from the mimetic codes of the past’ (Boehmer: 46). With the crumbling of apartheid and the phase of transformation in South Africa, there also came the possibility of and the need for different kinds of humour. Peter Hayes speaks of a ‘humour explosion’ in the area of theatre (Hayes: 207) – and the cartoon strip Madam & Eve has hit the nail on the head. In the area of popular culture and humour, it provides many of the characteristics that literary critics have called for. It 27

Francis et al. 1994: 3.

280

Gisela Feurle

looks at everyday life and domestic affairs, with light humour even when dealing with serious political and social issues. Its satire implies ambiguity, subtle irony and humorous criticism beyond binarism and it has the ability to surprise – in fact, the punchline often relies on this effect. ‘At last, it’s time for a laugh’ comments the Newsweek magazine, seeing Madam & Eve as ‘proof that South Africans have learnt to laugh at themselves’ (Francis et al. 1994: 3). When readers laugh at Madam’s prejudice or stinginess, Eve’s tricks and Mom’s soap opera addiction, they do not only laugh at others, but may also laugh about themselves. The humour of Madam & Eve – like all humour – depends on the laughing subject, its historical experience, its outlook on life, and also on its needs. On the one hand, the apartheid era – in particular the last decade and the horror of the State of Emergency – meant a lot of accumulated psychological stress and tension. After the relatively sudden fall of apartheid ‘laughter can dissolve tense atmosphere’ (Bremmer and Rodenburg: 2), it provides comic relief, helping people to get rid of emotional strain. On the other hand, postapartheid South Africa is characterised by tremendous flux and contradiction, it is a time of hope and disillusion, of expectations and harsh realities, of pain and absurdities, a time which is difficult to cope with. Laughter about oneself and one’s society creates a necessary distance. Getting relief and coping through laughter – these constitute reasons for the success of Madam & Eve and why its humorous ‘running commentary of life in our fast-changing country’ (Garson: 1) answers a need. But what, exactly, makes the cartoon strip so funny, often even hilarious?

Fig. 3. Reprinted with the permission of the Rapid Phase (Pty) Ltd. http://www.madamandeve.co.za

A great source of laughter obviously is the ironical and satirical presentation of the different themes. The new South Africa provides plenty of material with all its contradictions and contrasts between words and reality, as, for example, in the strip shown (fig. 3), when Madam follows the trend to get to know the exotic way of life of other South Africans, including the

Madam & Eve

281

black domestic worker in the backyard – and does it via TV. The punchline often is an unexpected twist and a surprise which triggers laughter, as, for example, also the question of the priest ‘Is she available on Tuesdays?’ in the first cartoon (fig. 1). The punchline may also work by exaggerating something seen as ‘normal,’ taking it to the extreme in order to make people aware of its absurdity – like the old stereotype and paranoia of maids stealing coffee and sugar as in the cartoon above (fig. 3). Not only surprise, but also predictability of the characters and repetition of themes with slight variations is a humorous device; it plays with familiarity and expectations, e.g. Mom’s regular gin and tonic, Eve’s sleeping on the ironing board, Madam’s stinginess. Laughter is also created when taboos are broken. In the case of Madam & Eve, breaking taboos means defying or ignoring former conventions of what is or can be laughed at. With Madam & Eve, one laughs about employers and workers, about the politicians of one’s own party, one sees humorous sides of serious and disappointing affairs, and one laughs about oneself, about prejudice, habits, and attitudes. The humour of Madam & Eve lives from the contrast between the gravity of the apartheid period, the strict political commitment and binarism of that time, when all was determined by the authority of oppression and the authority of resistance. It does not appeal or refer to authority but is, in that sense, anti-authoritarian. Madam & Eve’s humour is light and playful, it is not moralising and does not point fingers. This does not mean, however, that there are no values implied. On the contrary, its satire and biting criticism – for example of prejudice – is based on moral and democratic values. It can be regarded as a kind of subversive quality of Madam & Eve’s humour that readers begin to look and laugh at themselves. It is an ability that facilitates the change of attitudes and communication in a divided society like South Africa and seems more promising than direct or moralising attacks. Last but not least the drawings themselves are a great source of fun. They present a caricature of the characters, their appearance, their outfits and utensils, e.g. Mom’s build and disproportionate face, Madam’s hairstyle and big earrings – she actually complains in a fictitious interview with her creators that they have become so unfashionable28 – Eve’s typical South African featherduster, or Winnie Mandela’s hat. A comic effect also lies in the way emotions are expressed in the protagonists’ faces through their big eyes and mouths, and in their gestures and movements – e.g. Madam’s naïve surprise, Eve’s smile or frustration and Mom’s fury. The visual expression of feelings, attitudes, and reactions plays an important role throughout the

28

The Madam & Eve Interview by Eve Sisulu, Madam & Eve homepage (section creators).

282

Gisela Feurle

cartoon strip and it is here – especially through the drawing of the eyes – that Madam & Eve creates a visual code of its own. Madam & Eve’s humour offers a great variety of humour to its readers, and different people can laugh at different things: besides subtle irony, biting satire, and witty criticism it also includes nonsense, slapstick, joking, and jesting and has great entertaining quality. This is another reason for its broad readership.

‘Madam & Eve almost national heroes by now’29 – What makes Madam & Eve a South African cartoon? ‘Madam & Eve [...] has located a common national funnybone,’ ‘people of all colours and political stripe can’t get enough of Madam and Eve’ (Francis et al. 1994: 3) – comments like these imply a national relevance of the cartoon and one may take them as testament to the question of nationbuilding which is at the top of the agenda in post-apartheid South Africa. In the context of the nation-building discourse, a debate is taking place among scholars of literature about the question of a national history of literature. Its starting point is South Africa’s ‘continuing history of division and cultural fragmentation’ (Walder: 156). During apartheid, literature and its readership were fractured and deeply divided according to language and ethnicity: literatures in English, Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Sotho, ‘black literature in English’ etc. What constitutes ‘South African literature’ is a central question and there are those who are sceptical of ‘national meaning’ and who identify South African literature as ‘the product of a shared historical interaction’ or the ‘multiplicity of voices.’30 One may ask a similar question: what makes Madam & Eve a South African cartoon? There are various aspects to be considered. With regard to the legacy of divisions in South Africa, Madam & Eve in fact shows something new on a national level: its reception, at least to some extent, cuts across certain lines of division of colour and class. This can only be a careful and general assumption, however, in view of the restrictions and open questions mentioned above regarding the readership, but one may say that the plurality of its readers makes Madam & Eve a South African cartoon. Looking at the text and its implied readers, the various reasons stated above to explain the great popularity of Madam & Eve are also elements that 29 30

Francis et al. 1995: 3. For Johan van Wyk ‘a literature which is the product of a shared historical interaction – although different and even conflicting perspectives and ideologies embody this interaction’ – is the basis of a literary history of South Africa (34); Jean-Philippe Wade emphasises the ‘multiplicity of voices’ (239) to make up the national terrain and supports ‘difference’ against oppressive totalities.

Madam & Eve

283

make it a South African text: the vehicle of the typical South African relationship of ‘Madam and Maid’ – being bound together and, at the same time, contradicting each other – the broad range of themes of South African political, social, and cultural issues, the different levels of humour and kinds of comic elements involved. So although the setting and a frequent target is the white middle-class suburban home, the cartoon’s range of themes and humour show that it is meant for, and implies, readerships from different sections of South African society. The label ‘South African cartoon’ has an inside and an outside dimension. Madam & Eve often takes up South African idiosyncrasies and makes allusions that can sometimes only be understood and laughed at when the political and cultural context is familiar, for example the meaning of toyitoying,31 a sangoma,32 the mielie lady, certain politicians, affairs or TVprogrammes. This imagines a community of South African readers; at the same time, it does not deter international readers, who gain access through the internet, but adds a hint of authenticity for them.

Fig. 4. Reprinted with the permission of the Rapid Phase (Pty) Ltd. http://www.madamandeve.co.za

Madam & Eve is a South African cartoon also because it creates the conditions for a shared reaction: laughter. As discussed above, this laughter provides relief and a way of coping with the contradictions, problems and Toyi-toyi is a spontaneous traditional African dance, expressing defiance and solidarity when performed at mass demonstrations or celebratory occasions. 32 A sangoma is an African traditional healer, claiming supernatural powers. 31

284

Gisela Feurle

demands of the new South Africa. But laughter also unites people, even if the laughter comes from different quarters and has different causes – as presumably in the case of the rainbow nation-cartoon (fig. 4). Because Madam & Eve’s criticism and the laughter involved are not moralising and go beyond binarism, the strip can create common South African reference points despite old or persisting divisions and without covering up contradictions. Madam & Eve takes up shared experiences. Shared experience, however, just like the ‘national funnybone,’ does not imply a unified national perspective, but rather means that ringing events and sensitive contradictions of the nation are taken up, while playing with a multiplicity of perspectives: different perspectives of the cartoon’s characters, perspectives differing from official versions, a perspective different from one’s own – all belonging to the same society. Maybe Madam and Eve’s role as ‘national heroes’ has to be seen in their contribution to the creation of a democratic culture in South Africa – an aim beyond nation-building (see Wade: 245f.).

‘Madam and Eve: Two of the most influential South Africans of all time’33 – Fiction and reality From time to time, Madam and Eve step out of their cartoon and appear in spheres of real life, for example in newspaper headlines that report about labour laws or trade union affairs: ‘Madam and Eve must dance to new rules’ (Business Times 1 Dec. 1996) or ‘Madam wins the day as Eve is cleared out’ (Mail & Guardian 20 Sept. 1996). Such an impact of fictional characters is the result of the cartoon strip’s special kind of humour, the mirror it holds up to members of the South African society, and its ability to cut across divisions. It is no surprise, then, that Madam and Eve score on the list of the top one hundred most influential people in South Africa.

33

Francis et al. 1999: 3.

Madam & Eve

285

Bibliography Boehmer, Elleke. ‘Endings and New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transition.’ Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. 43-56. Bremmer, Jan, and Hermann Rodenburg, eds. A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams. A Study in the Politics of Exploitation. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1984. Daily Travel News for the Executive Traveller. ‘Madam & Eve Television Series Scoops Award.’ 6 May 2002. 8 Oct. 2002 . Francis, Stephen, Hugo Dugmore and Rico Schacherl. The Madam & Eve Collection. Weekly Mail & Guardian Publishing, 1993. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999. –––. Free at Last. Sandton: Penguin, 1994. –––. All Aboard for the Gravy Train. Sandton: Penguin, 1995. –––. International Maid of Mystery. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999. –––. The Madams are Restless. Johannesburg: Rapid Phase, 2000. Francis, Stephen, and Rico Schacherl. Madam & Eve – 10 Wonderful Years. Johannesburg: Rapid Phase, 2002. Ferreira, Kotie, and Ida van Tonder. ‘Cheerleader or Critic? A Fine Line.’ Inhoud SJI 1996. 17.5.02 . Garson, Philippa. ‘Madam and Eve Turns 10.’ SouthAfrica.Info The Official Gateway. 2 Oct. 2002. 14 Nov. 2002 . Gelfert, Hans-Dieter. Max und Monty: Kleine Geschichte des deutschen und englischen Humors. München: Beck, 1998. Gordimer, Nadine. ‘Ah, Woe Is Me.’ 1953. Some Monday For Sure. London: Heinemann, 1987. Hayes, Peter. ‘Stagings.’ Interview by Ashraf Jamal. Senses of Culture. South African Culture Studies. Ed. Sarah Nuttal and Cheryl-Ann Michael. Oxford: OUP, 2000. 197-211. Heinisch, Severin. Die Karikatur: Über das Irrationale im Zeitalter der Vernunft. Wien: Böhlau, 1988. Madam & Eve Homepage. 8 Oct. 2002. . Madam & Eve: The Unofficial Evaluation. 8 Oct. 2002. . Magona, Sindiwe. Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night. Claremont: David Philip, 1991.

286

Gisela Feurle

Ndebele, Njabulo, ed. ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writing in South Africa.’ South African Literature and Culture. The Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. 41-59. Nkosi, Lewis. ‘Postmodernism and Black Writing in South Africa.’ Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. 75-90. Sachs, Albie. ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom.’ Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. 239-48. Smith, Gail. ‘Madam and Eve: A Caricature of Women’s Subjectivity?’ Agenda – Empowering Women for Gender Equity 31 (1996). Standley, Jane. ‘Serious Side to SA Sitcom.’ BBC News Online 10 Mar. 2001. 30 Oct. 2002 . Wade, Jean-Philippe. ‘Genealogies of Desire.’ Rethinking South African Literary History. Ed. Johannes Smit, Johan van Wyk and Jean-Philippe Wade. Durban: Y-Press, 1996. 236-46. Walder, Dennis. Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Wilkerson, Isabel. ‘South Africa’s Servant Class Struggles On.’ International Herald Tribune 18 Oct 1994. Reprinted in: South Africa – Rebirth of a Nation. World and Press Special. Ed. Bernd Schröder. Bremen: Eilers & Schünemann, 1994. 44-45. van Wyk, Johan. ‘Towards a South African Literary History.’ Rethinking South African Literary History. Ed. Johannes Smit, Johan van Wyk and Jean-Philippe Wade. Durban: Y-Press, 1996. 31-9.

WENDY WOODWARD

Laughing back at the kingfisher Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and postcolonial humour

T

he Heart of Redness has been widely acclaimed. For David Attwell it is ‘the most ambitious work of fiction by a black writer in well over a decade’ (Attwell: 14); for Henk Rossouw it is ‘a South African original’ (Rossouw: 5); for Itumeleng Mahabane the novel is ‘the first step towards a richness of structure that may lead towards our own Okri, Salman Rushdie or Marquez’ (Mahabane: 80).1 Undoubtedly, The Heart of Redness is a postcolonial novel of epic proportions, highly conscious of what Chapman terms the ‘aesthetics of liberation’ (Chapman: 1-16). Humour is, of course, very much part of Mda’s liberatory aesthetics, but while many reviewers and critics have referred to the humour in his writing, none has actually analysed precisely what the humour derives from or why it may be unsettling. Irony and subversion are acknowledged conventions in postcolonial writing, but Mda goes beyond these strategies. Rob Amato, in introducing three of Mda’s plays, coins the term Mdadaism, which he defines as ‘elusive black theatrical satire in the old and new Southern Africa’ (Amato: v). Amato brings out the qualities of doubleness which make Mda’s theatricality ‘provocative,’ ‘strange’ and ‘surreal’ (v). The plays, Amato finds, ‘often turn on a sadness or grotesquerie, some

1

Nadia Sanger’s research assistance, made possible by research funding from the University of the Western Cape, was invaluable. I am also grateful, for comments, to Ralph Goodman, currently working with me on The Empire Laughs Back, and to the National Research Foundation, for funding this project.

288

Wendy Woodward

painful and ironic turn of history’ (v). Mda’s representations of ‘painful and ironic’ histories, both colonial and postcolonial, also constitute the novel, as he satirises both the colonial authorities and the ‘Aristocrats of the Revolution.’ In the latter case, policies of the ‘new’ South Africa are antagonistic to the poor and to sustainable ecological development. The satire here is bitter – and astringently salutary. In a recent interview, Mda discounted the possibility that such a critique (when the ‘liberators’ may become the ‘new oppressors’) was ‘unpatriotic’: ‘[T]he willingness to be critical shows a deep love for country. Anyway, my view of patriotism is not love for politicians but love of a country’ (Isaacson: 18). Satire may not always aspire to entertain, as humour does. Instead, satire, which underscores the faults of the social formation, is socially and / or politically motivated and may be too hard-hitting to be amusing. Satire, unlike the grotesque, which locates laughter and anger or disgust together, produces them separately (see Thomson: 31). Unusually however, Mda deploys satire not merely to subvert, but for reconciliatory purposes as well. A ‘true Theatre of Reconciliation,’ Mda has argued, ‘will address the past solely for the purpose of understanding the present. Of understanding why it is absolutely necessary for us to have reconciliation’ (1995: 7). Reconciliation for Mda includes not only ‘repentance’ and ‘forgiveness’ but ‘redress’ in the form of ‘justice’ and ‘restitution’ (1995: 7). In The Heart of Redness a recuperation of the traditional, like reconciliation, is central to nation-building. Thus a postcolonial writer, as Chapman suggests, ‘is preoccupied with cycles leading beyond urban and spiritual disintegration to forms of cultural and national rehabilitation’ (Chapman: 10). For Zakes Mda, humour constitutes a central narrative strategy in his rehabilitation of the traditional Xhosa worldview, which he grounds firmly in contemporary issues of post-1994 South Africa. This humour derives, in part, from the multivocality of the narrative and the echoes of traditional folk tales, and fluctuates between discourses of the colonial and of the postcolonial. Mda’s foregrounding of the politics of representation in relation to colonial discursivity is also rendered humorous, if paradoxically so, given the violence and cruelty depicted in the narrative. While the humour may occasionally be rendered secondary to feelings of horror for the reader, it is Mda’s celebration of the grotesque in indigenous South African forms which makes his humour so arresting. Mda’s use of humour is complex and even discomforting for the reader in its concatenation of the bizarre and the tragic, both of which obtain in the grotesque. Conventionally, the grotesque yokes together both mirth and horror which coexist in a ‘state of tension’ (Thomson: 5). It is a form replete with

Laughing back at the kingfisher

289

ambivalence and incongruity, which is both comic and monstrous (Thomson: 5) and often surfaces in times of transition or transformation (Thomson: 11). The grotesque may be exemplified in many ways, as it is in The Heart of Redness: Mda’s use of the grotesque, for example, recalls aspects of the Bakhtinian grotesque as high serious postcolonial (and colonial) constructions of identity and history are undermined. The grotesque is particularly effective because of its location within a realistic setting (see Thomson: 7) in Mda’s rehabilitation of the Cattle-Killing movement of the amaXhosa in the 1850s.2 While belief in the ancestors is not subverted but respected, even traditional spirituality is accorded some comic treatment as it is measured against the banalities of the quotidian. The narrative alternates between the Cattle-Killing Movement of the midnineteenth century and the present day. In the latter story, Camagu, recently returned from North America, goes to the rural village of Qolorha and stays on. In a reversal of the ‘Jim comes to Jo’burg’ trope common to earlier South African stories in which a country bumpkin learns about the intricacies of the metropolis, Camagu learns from the villagers, whom he initially patronises, about his place in post-elections South Africa.3 Here, in the grand, natural location of the Wild Coast, Camagu is divided between his admiration for the school principal and his unacknowledged passion for a young peasant woman. In the mode of social comedy, which mocks the shibboleths of the social formation, identity politics are held up for scrutiny, notions of racialised identity as fixed are mocked: whiteness may blur with blackness if a white man takes on Xhosa custom; blackness is no guarantee of employment if the black man has been in exile and cannot do the freedom dance of toyi-toyi. Mda encourages the reader to laugh at the rigid adversariality inherent in the ongoing feud between Believers and Unbelievers. But the humour is affectionate here as it is in the representation of traditional relationships with nature. Camagu learns about ecology through Qukezwa’s embodied knowledge of her place and the reader is meant to endorse the ecological practices of the Believers, whose heterarchical relationships with spiritualised animals and agentive birds suggest an enlightened (but never unrealistic) alternative to the greed of techno-capitalism.

2

3

The Cattle-Killing was a millenarial movement begun along the eastern borders of the Cape Colony in 1856. The young prophetess Nongqawuse was told by the ancestors that all cattle should be slaughtered and all crops and foodstores destroyed preparatory to their return with especially potent cattle and abundant food. Colonists would be driven away from traditional lands. Tragically, some 40,000 people subsequently died (see Peires). The classic text in this genre is Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, first published in 1948.

290

Wendy Woodward

Throughout the novel, Mda uses different forms of humour: the more subversive satire and the grotesque as well as the more affective social comedy which incorporates the ecological. These forms are all skilfully deployed for postcolonial effect, which aspires to ‘cultural and national rehabilitation.’ If the title of the novel recalls The Heart of Darkness with its colonial journey to horror, then The Heart of Redness celebrates a return to Xhosa tradition, metonymised here by the redness of indigenous clay used for cosmetics, for building material, and for dyeing clothes.4 Not only does the novel stress the particularity and richness of a culture previously subjected to colonial discursivities, but it subtly demands selfreflexivity on the part of the reader who is constructed as non-racialised, but as having to be adept in isiXhosa vocabulary and nomenclature. Some of the laughs, then, are on the reader who is not familiar with the language and its pronunciation.

Colonialism, postcolonialism and representations of the body The tragedies engendered by the Cattle-Killing Movement, with its concomitant starvation of many amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape who had believed in the prophecies and directives of two adolescent girls, hardly seem conducive to laughter – unless it be to jeer at the gullibility of people who slaughtered their cattle and destroyed their crops in order to propitiate the ancestors who would then arise and bring a new prosperous and anticolonial order. The way this history was taught in the apartheid era to schoolchildren and its naming as the ‘National Suicide of the amaXhosa’ in textbooks was obviously derisory. In his representation of the Cattle-Killing, Mda counteracts (colonial) prejudice as well as the perceived ‘shamefulness’ of the Cattle-Killing for the amaXhosa themselves by rehabilitating this historical episode. He does so by representing the incontrovertible logic of the peoples’ spirituality, their belief in sacrifice to connect with the ancestors at a time when five thousand cattle were dying every month from lungsickness (Peires: 71). Tragically, the father of Twin and Twin-Twin could not be effective as an ancestor because he had been rendered headless, decapitated by British soldiers in The Great War of Mlanjeni. In the scene where the two brothers spy on British soldiers boiling a dead man’s head, Mda has the twins as focalisers, thereby subverting colonial representation and discursivities. The humour, macabre as it may be, turns on this subversion and on crosscultural 4

In her memoirs Noni Jabavu, for example, refers to a peasant woman’s ‘red ochre-smeared pagan costume’ (Jabavu: 21). Later Jabuvu’s uncle remonstrates with the woman who had called herself ‘red’ because she was a ‘pagan’ as opposed to a missionary convert. He tells her ‘we are one people now’ rather than differentiated according to the hierarchised categorisations of the missionaries (Jabavu: 25).

Laughing back at the kingfisher

291

misunderstanding. Logically, the young men seem justified in believing that these soldiers must be cannibals, and the reader cannot help but be persuaded of this. But John Dalton, whom the twin brothers then capture, coolly accounts for the colonial rationale: the skull is to be a souvenir or used for ‘scientific enquiry’ (The Heart of Redness: 21; below all references are to this edition). With the tragic and the comic so paradoxically juxtaposed, Mda thus sends up the horror and the tragedy of colonial practices which he defamiliarises through representational subversion. For Bergson the comic has to connect with the intellect and is divorced from feeling (5), but the grotesque here keeps feelings of outrage in tension with what can only be very wry and pained amusement at this exchange located in what Pratt calls the ‘contact zone’ (1992). Colonial practices are further subverted by the indigenous undermining of colonial heroes. For the resident amaXhosa, Sir George Grey’s title as The Man Who Named Ten Rivers is meaningless; they had already named the local rivers. Governor Grey is represented disjunctively: cunningly trying to wrest legal power from the amaXhosa chiefs and then boasting to ‘genteel’ admirers at a Cape Town ball about his plans to civilise the amaXhosa. Similarly, Mda represents the British themselves through indigenous perceptions. When the colonists rebuff Mhlaza’s invitation to participate in the Cattle-Killing and the future benefits, the suspicions of the Believers are confirmed: ‘What else would one expect from people who were a product of a different creation from that of the amaXhosa, people who were so unscrupulous that they killed the son of their own god?’ (153). The reasoning, from this perspective, is indisputable. But such clarity cannot be brought to the complexities of the situation for the Believers and the Unbelievers, who are torn now between the prophecies and Christianity respectively, between rebellion and apparent collaboration with the colonial authorities. Given the centrality of these complexities to Mda’s narrative, the tensions of the grotesque with its reliance on incongruity and dualities are entirely apposite. Also apposite in Mda’s representations of colonialism is the Bakhtinian grotesque with its emphasis on the ‘materiality of the body’ in popular culture, as opposed to the disembodiment and ‘humourless seriousness’ of official culture (Dentith: 66). In colonial discourse, the male colonial subject tends to be represented either as disembodied or as a body which is unproblematically inviolable, contained, and solid rather than femininely fluid, recalling Bakhtin’s concept of the modern body as an ‘individual, closed sphere’ (Morris: 236). Sir Harry Smith, for example, who styles himself The Great White Chief of the amaXhosas, orders their elders and

292

Wendy Woodward

chiefs to kiss his staff and boots (18). Yet he cannot maintain the fiction of his official body; the very acts of making obeisances to him call attention to his embodiment.5 Colonial vulnerabilities are also illustrated in Twin-Twin’s reference to the ‘people through whose ears the sun shines’ (298), highlighting the contempt for the classical body of the colonists on the part of those whom they wish to impress and subdue. In contrast, the peasant culture, although not always anarchic as in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, celebrates the body. It does so in ways reminiscent of grotesque realism: apparent debasement may also signify an assertion of the body, both of which connect with the ‘sacred and exalted’ and eternal renewal (Morris: 239, 243). Mda not only renders comic the colonial male body but also the peasant male body in the present-day Qolorha and constructions of traditional masculinities: Bhonco, for example, is adamant that the male teacher at Qolorha-by-Sea Secondary School was not accepted because he was uncircumcised and hence ‘not a man’ (3). ‘How could he teach our children with a dangling foreskin?’ he asks NoPetticoat rhetorically. And when Camagu falls foul of Bhonco for supporting the development of ecological tourism and not the building of a casino, Bhonco mocks him for being uncircumcised. The representation of Camugu’s sexuality and that of two of the women with whom he becomes involved has much in common with the Bakhtinian grotesque and the materiality of the sexualised body. The contrast between Xoliswa Ximiya and Qukezwa humorously recalls the classical official body versus the grotesque peasant body respectively (see Dentith: 67-8). The former daughter of Bhonco and NoPetticoat, has just been promoted to be headmistress of the local secondary school at the start of the narrative. Her beauty exceeds that of a supermodel in Camagu’s opinion (70), but the village men find her less appealing, because she is not ‘plump and juicy’ (10). Qukezwa mockingly refers to her as Camagu’s ‘thin girlfriend’ (115) who is a bat because she does not know ‘whether she is a bird or a mouse’ (198). The teacher’s denial of her body as sexualised is mocked communally at the fund-raising concert when an unnamed man pays to have Camagu tickle her anywhere on her body as nobody has ever seen her laugh. This concert is a site of carnivalesque transgression, an example of indigenous folk culture where the highest bidder can make demands on anyone in the audience. Xoliswa Ximiya is rigidly opposed to such personal infringement, but ultimately, the ‘scars of history’ – which had literally materialised on the bodies of successive generations of exclusively male ancestors as signs of ‘ancestral vengeance’ (301) for the lack of belief in the 5

Grosz notes that within contemporary ‘male sexual morphology’ generally the heterosexual male body is phallicised and constituted as ‘the sealed-up, impermeable body’ (Grosz: 201).

Laughing back at the kingfisher

293

prophecies – appear on what fellow Unbelievers call her ‘civilised body.’ These scars cruelly alert her not only to her denial of the force of history but to the denial of her own embodiment. Conventionally, in western terms, Qukezwa may appear to be an antiheroine with her short, plump peasant body, but she constitutes a feminist hero, not only as a challenger to patriarchal tradition, but, conversely, as a repository of traditional accomplishments, adept at two-tone singing and playing the bow instrument. She is a complex, witty, articulate young woman who is well-equipped to enlighten Camagu about his own sexuality and to dispel his romantic illusions. For Attwell, their coupling is ‘a solution drawn from Shakespearean comedy […] to signal a reconciliation of opposites’ (Attwell: 14), but this is no marriage of two unsuited characters, like that of the dull-witted, countrified Audrey with the cerebral, courtly Touchstone. Such marriages depend on the characters being unchanging types, and Qukezwa and Camagu do not embody fixed subjectivities. Camagu in particular has much to learn and it is Qukezwa who is most responsible for teaching him. Such schooling of a character has much in common with Jane Austen’s narratives in which an Elizabeth Bennett has to relinquish pride, or an Emma Woodhouse has to dispense with her romantic illusions. As Raymond Williams points out, none of Austen’s representations of ‘personal relationships’ are ‘abstracted’ as ‘an observed psychological process’ (Williams: 17). What preoccupies Austen is the social: ‘It is, rather, personal conduct: a testing and discovery of the standards which govern human behaviour in certain real situations’ (Williams: 17). Mda, similarly, deploys comedy within this social realm, of the individual within the community. Camagu, the once-isolated returned exile who lived in high-rise and dangerous Hillbrow, is now resident in a rural social formation for which he does not know the parameters. His conduct is ceaselessly monitored by the villagers who often gossip about him in his presence, but it is Qukezwa who actually challenges him on levels of sexuality and who galvanises him to transform, if unconsciously, his outer conduct until it manifests in an inner change of which he himself is initially unaware.

Ecologies and the feud between the Believers and the Unbelievers Mda is diligent about the specificities of his satire of post-elections South Africa. Thus Camagu is angry not with the villagers but with Dalton’s neocolonialism in not promoting the peoples’ ‘self-reliance’ (286) and in keeping the authority for himself. But perhaps the most hard-hitting and sustained critique is levelled at the would-be developers who come to Qolorha to survey the land in order to construct a gambling complex. Then they quarrel about whether to construct ‘a crime-free timeshare paradise’

294

Wendy Woodward

(234) and whether to replace the local vegetation with imported trees and build an English village by the sea. When both Zim and Camagu oppose these plans, the token black man amongst the developers warns them belligerently that the project has been approved by the ‘ruling party’ who constitute the directors of the developing company. It is Camagu who comes up with the solution – to get the area declared a national heritage site. Camagu, unavoidably, to his annoyance, is implicated in the feud between the Believers and Unbelievers which legislates the lives of the villagers. That Mda treats the ‘war’ between the two groups as comically excessive suggests, again, a rehabilitative motive to his humour and an undermining of oppositional thinking so destructive to the community. The very nature of the feud itself seems spurious, for the negation of unbelieving has been ‘elevated […] to the heights of a religion’ (4), yet the differences between the two groups are deeply philosophical and rooted in the history of the Cattle-Killing and the suffering of the Middle Generations. Paradoxically, given the tragic outcomes of belief in the prophecies of Nongqawuse, the Believers seem ‘ignorant of unhappy things’ while the Unbelievers ‘induce sadness to attain happiness’ (209) in their dance, a ritual they have created with the help of the abaThwa, to celebrate their unbelief. Generally, the Unbelievers lack any humorous detachment from their plight and are highly serious. Their elders, for example, fail to find ‘ridiculous’ the possibility that the small abaThwa might get aggressive with ‘giants’ like Bhonco: ‘Unbelievers are not prone to laughter. Or, if they laugh at all, it must be in secret. No one must ever know about it. That is why the elders once reprimanded Bhonco when they thought he was becoming too loose with his expression of joy’ (217). If the Unbelievers are comic themselves because of their seriousness and rigidity of conduct, their minimal humour has divisive subject matter, like jokes based on religious or racialised stereotypes. Bhonco is ‘appreciative’ of the ‘derogatory isiXhosa names [the elders use] for the Khoikhoi and people of mixed race. It is the next best thing to laughter’ (218). In contrast, the affective humour associated with the Believers, embedded in their relationships with birds and animals and in their attitudes to death, both rehabilitates Xhosa tradition and reconciles, on an epistemological level, apparent opposites. Mda undermines, quite profoundly, with recourse to traditional beliefs, dualistic (sometimes western) thinking about differences between the human and the nonhuman, as well as between the living and the ancestral spirit world. Mda’s comedy, underpinned by profoundly ecological perceptions, fulfils Joseph W. Meeker’s re-definition of comedy as a genre which promotes positive relationships between human and non-human animals and what he terms the Earth’s ‘natural processes,’ thus enhancing

Laughing back at the kingfisher

295

human chances of evolutionary survival by ‘adapt[ing] us better to the world’ rather than ‘estrang[ing] us from it’ (Meeker: 3-4). Zim’s relationship with the wild fig tree which surrounds and nurtures his home and with its resident amahobohobo [spotted-backed] weaverbirds challenges both western and the Unbelievers’ hierarchised constructions of difference between humans and birds, between the wild and the tame. To the Unbelievers’ incredulity, Zim never kills the birds which inhabit the tree, not even the plump green pigeons. The conversation between him and the weaverbirds illustrates the continuity between human and nature (see Plumwood: 66f.) as well as the traditional continuity between birds and spirituality. Not only does Qukezwa communicate with her father ‘in whistles’ (42), the language of the spirits, but the Believers ‘talk among themselves in the language of the birds’ (42). The humour in relation to Zim and the birds resides in the situation comedy of his meditative ‘musing’ about his late wife and about ‘the joys of belief’ (41) being interrupted by a nest falling on his head and then by Qukezwa’s adolescent tantrum (after she has been threatened by her father’s ex-lover’s friends), to which he responds ‘Where do you get your manners […] talking to your father like that?’ (42). Subsequently, when Camagu and Dalton pay a social call on Zim, who is ‘reclining under his tree’ (135), the old man confronts the newcomer, unjustly, berating him for being a ‘total Unbeliever’ who has been ‘bought with the thighs of Bhonco’s daughter’ in order to annihilate ‘our forests and our birds and our lizards’ (135). Climactically, in the final battle between Zim and Bhonco, the former calls on the hadeda ibis to harrass his enemy. The acrimony had begun at the carnivalesque concert: Zim, rendered the highest bidder by virtue of his entire old-age pension, demanded that NoPetticoat should ululate until the end of the proceedings. Bhonco’s revenge for the humiliation of his wife was to hire a troop of ululators to perform serially outside Zim’s home. Zim vindictively then sent the hadedas to laugh at Bhonco: ‘They are drab grey, stubby-legged birds with metallic green or purple wings. Three or four birds follow [Bhonco] wherever he goes, emitting their rude laughter. They sit on the roof of his ixande house, and continue laughing’ (227). The villagers begin to feel some discomfort at this battle. Some worry that Bhonco will send the hammerhead bird to destroy Zim’s possessions with his lightning, but most are reassured that only Zim can communicate with birds. Zim, it seems, can communicate with bees too: a swarm attacks Bhonco who is enraged that his rival has persuaded their common headless ancestor to send bees to attack him. Bhonco has to concede that the Believers have won this battle when his wife NoPetticoat betrays him, not only by joining Camagu’s co-operative

296

Wendy Woodward

society but by reverting to traditional isiXhosa dress, which she loves, and by siding with the Believers’ objections to the planned development. Bhonco’s rather maddened response is to ‘melt into laughter’ at the thought that the Believers will not win in the end. His conduct is transformed; he is disgraced among fellow Unbelievers because he laughs the hadedas into retreat, but Camagu observes that it is only ‘the laughter of sadness’ (271), emphasising that humour can be double-edged. Mda’s humorous use of birds also has a double purpose, for they are linked to Xhosa tradition, just as Camagu’s empathetic response to a snake connected him to the totem of the amaMpondomise clan to which he belongs. ‘Calling out’ or accusing a ‘human transgressor’ echoes the behaviour of talking birds in folktales: in ‘The Turban,’ a honeybird reveals the husband’s murder of his second wife (Jordan: 18-31). In ‘Siganda and Sigandana’ both a cow and a honeybird tell tales on a duplicitous murderous brother (Jordan: 219-37). According to Jordan, nature is seen traditionally as having healing properties for human society (218). For Mda in The Heart of Redness only a respect for nature such as that exemplified in the Believers’ ecological consciousness can prevent Qolorha and its environment from being plundered by greedy developers imbued with the corruption so endemic to the ‘new’ South Africa. In another scene, congruent with the close relationships which exist in folktales between humans and birds, the pregnant Qukezwa and Camagu explore the wreck of a ship, and argue about the identity of a laughing bird they can hear but not see. ‘A bird laughs: wak-wak kiririri! They laugh with it, competing to see who will produce the closest imitation. Their eyes search for it. But they cannot find it’ (254). The giant kingfisher’s arrival on the mast proves Camagu right and signifies a culmination of all the ecological lessons he has learnt since he has been in Qolorha. Qukezwa, delighted about her pupil surpassing her, laughs until she outdoes the bird who flies off ‘yelping its own laughter’ (255). For Qukezwa, the kingfisher’s laughter continues, but for Camagu the laughter emanates from his unborn child whom he can feel kicking in utero as though inner and outer aspects of nature have become inseparable. In a reconciliation of what Kristeva sees as binaries – the order of the phallus, which is one of shame, guilt and desire, has shifted and can now merge with the realm of the body’s territory in mother / nature which embodies authority without guilt (74), the scene also represents a joyous, comedic collaboration between human and nonhuman world and disproves Bergson’s anthropocentric contention that humour ‘does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human’ (3, original emphasis). For both the kingfisher here and the hadedas earlier, their laughter is evidence of their agency and

Laughing back at the kingfisher

297

intentionality (see Plumwood: 135-6) and their connection with the human sense of the comic. Mda thus subverts dualistic thinking which deprives animals or birds of subjectivity – or the ability to laugh. These creatures are ‘anothers’ who are familiar co-dwellers on the earth with humans rather than denigrated others (see Murphy: 88). Humans dying constitutes the final ecology in The Heart of Redness. Mda’s representation of Zim’s desire to die and the response of the villagers subverts western notions of death as unspeakable and without significance or humour. As Plumwood argues, modernity has not proffered ‘a life-affirming account of death;’ hence death is seen as excluded from nature. This modern western ‘account which treats death as severance from meaning and continuity [and which] also deprives life of much of its meaning and continuity’ (102) is contradicted by the villagers’ acceptance of death. After Zim has negotiated Qukezwa’s lobola, or bride-price paid in cattle, with Camagu, he ‘declared that he could now go in peace, for his work was done’ (288). Nothing interests him except the thought of joining NoEngland in the realm of the ancestors. For weeks he ‘hover[s] between the Otherworld – the world of the ancestors that runs parallel to this world – and the world of today’s Qolorha-by-Sea’ (303). Believers criticise Qukezwa for holding him with her love and plead with her to ‘release’ him. In village opinion: ‘Everyone looks forward to the pleasant life in the Otherworld. It is cruel to hold the elder to this earth’ (303). Zim’s familiars keep him company, the birds moving through domestic space as though it is wilderness, his horse revealing a consciousness of an imminent parting: ‘Amahobohobo weaverbirds fill the homestead with their rolling, swirling song. They miss the man who spent most of the day sitting under their giant wild fig tree. Gxagxa refuses to move from his vigil outside Zim’s door’ (305). Finally, Zim dies with a smile. NomaRussia had told him of his son’s funeral in the city so Twin will be there for him in the Otherworld. The response to Zim’s death endorses strong amaXhosa beliefs in the afterlife, and in the continuity between life and death, thus liberating death from being a meaningless void. Bhonco, characteristically, is furious that Zim has once again beaten him, this time by having attained the status of ancestor ahead of him. Bhonco fears that Zim will be a ‘vengeful’ ancestor who will cause trouble for the Unbelievers and fail to be appeased by sacrifice. Even the apparent finality of death, then, is contradicted by beliefs comically contextualised in a feud which can be expected to continue in the Otherworld. That Mda manages to present such serious epistemological challenges to dualistic thinking in a comic mode is admirably skilful and far more

298

Wendy Woodward

convincing than any high serious representations of what the heart of redness reveals to a cosmopolitan city-slicker like Camagu. This ‘redness’ does not incorporate a limited, provincial worldview, nor a celebration of a transcendent belief in spirituality but an ecological immanence which maintains wildness in co-operation with sustainable human development.

Conclusion Mda has discussed certain indigenous theatre which, because it ‘did not strive for political meaningfulness or profundity […] made it a more potent vehicle for transformation’ (1995: 2). Such theatre ‘critically depicted the lives of the people, using those theatrical and linguistic codes that were commonly shared by the rest of the community’ (1995: 2). While the humour in The Heart of Redness may be seriously conceptualised – the satire which mocks the ‘new’ South Africa, the grotesque which undermines rigid representations of the body, be they colonial or postcolonial, the comic engagement with birds, animals, and death which challenges dualism – the novel is never reduced to or weighted down by its ideas. Like the indigenous theatre Mda refers to, his use of humour renders The Heart of Redness effectively transformatory in its representation of the lives of the villagers of Qolorha. The novel certainly has ‘political meaningfulness and profundity’ yet the humour, I would argue, makes the novel ‘a more potent vehicle for transformation.’

Bibliography Amato, Rob. Introduction. Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires by Zakes Mda. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP, 2001. v-xxi. Attwell, David. ‘Mda Returns to Nongqawuse for Inspiration.’ Sunday Independent 28 Jan. 2001. 14. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Claudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1911. Chapman, Michael. ‘The Aesthetics of Liberation: Reflections from a Southern Perspective.’ Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 10.1 (1998): 1-16. Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994.

Laughing back at the kingfisher

299

Isaacson, Maureen. ‘The Free State Madonnas Prevail in Mda’s New Novel.’ Sunday Independent 22 Sept. 2002. 18. Jabavu, Noni. Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts. London: John Murray, 1960. Jordan, AC. Tales from Southern Africa. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Mahabane, Itumeleng. ‘Twins and Traditions: The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda.’ Financial Mail 18 May 2001. 80. Mda, Zakes. ‘The Role of Culture in the Process of Reconciliation in South A frica.’ Seminar No 9 1994. Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. 1995. 22 Feb 2002. . –––. The Heart of Redness. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Morris, Pam. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Paton, Alan. Cry, The Beloved Country. 1948. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Peires, J.B. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa CattleKilling Movement of 1856-7. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1989. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Rossouw, Henk. ‘Mda’s Twin Peak: The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda.’ Weekly Mail and Guardian 18 Jan. 2001. 5. Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. The Critical Idiom Series 24. Ed. John D. Jump. London: Methuen, 1972. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. 1970. St Albans: Paladin, 1974.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

A ability to laugh, 297 Aborigines, 108–109, 115 absurd, 80, 93–94, 111, 115, 124, 152, 187, 218, 241, 250, 252–54, 265, 268, 280 accent, 17, 111–13, 138, 140, 171, 172, 225–31, 235–42 acculturation, 208, 213, 214, 219 Adler, Nancy, 211 aesthetics of liberation, 287–88 African American, 14, 49, 62, 170, 178, 182, 184–185, 229, 231 agency, 3, 10–12, 16, 47, 53, 56, 67, 121, 155, 297; creating agency 2 aggression, 10, 16–17, 31, 55, 63–67, 70– 71, 75, 85, 81, 101, 122, 194, 196, 294 Ahmed, Akbar S., 76 Alexander, Richard, 196–204 Alexie, Sherman, Tonto and Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven, 247–51 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 183 All-American Girl, 178, 180–87 Allen, Paula Gunn, 248, 252 Da Ali G Show, 235, 239 Allo, Allo, 226 alterity, 92 Amato, Rob, 287–88 amaXhosa, 289, 290–92, 297 ambiguity, 15, 16, 18, 29, 32, 39, 120, 197, 209–11, 215–16, 220, 273, 279 ambivalence, 18, 47, 50, 56, 64, 66, 73, 108, 109, 133–34, 137, 140–43, 149, 151, 157, 166, 170–71, 194–95, 197, 201, 229, 263, 279, 289 American dream, 94, 104, 161–62, 172, 174, 186, Americanness, 18, 165–66, 168, 174. See also African American;

All-American Girl; Canadian dream; anti-Americanism Amis, Kingsley, 90–91, 137 Amos ‘N Andy, 178, 182 Anderson, Benedict, 14–15 Andrews, Maggie, 143 anger, 259, 261, 288 animals, 290, 294–95, 297, 298 anthropology, 210, 211 anti-Americanism, 103, 105 anti-hero, 85 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 163 Apartheid, 20, 62, 271, 274, 276–77, 279– 82, 290 Appadurai, Arjun, 158 appropriation, 50, 149, 180 Arabian Nights, 109 Aristotle, 28, 263 Asafu-Adjaye, Jacqueline, 178, 187 Ashcroft, Bill, et al. 2, 8, 13, 30, 123, 126, 194–95, 208 assimilation, 214 Attardo, Salvatore, 196–97, 202, 204 Attwell, David, 287, 293 audience, 14, 15, 18–20, 63, 65, 73–74, 122, 143, 149, 151–59, 165, 177, 179, 181, 184, 187–88, 210, 226, 229–30, 232–34, 236, 238, 240–42, 254, 293 Austen, Jane, 208, 293 Australia, 17, 108–9, 114–16, 137, 138 authenticity, 233, 236, 241, 261, 283 authority, 47–48, 51, 55, 63, 69–70, 79, 100, 123, 228–29, 242, 250–51, 258, 281, 294, 296

B Baker, Houston A., Jr., 185 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30, 46–49, 118, 258 Bakhtinian grotesque, 289, 291–92

302 Ball, John Clement, 10 Barber, C.L., 257 Barnard, Robert, 207 Baron, Dennis, 169 Baron Cohen, Sacha. See Da Ali G Show Barrie, Robert, 127 Bennett, Herman L, 56–57 Benson, Eugene, 2 Bergson, Henri, 3, 28, 43 Berry, J.W, 213–14 Bhabha, Homi, 11, 64–65, 102, 133–34, 142–43, 153, 155–56, 163–64, 170– 171, 194, 202, 213, 229 Bhaskar, Sanjeev. See The Kumars at Number 42 bildungsroman, 195 bilingualism, 231 Billig, Michael, 194, 197, 229 Black British Englishes, 227, 235–36, 241–43 Black British, 178, 186, 195, 208, 227, 233, 235–42 black comedy, 102–3, 259 black humour, 10, 103 Blaeser, Kimberley, 249 Bock, Henning, 143 body, 6, 20, 35, 49, 61, 78, 80, 89, 94–95, 114, 118–21, 126–27, 134, 152, 187, 198–202, 290–93, 298 Boehmer, Elleke, 117, 279 Bonfante, Jordan, 180, 185–87 border, borderlands, 70–71, 96, 162–63, 169–73, 250 Boskin, Joseph, 11–12, 161, 183–86 Bourne, Stephen, 231–35 Braunschmid, Angelika, 209 Bremmer, Jan, 280 Brinkley, Alan, 165 Brislin, Richard W., 212, 218 Brodber, Erna, Myal, 33–36 Brooks, Chris and Peter Faulkner, 141 Brown, Laura, 120 bureaucracy, 217 Byatt, A.S., 208

C Caliban, 108 calypso, 16, 50–57, 229

Index Canada, 17, 91–98, 104–5, 132, 150–51, 250, Canadian dream, 16, 94–97, Canadian identity, 17, 91–97, 104–5 Canagarajah, A. Suresh, 204 canon, 9, 108, 118, 127 capitalism, 92, 94, 99–110, 253 Caribbean, 16, 19, 36–37, 44–58, 112, 150, 186, 208, 229–34, 240–42 caricature, 133, 143, 182, 185, 217, 228– 34, 238–42, 279, 281 Carlyle, Thomas, 132 carnival, carnivalesque, 2, 10, 16, 30, 43, 46–57, 78, 83, 127, 229, 263, 268, 292, 295 Carr, Caleb, 75 cartoons, 20, 79, 135, 271–84 Castle, Gregory, 2 Caswell, Michelle, 185–86 catharsis, 20, 253 cattle-killing movement of the AmaXhosa, 289–91 Cavaliero, Glen, 79, 266–67 Celts, 109, 115 censorship, 279 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 123 Chapman, Antony J., and Hugh C. Foot, 4, 6, 27, 28 Chapman, Michael, 287–88 Chicano/a, 18, 162–74 Chinese immigrants, 213–14 Cho, Margaret. See All-American Girl Chong, Tommy, 161, 165 Chris Cook, 131 Christianity, 83, 111, 115, 291 Churchill, Winston, 85, 131 Citizenship, 162–74, 215 Civil Rights Movement, 62, 166, 178, 229 Cixous, Hélène, 10–16, 61–71 class, 34, 37, 47, 55, 71, 90, 111–13, 125, 135, 151, 166–71, 177–78, 186–87, 203, 210, 218, 228, 235, 275–82 Clennell, Andrew, 131 clichés, 120 Cock, Jacklyn, 274–75 cognition, 4, 29–31, 35, 39, 51, 218 Cohen, Sarah Blacher, 101 collaboration, 126, 291, 297 colonial, colonialism, 2, 6, 11, 13, 17, 19, 34–38, 45, 47–56, 64–68, 89, 91–105, 108–16, 118–120, 132–34, 137, 142,

Index 155–59, 163–64, 170–72, 185, 194, 208, 229–30, 247–49, 252–55, 261– 68, 274, 291, education, 19, 156, mimicry, 155–57, stereotype, 64, 102 coloniser’s gaze, 199 comedy, 1–7, 18–20, 66, 74, 79, 84, 92, 102–3, 111–12, 127, 151–57, 162–66, 177–88, 208–15, 226, 229–35, 250– 54, 257–68, 289–95 comic doubt; 158, relief; 28, 36, 39, 120, 280, sub-plot; 125, techniques, 261– 62 commodification, 179–80 connotation, 142, 196–204 Conrad, Joseph, 128, The Heart of Darkness, 62, 290 context, 3, 9–16, 19, 28–39, 45–47, 50, 57, 65, 71, 90–92, 105, 109, 132, 150–51, 157, 162, 178, 180–84, 187, 193–95, 201–18, 229, 234, 242, 248–49, 254, 262, 272, 274, 276, 282 contradiction, 3, 29, 54, 56, 90, 143, 162, 170, 208, 266, 272, 274, 279–84 control, 68–71, 78, 140–41, 172, 186–87, 194, 207, 210, 253–54, 263, 278 cooking, 214, 219 Cooper, Brenda, 257 Cooper, Fennimore, The Last of the Mohicans, 251 Cornford, F.M, 257 Coronation Street, 232–33, 235 corruption, 11, 52, 100, 132–38, 198–200, 214, 259, 263, 277, 296 The Cosby Show, 178, 184, 233, 235 Coward, Noel, 139 coyote, 252 –53 creole languages, 231 creolization, 45, 47 Crichlow, Wesley, 150 cricket, 156, 158 crosscultural misunderstanding, 291 Cullen, Jim, 165–68 cultural conflict, 15, 30–32, 39 cultural difference, 28, 39, 40, 62, 183, 201, 218 Cushner, Kenneth, 218 cynicism, 110

D Darder, Antonia, 170

303 Davidson, Arnold E, 91, 94, 102–4 Davies, Christie, 182–83, 218 death, 52, 61, 80, 104–5, 110, 114–15, 123, 127, 186, 232, 252, 254, 261–62, 294, 297 –98 defamiliarisation, 291 Defoe, Daniel, 128, Robinson Crusoe, 38, 251 Dentith, Simon, 291–92 deportation, 162, 169, 172 derision, 28, 46–52, 64–70, 133, 149, 153, 171, 208, 217 Desai, Anita, Fasting, Feasting, 198, 201, 203 Desai, Kiran, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, 201, 203 desire, 3, 10, 50, 61, 64–65, 71, 112, 124– 25, 138, 150, 155, 167–72, 184, 208, 214, 296–97 Desmond's, 19, 178, 186, 233–38, 241 dialect, 19, 225–26, 231 Diamond, Neil, ‘America’, 173 Dickens, Charles, 208 discipline, 8, 52, 133, 141, 194, 197, 211, 218, 229 discomforting humour, 288 disembodiment, 291 dispossession, 108 diversity, 8, 44 Döring, Tobias, 229 Dorinson, Joseph, 183–86 double-coding, 30, double perspective, 32, double vision, 44, double consciousness, 152 Douglas, Mary, 207, 210 Du Bois, W.E.B., 152 dualistic thinking, 297, 298 Dyer, Richard, 70

E Eagleton, Terry, 5 Eastman, Max, 1, 3, 21 Eco, Umberto, 196, 268 economy, 92–93, 97, 117, 179 écriture feminine, 62 education, 12, 19, 112, 156, 194–97, 202– 3 eighteenth-century satire. See satire Elliott, Robert C, 109 Ellison, Ralph, 185

304 emotion, 31, 47, 125, 233, 281 Empire Road, 19, 233, 235–36, 241 empowerment, 11, 16, 65, 71, 179 Englishness, 117–18, 132, 133, 138–39 Enlightenment, 74, 110, 157 Equiano, Olaudah, 118 ethics, 67, 166 ethnic cabaret, 18, 151 ethnic comedy, 18, 151, 179–81 ethnic glue, 247–49, 253, 255 ethnic humour, 11, 161, 182, 227 ethnic jokes, 14, 227 ethnic minorities, 169, 217 ethnic signifiers, 240 ethnicity, 62, 83, 166–73, 179–80, 276, 282 euphemisms, 67, 254 exaggeration, 103, 109, 228, 234, 238, 242. See also hyperbole exclusion, 65, 90, 115, 150, 159, 165, 169, 226 expropriation, 53, 58

F La Famille Ramdan, 178 Fanon, Frantz, 54–55, 65–66 Farah, Nuruddin, Secrets, 257, 259–69 Fawlty Towers, 226 feminist theory, 61 Ferreira, Kotie, 277 Fielding, Henry, 6, 91, 107, 133, The History of Tom Jones, 4 film, 8, 18, 49, 140, 161–74, 210–11, 235, 239–41, 251 Finney, Gail, 11 Fiske, Susan T, 218 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, 104 folk comedy, 259 food, 32, 92, 119, 213, 219, 261, 264, 267, 289 fool, 17, 83, 104, 112, 123–27, 137 The Fosters, 178, 233–34 Foster, David, Moonlite, 107–16 Foucault, Michel, 198 Francis, Stephen. See Madam & Eve Freeden, Michael, 132 Freud, Sigmund, 6–11, 16, 29, 61–71, 124–26, 194 –97, 204–5, 227–29, 238, 242

Index Freudian slip, 125 Freudian triangle, 70

G Gagiano, Annie, 260 Gandhi, Leela, 108 Garson, Philippa, 276, 280 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 49, 184 gender, 12, 62, 64, 153–54, 168, 185, 276, 290 genre, 30, 50, 79, 109, 110, 151, 177, 179, 195–97, 201–3, 208, 230, 235, 257–8, 289, 295 George E. Paton, 210, 218 German Turkish, 180 Gibbons, Stella, Cold Comfort Farm, 260 Gilman, Sander L, 63, 70 Gilroy, Paul, 65, 213–14 globalisation, 179 Goldberg, Theo, 2 Goldberger, Nancy Rule, 211 Golden, Daniel, 93–104 Goldie, Terry, 150–52 Goodness Gracious Me, 178–87 Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A, 75 Gopinath, Gayatri, 150 Gordimer, Nadine, Ah, Woe Is Me, 275 Gray, Herman, 178 Greek comedy. See comedy Greer, Germaine, 193 Greiner, Donald J., 209 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw James Albert, 118 Grosz, Elizabeth, 292 Grote, David, 177–80 grotesque, 119, 121, 127, 162, 203, 262, 266–67, 288–92, 298 group boundaries, 31, 39, 210 group solidarity, 170 Gruber, William E., 257–58 Gudykunst, William B., 212, 218 guilt, 125, 276, 296 gullibility, 94, 101, 290 Gunn Allen, Paula, 248, 252 Gutwirth, Marcel, 14 Guyana /-ese, 237, 227, 231–37

H Hall, Edward, 211 Hall, Mildred Reed, 211 Hall, Stuart, 178, 183–84, 226, 232–33

Index Halliday, Michael A.K, 196 Hamamoto, Darrell Y, 183 Hargreaves, Alec G, 178 Harris, Stephen, 110 Harris, Wilson, 45, 49 Harry Dugmore. See Madam & Eve Harvey, David, 179 Hawley, John C., 2 Hayes, Peter, 279 healing power of humour, 10, 249 Hearne, John, 54 hegemony, 66 heteronormative, 149–55 Hibbert, Christopher, 139 hierarchies, 10, 34–35, 64–67, 71, 121, 133, 207, 263 Hill, Errol, 47 Hobbes, Thomas, 28, 208 Hofstede, Geert, 211 Hogarth, William, A Rake’s Progress; 132–35, 143; Industry and Idleness, 141 Hollywood, 138, 140, 161, 186 home, 33, 51, 53, 68, 82, 100, 108, 121, 122, 131, 138, 140, 162, 185, 203, 213, 215, 234, 259, 272, 274, 282, 295 homophobia, 152–60, 239 homosexuality, 133, 138 Horace, 17, 91, 105 Hornby, Nick, 208 horror, 62, 75, 81, 103, 248, 261, 267, 280, 288, 290, 291 Hughes, Langston, 31 humorous appeasement, 184, 185 humour as a disposition, 4–5, 28 humour as alternative, 16, 20, 71, 85, 90, 122, 132, 258, 266 Huntington, Samuel P., 74 Husband, Charles, 227, 232 Hutcheon, Linda, 166 hybridity, 64, 65, 118 hyperbole, 33, 166, 171

I im-/migration, 30, 36, 37, 45, 157, 162, 169–73, 178, 185, 230, 231, im/migrant, 36–38, 75, 98, 169–173, 178, 182, 185, 209, 213–19, 227, 231– 32, 242

305 imitation, 48–49, 58, 96, 128, 133, 166, 194, 202, 225–29, 238–41, 258, 296 in-betweenness, 64 incompatibility, 9, 209 incongruity, 9–11, 29, 36, 119, 127, 153, 157–58, 161, 196–97, 204, 210, 220, 289, 291 indeterminacy, 12, 64, 66, 279 Indian oral tradition, 123 indigenous peoples, 93, 101–2, 108 institutions and humour, 18, 137, 139, 140, 143, 197, 201 intentionality, 297 intercultural understanding, 209–12 interculturality, 209, 211, 213–16, 219 interstitial space (Bhabha), 213 intertextuality, 117, 123, 127 Inuit, 17, 92–93, 97–104 irony, 2, 51, 66, 69, 108–9, 140, 169, 173, 194, 200, 204, 215, 230, 249, 252–55, 272, 281, 287 Irvine, Judith T, 225–26 Isaacson, Maureen, 288 Iser, Wolfgang, 212

J Jabavu, Noni, 290 Jaeger, Joachim W., 11 Jaggi, Maya, 193, 213 Jamaica/n, 19, 33 –36, 195, 227, 231, 234, 237–42 Jamaican English, 195 Jane Austen, 208, 293, Emma; 293 Jenkins, Ron, 61 jester, 67, 118, 123, 125 Jhally, Sut, 178 jokes, 1–15, 27, 31, 50, 51, 63–69, 112, 114, 121, 127, 140, 152, 154, 159, 177, 182–83, 188, 194, 196–204, 207– 12, 217–18, 221, 227–29, 248–50, ethnic jokes, 14, 227, Jewish jokes, 10, 229, tendentious jokes, 63 Jordan, AC, 296 juvenal, 17, 90, 91, 105, 110 juxtaposition, 29, 122, 196, 199–203, 259

K Kabarett, 18, 151, 153, 157, 159 Kaiser, Andrea, 185

306 Kant, Immanuel, 79 Keith-Spiegel, Patricia, 5 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 258 King, Bruce, 213 King, Thomas, Green Grass Running Water, 248–54 Kinsella, W.P., Dance Me Outside, 247, 253–54 Kipling, Rudyard, 128 Kivisto, Peter, 179 Klor de Alva, J. Jorge, 164 Knight, Franklin W, 45 Kotthoff, Helga, 31 Krewer, Bernd, 212 Kristeva, Julia, 296 The Kumars At Number 42, 181 Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia; 203; My Son the Fanatic, 74–85

L Lacan, Jacques, 124 language attitudes, 226 (all of section 3) language, 12, 17–19, 31, 34, 36, 61, 67, 71, 99, 108 –15, 169, 174, 179, 182, 196–200, 208–14, 219, 225–40, 250– 51, 261, 268, 276, 282, 290, 295 laughing double, 118 ‘Laughter's to be Taken Seriously’ (Kingsley Amis), 90–91 laughter: community-building effect of laughter, 14–15, 20, 31, 249, 253, juvenalian laughter, 97 Leech, Geoffrey N., 200, 204 Lewis, Paul, 6–8, 14 Lewis, Peter, 214 lexical ambiguity, 197 liberation, 56, 57, 61, 138, 268, 277, 287 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, 179, 180, 215 liminality, 64 Lincoln, Kenneth, 247–55 Ling, Amy,179 linguistic norm, 209 Lipsitz, George, 179–82 List, Christine, 170 Lodge, David, 208 Logan, Brian, 188 logorrhoea, 123 London Jamaican, 231, 237–42 Loomba, Ania, 64 Lorper, Thomas, 239–40

Index Lovelace, Earl, The Dragon Can't Dance, 43–58 low comedy, 111 Luger, Kurt, 212

M macabre, 103, 291 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 193 MacCannel, Juliet Flower, 65 Macdiarmid, Hugh, 112 Maciel, David R., 165 Madam & Eve, 271–83 magic(al) realism, 257 Mahabane, Itumeleng, 287 Mahabharata, 109 malapropisms, 197 male gaze, 121–22 Malik, Sarita, 230, 234 Mall, Ram Adhar, 211, 219 Manning, Jason, 173 Marcus, Greil, 165 Marechera, Dambudzo, The Black Insider, 257–69 marginality, 50, 95 Marin, Richard, Born in East L.A., 161–74 marketing of humour, 2 Marquez, 45, 287 Marrouchi, Mustapha, 75–76 Mars-Jones, Adam, 195 Martineau, William H., 10 Marx Brothers, 178 Marx, Karl, 10 masculinity/ies, 14, 139, 150, 154, 171, 172, 292 masquerade, 43–58, 83 master-servant relations, 38, 133, 275 materialism, 51, 53, 104, 115–16, 239 materiality of the body, 20, 291 McLeod, John, 2, 8, 13, 208 Mda, Zakes, The Heart of Redness, 287– 98 media, 96, 103, 179, 181–85, 215, 226–33, 239, 266, 278 Meeker, Joseph W., 295 melancholy, 124, 158, 259 melting-pot ethnicity, 169 Menippean satire. See satire Meredith, George, 7, 258 migration. See im/migration.

Index mimicry, 44–53, 58, 83, 102, 115, 133–34, 155–57, 194–95, 228–30, 238, 240–42 minstrel shows, 230, 240 minstrelsy, 185 missionaries, 108, 120, 290 Mistry, Rohinton, 193–94, A Fine Balance;193, 198, 200–1; Family Matters, 198–99, 201; Such a Long Journey, 203–4 misunderstanding, 19–20, 33, 89, 199, 202, 209, 212, 216, 219–20, 237, 291 Mixed Blessings, 233 Mo, Timothy, Sour Sweet, 208, 212–15, 220 mockery, mocking, 44–54, 115, 126, 127, 132, 143, 155–58, 183, 194–95, 241, 249, 260–63 mock-heroic, 95, 105 mock-signification, 45, 48–52, 58 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 62 moral ideals, 118–19 moralising, 281, 283 Morra, Linda, 93, 96, 100–5 Morris, Pam, 292 Morson, Gary Saul, 30 mosaic multiculturalism, 208, 220 Moynahan, Brian, 134 Mühleisen, Susanne, 231, 236, 237 Mulkay, Michael, 12 multiculturalism, 1, 90, 92, 104, 105, 168 Murphy, Patrick D., 297 Muslims, 75–79, 82–83, 127, 187, 188, 199, 202 Mwangi, Meja, Striving for the Wind, 257–69 mythology, 110

N Naipaul, V.S., A House For Mr Biswas, 43–54 Nash, Walter, 207 national humour, 281–83 nationalism, 45, 91, 170 nationality, 18, 169, 171, 173 nation-building, 54, 272, 282, 284, 288 natural (bodily) functions, 126, 295 Ndebele, Njabulo, 279 Nelson, T.G.A, 268 neocolonial/-ism, 102, 103, 122, 293 "nervous condition", 55–58

307 New Historicist, 91 New, Melvyn, 118, 123 Nietzsche, 48 Nilsen, Don L.F., 196 Nkosi, Lewis, 279 No Problem, 233–34 nonsense, 127, 157, 158, 238, 281 Noriega, Chon A., 164–72 norms, 30, 39, 118–28, 154–56, 164, 177, 208–11, 215, 220 Norwood, Gilbert, 263 novels of migration, 30, 36 Nowak, Helge, 208

O oedipal, 124–25 Okri, Ben, 287 Olson, Stephanie Koziski, 187 oppression, 12, 48, 55, 57, 61–62, 99, 172, 186, 269, 277–82 Ostovich, Helen, 126 Other, 83, 93, 109, 118–21, 153–59, 169, 229, otherness, 2, 64, 93, 149, 153, 169–71

P pachuco, 171 paganism, 111 painful humour, 9, 219, 254, 259 Palmer, Colin A., 45 Palmer, Jerry, 69, 207–12, 264 paradox, 6, 28, 65, 115, 152, 159, 267 Parkin, John, 7, 11 parody, 17, 102, 109, 115, 118, 124, 127, 164–68, 173–74, 194, 204, 228, 240, 261 Patois, 34, 36, 231, 235–37, 242 patriotism, 95, 165, 166, 288 Patterson, Sheila, 231 Peacock, Thomas Love, 107, 109, 260 Peires, J.B., 289–90 Penhall, Joe, Blue/Orange, 66–71 Pennycook, Alastair, 194 performance, 12, 13, 32–34, 48–58, 78, 81, 101, 103, 126, 139, 149–59, 173, 181, 181–82, 187, 230, 240, 295 Perlmutter, Daniel P., 196, 204 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 133 Pfister, Manfred, 9–10, 118, 126

308 Phillipson, Robert, 194 picaresque, 52, 99, 104, 108, 111 Pichler, Susanne, 208, 211 Picong, 46, 50–51, 58 Pines, Jim, 178, 231 Pirandello, Luigi, 3–4, 7 Plumwood, Val, 295 –97 political aims / concerns, 74 political comedy, 260 political correctness, 68, 92, 184, 227 political critique, 123 political satire. See satire polysemy, 4, 197 Pope, Alexander, 109, 207 postmodernism, 17, 64–65, 79, 173, 185 postcolonial: body, 290-93; definition, 56; effect, 290; genre, 109; and heterogeneity, 8; imperative, 2n. 2; identities, 66; intervention, 64; and laughter 2-15; and place, 137-39; subject, 64, 66, 194 postcolonial imperative, 2 Powell, Chris, 210, 218 power structures, 61, 63, 84 pragmatics, 200, 204, 211 Prasad, Raekha, 240 Pratt, Marie Louise, 291 predictability, 262, 280 prejudice, 27, 37, 105, 151, 157, 179, 218, 234, 248, 250, 253, 260, 274, 279, 281, 290 Price, Darby Li Po, 180, 186 primitivism, 98, 102 pronunciation, 74, 219, 225, 290 Provine, Robert R., 11 psychoanalytic criticism, 123–24 Punch, 17, 131, 135, 136, 140

Q Quayson, Ato, 2 queer studies, queer theory, 150–51, 159

R Rabelais, François, 30, 46–47 racial stereotyping, 62, 64 racism / xenophobia, 61, 70, 104–5, 152, 159–60, 181, 183, 185, 230, 234, 241, 259 racist humour, 227 rake, 132–43

Index Ramraj, Victor J., 9, 93–102, 213, 220 Randall, Neil, 103 Randhawa, Ravinder, 203 Raskin, Victor, 14, 28–29 Ray, Arthur, 92 readers, readership, 1, 4, 14, 15, 28, 40, 63, 65, 73–74, 78–83, 90, 94–105, 107–12, 124–26, 137, 201, 208, 210– 19, 249–62, 267, 271, 274–83, 282, 288–91. See also audience Reagan, Ronald, 165–66, 173 reception, 15, 182, 187, 212, 215, 226, 272, 274–76, 282 reconciliatory humour, 20 Reichl, Susanne, 195, 199, 202, 214 relativism, 210 release function of humour, 10, 28–29, 54, 196 religion, 62, 63, 101, 113, 120, 179, 186, 201, 203, 294 Renger, Rudi, 212 revenge, 124–27, 248, 253, 254, 264, 295 rewriting, 118, 127, 128, 143 Richler, Mordecai, 1, 7, The Incomparable Atuk, 91–105 Roeckelein, Jon E., 4 Rohlehr, Gordon, 50, 57 Ross, Alison, 209, 211, 215, 217 Ross, Karen, 178 Ross, Malcolm, 97 Rossouw, Henk, 287 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, 203 Rubin, Louis D., Jr., 161 Ruddock, Andy, 187 Rushdie, Salman, ‘Yorick’; 117–18, 123– 28, Midnight’s Children; 109, 112, 123, The Satanic Verses, 74–80, 82– 85

S Sachs, Albie, 279 Saeva Indignatio, 90, 100 Said, Edward, 8, 108, 201 Salingar, Leo, 258, 268 Samovar, Louis, 212 sarcasm, 162, 170 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55 Sassen, Saskia, 179

Index satire: as genre, 109, 208, 258, 288, as conservative genre, 110, eighteenthcentury, 117–118, 124, 127, 139, Menippean, 124, nineteenth-century, 107, 109, 111, political, 151, 260, rewriting satirical traditions, 118, twentieth-century, 109, 111 satirical, 91–95, 101–5, 107–15, 128, 131, 132, 140–1, 180, 220, 275, 279–80 satirist, 47, 91, 110, 142, 151, 207, 268, 279 Scanlan, Margaret, 73, 81, 84 Schacherl, Rico, 271. See also Madam and Eve Schadenfreude, 99, 122 Schaeffer, Neil, 69 Schlote, Christiane, 181 schools, 19, 33, 109, 140, 156–57, 194– 204, 215–19, 262, 274, 289, 292 Schulze-Engler, Frank, 13, 117 Schwarzer, Bert, 127 science, 4–7, 107, 111, 113, 115 Scott, Kim, Benang, 109 Searle, Ronald, The Rake's Progress, 131– 43 Sebba, Mark, 231, 239 segregation, 274 Seidel, Michael, 118 Seinfeld, 180 self-other, 15, 92, 121, 153–56 self-deprecating humour, 13, 248 self-identification, 49, 154 self-parody, 240 Selvadurai, Shyam, Funny Boy, 149–60 Selvon, Sam, Moses Ascending, 36–38; The Lonely Londoners, 36 sense of belonging, 31, 163 sense of community, 249 Seth, Vikram, A Suitable Boy, 195–203 settler society, 115 sexuality, 124, 127, 150, 171, 292–93 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 91 shaggy-dog story, 252 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 48, 117, 123–28, 177 Sherbert, Garry, 118, 124 Shklovsky, Victor, 94 Siegel, Lee, 118 Simon, Richard Keller, 4, 6, 257–58

309 Singh-Toor; Matthew, ‘Samhadrarow and the Partial Exchange’, 117–24, 128 Sinhalese, 150, 152 situation comedy, 177, 295 Sked, Alan, 131 slapstick, 51, 162, 166, 281 Slemon, Stephen, 14 Smiles, Samuel, 132, 141 Smith, Gail, 277 Smith, Jeanne Rosier, 250 Smith, Zadie , White Teeth, 74–85, 195, 198–204 social comedy, 20, 215, 289, 290 social criticism, 90, 209, 229 sociolect, 225, 226 Soja, Edward W., 179 Sollors, Werner, 31 Sommer, Roy, 195 South Africa, 271–84, 288, 289, 293, 296, 298 Southgate, Martha, 183–84 spirituality, 289–90, 295, 298 Spolsky, Bernard, 194 spoonerism, 199 Springsteen, Bruce, ’Born in The USA’; 162–67; ’I’m on Fire’, 167, 171 Sri Lanka, 149, 157 standard English, 34, 36, 112, 236 Standley, Jane, 271 stand-up comedians, 178, 188, 225 Stearns, Jason, 39 Stein, Mark, 3, 83, 195, 208 stereotype, 12, 16, 18, 28, 35, 37–38, 64– 65, 98–104, 120, 133, 142–43, 162, 170–71, 180, 182, 187, 218, 225–27, 233–34, 272–77, 280, 294 stereotype, self-directed, 162, 170 Sterne Laurence, 109, Tristram Shandy, 117–18, 123–24, 126–27 stimulus-response, 4, 5, 28 structural ambiguity, 211, 215 subaltern, 65, 120, 164 subversion, -ve, 3, 10, 12, 13, 30, 32, 39, 46–49, 56, 61–65, 71, 73, 84, 85, 109, 118, 120, 126–28, 141, 149, 155–59, 168, 187, 208, 229, 230, 242, 281, 287, 290–91 superior, -ity, 28–30, 38, 50, 62, 67, 69, 101, 118–22, 132, 204, 210, 217, 237 surprise, 35, 57, 79, 98, 237, 249, 279–84

310 Swift, Jonathan, 109, 110, Gulliver’s Travels, 117–27 Syal, Meera, 178, 181, 187, Anita and Me, 2, 195, 202; Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 31–32, 197–203 Sypher, Wylie, 94

T taboos, 267, 280 Tamil, 18, 149–59 Tapping, Craig, 184 Terkessidis, Mark, 18, 151–53, 157–59 Terminology, 3–4, 9, 15, 27, 151, 162, 259, 268 terrorists, -ism, 73–85 Tharoor, Shashi, The Great Indian Novel, 109, 115 theories of humour, 7, 16, 19, 28–29, 39, 62, 196, 210 Thieme, John, 2, 208 Thomson, Philip, 288–89 Till Death Do Us Part tolerance, 73, 126, 219, 227, 265–67 Tonn, Horst, 163 Torres, Rodolfo D., 170 tourism, 45, 292 tragedy, 48, 79, 110, 116, 124–27, 159, 257–58, 291 tragic clown, 124 travelogue, 118 travesty, 114, 127, 228, 240–42 Triandis, Harry C., 211, 212 trickster, 104, 248–54 Trinidad, 43–58, 229 Tulloch, John, 187 Turner, Paul, 118 TuSmith, Bonnie, 180 TV comedies, 18, 235

U universal values, 127 Universalism, 9, 64, 210 unmasking, 83, 162, 168, 228, 242 Updike, John, 7

V van Wyk, Johan, 282 verbal humour, 29, 195–200 verbal transgression, 67 vernacular, 44, 58, 113

Index Veroff, Jody Bennet, 211 victimry, 158 Vidal, Gayle, 178 violence, 54–58, 74–77, 179, 250, 254, 288 Vizenor, Gerald, 158, The Heirs of Columbus, 247–54 Vogel, Susan C., 29 Voltaire, Ingénu, 93 voyeurism, 267

W Wade, Jean-Philippe, 282, 284 Wagner, Valeria, 124 Walcott, Derek, 43, 49, 58, ‘Mass Man’, 58 Walder, Dennis, 2, 282 Walker, Christopher, 180, 188 Walker, Nancy A., 31 Walvin, James, 208 Was guckst du? 178, 180–82, 187 Watson, Don, 108 Waugh, Evelyn, 17, 109 Webb, R.K., 131 Weedon, Chris, 180–87 Weinreb, Ben, 139 Weiss, Wolfgang, 118 Werbner, Pnina, 75 West, Rebecca, 135 Wilkerson, Isabel, 275 Williams, Eric, 55 Williams, Raymond, 293 Woodcock, George, 93 word play, 66, 250, 267 working class, 166–171, 228, 276 writing back, 13, 16, 17, 30, 123, 126

X Xhosa, 282, 288–96

Y Yanar, Kaya. See Was Guckst Du? Young, Robert, 2, 8, 64, 141, 195

Z Zakes Mda, 1, 20, 288, The Heart of Redness, 287–98

Contributors

Heinz Antor is Professor of English Literatures at the University of Cologne. He is the current President of the Association for the Study of the New English Literatures (ASNEL). His research interests include world literatures in English, postcolonial studies, the English novel, and literary and critical theory. His recent publications include Der englische Universitätsroman. Bildungskonzepte und Erziehungsziele (1996); Shakespeare alternativ (1997); Intercultural Encounters - Studies in English Literatures (1999, with K. L. Cope); English Literatures in International Contexts (2000, with K. Stierstorfer); Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture, (2003, with S. Brown, J. Considine and K. Stierstorfer), and Refractions of Canada in European Literature and Culture (to be published in 2005, with K. Stierstorfer). Mita Banerjee is Professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz. Her book The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate was published in 2002; her postdoctoral thesis, entitled Race-ing the Century, which focuses on twentieth-century ethnic cultural production in literature, film, music, and art, was published in 2005. She is currently working on a postcolonial re-reading of the American Renaissance. Maggie Ann Bowers is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth, specializing in the field of multi-ethnic and cross-cultural writing of North America and Britain. She has published articles on African American writing, Native American writing, and the comparisons between Asian American, Canadian, and British literature. She is the author of Routledge’s New Critical Idiom volume Magic(al) Realism and is a co-editor of the multi-lingual postcolonial volume Convergences and Interferences. She belongs to the Centre for European and International Research at the University of Portsmouth and the Postcolonial Research Group of the University of Antwerp. Ulrike Erichsen has been a member of the English Department of the Technical University Darmstadt since 1995. Her teaching and research interests are in cultural studies, post-colonial theory and criticism (Caribbean, Southern Africa, contemporary Black British writing), and the intersection of gender and post-colonial theories. Her publications include articles on authenticity and identity, problems of invented

312

Contributors

identities, and Caribbean women’s writing. Her doctoral thesis on re-writings of colonial history and colonial experience in selected contemporary Caribbean novels was published as Geschichtsverarbeitung als kulturelle Selbstreflexion (2001). She has just co-edited a collection of papers on gender issues. She is currently preparing a post-doctoral dissertation on the realisation of gender in poetry. Astrid M. Fellner is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on U.S. Latino/a literatures, post-revolutionary American literature, feminist and queer theory, and body studies. Selected Publications: Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana SelfRepresentation (2002); co-edited publications: (Anti-)Americanisms (2004), Body Signs: The Body in Latino/a Cultural Production (forthcoming Ediciones Nuevo Espacio); several articles in the fields of Chicano/a literature, Gender Studies, and American Cultural Studies. She is the recipient of an Erwin-Schrödinger Fellowship and is currently working on her Habilitation on ‘Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture’ at UMass Amherst and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. Gisela Feurle teaches English and African literatures within an interdisciplinary context at the Oberstufen-Kolleg of the University of Bielefeld. She once taught English and literature at a secondary school in Zimbabwe and has published a study on processes of intercultural learning in the course of students’ travels to Southern Africa (Annäherungen an das Fremde). Together with Detlev Gohrbandt, she has translated into German Bessie Head’s novels Maru and When Rainclouds Gather. Her teaching and research interests include literatures of Southern Africa – recently also cartoons and photography – and intercultural learning. Annie Gagiano is Professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Without relinquishing her interest in canonical English Literature (particularly twentiethcentury poetry), she has concentrated more recently on African English fiction and postcolonial and gender theory bearing on literary texts. Gagiano is the author of Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (published in the U.S.A. by Lynne Rienner, 2000) and of a number of articles and book chapters on African novels, folktales, poetry, and Shakespeare. In her writing she has commented on postcolonial aesthetics and socio-political issues; her numerous articles feature works by Blixen, Coetzee, Farah, Head, Hove, LaGuma, Mphahlele, Mungoshi, Ngugi, Nortje, Nkosi, Serote, Soyinka and other writers. Detlev Gohrbandt teaches Cultural Studies and English teaching methodology at the University Koblenz-Landau at Landau campus. Focussing on ‘visual culture,’ he combines Cultural Studies with teaching methodology and deals with questions such as the mediation of photography, film or cartoons into (a foreign) language, the cultural contextualisation of such texttypes, and the impact of these research questions

Contributors

313

on learners’ development of critical competences and on the canon debate in secondary and tertiary education. These questions have been discussed in his Textanlässe, Lesetätigkeiten: Poetik und Rhetorik der Unabgeschlossenheit (1998). He has also written a number of essays on the fable, on the discourse of moral values in George Eliot and in caricature, as well as on postcolonial literature in Africa. Klaus Heissenberger studied English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, the University of Ghent, and Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He received his degree in Vienna in 2001, with a thesis on Bruce Springsteen (‘“These two lanes will take us anywhere:” Bruce Springsteen Meets America on the Road’). Currently, he is teaching Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna and working on his doctoral thesis, ‘Real American Men? The Reconstruction of Straight White Masculinity in Recent American Popular Culture.’ Anthony Ilona holds a PhD from the University of London. He has taught a range of subjects in the field of postcolonial literature and theory at the Universities of London and Sussex. He is former Managing Editor of the literary journal Wasafiri and currently works at The Guardian newspaper in London. Susan Lever is Associate Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. She has published widely on Australian contemporary fiction, and is currently writing a study of the novels of David Foster. Her most recent book is Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction (Halstead/ASAL, 2000). Michael Meyer studied German, English and American literatures at the Universities of Mannheim, Iowa, and Freiburg. He has taught Anglophone literatures at the Universities of Bamberg, Bayreuth and Koblenz-Landau. He is the author of Struktur, Funktion und Vermittlung der Wahrnehmung in Charles Tomlinsons Lyrik (1990), Gibbon, Mill und Ruskin. Autobiographie und Intertextualität (1998), and an introduction to studying English and American Literatures (2004). He edited a volume on the teaching of literature, Vom Hörsaal zum Tatort. Neue Spuren vom Hochschulunterricht? (1994), and Salman Rushdie’s short stories East, West (2002). His articles deal with Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, colonial and postcolonial cultures and literatures. Currently, his research projects cover the Panorama, contemporary short stories, and the culture of credit, trust, and credibility. Susanne Mühleisen teaches linguistics at the Universität Frankfurt am Main. She has published Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (Benjamins, 2002), as well as numerous articles on sociolinguistic issues in Caribbean creoles and British Black Englishes, as well as on translation and intercultural communication. Her research interests include sociopragmatic issues, linguistic anthropology, and intercultural communication. She is

314

Contributors

currently working on a contrastive study of address forms in English and German and their translation in intercultural communication. Margit Ozvalda received her M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from University of Vienna in 1996, with a thesis on Lady Montagu as a traveller, writer, and translator. She is currently Assistant Professor at the English Department of Vienna University of Economics. In 2003, she completed a PhD on coursebooks and English as an International Language. Her research interests include (literary and nonliterary) Genre and Discourse Analysis, English for Specific Purposes, English as an International Language, anglophone postcolonial novels, and intertextuality in postcolonial rewritings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Susanne Pichler is Assistant Professor at the English Department at the LeopoldFranzens University in Innsbruck. She has published a book on Buchi Emecheta’s ‘London Novels’: An Intercultural Approach (WVT, 2001), and written articles on Ama Ata Aidoo, Sam Selvon, David Dabydeen, Caryl Phillips and Romesh Gunesekera. Her research interest covers areas like ethnic and intercultural relations, constructions of self and ‘other’, Black British writing, and postcolonialism. Helga Ramsey-Kurz is associate professor at the English Department of the University of Innsbruck. Her PhD on female friendships in fiction was published as The Anatomy of Friction (1997). She has published articles on various postcolonial writers in journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Ariel, and is currently completing a book on the non-literate Other in twentieth-century novels in English. Susanne Reichl is assistant professor at the department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, where she has taught literatures in English, Cultural Studies, and teaching methodology. She is the author of Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (2002), and has published on postcolonial literatures, cultural studies, and the teaching of literature. As the recipient of an Erwin-Schrödinger-scholarship, she will spend the next two years in Germany and the UK, working on an interdisciplinary study on the understanding and the teaching of literature in a foreign language. Virginia Richter wrote her dissertation on gender and violence in the eighteenthcentury novel, Gewaltsame Lektüren. Gender-Konstitution und Geschlechterkonflikt in Clarissa, Les Liaisons dangereuses und Les Infortunes de la vertu (published in 2000) at the University of Munich. She worked as a co-ordinator of the graduate school ‘Postcolonial Studies’ in Munich, and is now the managing director of the new BA/MA programme in Comparative Literature (Munich, again). She was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where she was doing research for her Habilitation on ‘Missing Links: Anthropological Anxiety in British Imperial Discovery Fiction, 1870-1930.’ She has published a translation of Margaret

Contributors

315

Cavendish’s The Blazing World (2001), and co-edited Zwischen Revolution und Emanzipation: Geschlechterordnungen in Europa um 1800 (forthcoming). Christiane Schlote lectures at the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin. She has published on postcolonial and transnational literatures, identity politics, Latino and Asian American drama, documentary theatre, urban fiction and diasporic Arab women writers. She is the author of Bridging Cultures: Latino- und asiatisch amerikanisches Theater in New York (1997) and coeditor of New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama (2003). She is currently working on a book on British and American women writers, playwrights, and filmmakers of South Asian descent. Mark Stein is Junior Professor for Theories of Non-European Literatures and Cultures at Potsdam University. His research interests include African, black British, and Caribbean literatures as well as transnational autobiography and postcolonial theory. Amongst his publications are Can the Subaltern Be Read? (1996, with T. Döring and U. Schäfer), Migration and Its Metaphors (2002, with M. Banerjee and M. Heide), and Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Ohio State UP, 2004). His articles are on parody, irony, visual culture, transculturation, and on writers such as Dambudzo Marechera, V.S. Naipaul, Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, Olaudah Equiano, and Aphra Behn. He is now writing a book on Jackie Kay. Wendy Woodward is Professor in English Studies at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. She has published widely in the fields of postcolonialism and gender, and on South African writing. Recently, she has co-edited Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Rodopi, 2002). Her current research projects include The Empire Laughs Back: Satire and the Grotesque in Postcolonial Southern African Texts (with the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch) as well as Sentience and Sensibilities: Representations of Animals in Southern African Writing.