Comedy in Decline and Fall PDF

Comic Aesthetics and the Effect of Realism in the Novel

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of

The Department of English

Villanova University

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in

English

by

Michael Thomas Nace

April, 2008

Under the Direction of

Dr. Jean Lutes

UMI Number: 1450348

14503482008

UMI MicroformCopyright

All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road

P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

Nace ii

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT...........................................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 – DEFINITIONS OF COMIC TERMINOLOGY IN NOVELS..........................................2

DEFINITIONS OF COMIC TERMINOLOGY IN NOVELS.........................................................................................6 CHAPTER 2 -- THE COMIC SPECTACLE ............................................................................................... 14

TORTILLA FLAT............................................................................................................................................... 18 DECLINE AND FALL......................................................................................................................................... 31

CHAPTER 3 -- THE COMIC INTERIOR IN NOVELISTIC HEROES................................................ 46 ULYSSES .......................................................................................................................................................... 54

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................................................ 82 WORKS CONSULTED ................................................................................................................................... 84

Nace 1

Abstract

The sensation of realism experienced in the reading of novels remains a peculiar

and mysterious problem of the scholarly reader. While a multitude of hypotheses exist for

understanding this realist mechanism found in the novel, I believe that a careful

consideration of the novel’s relationship to comedy and comic aesthetics offers a

fascinating schematic of how the reader is so consistently drawn into that state of

mystical connection with the text known as verisimilitude. By focusing on three novels

written in the first third of the 20th century, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935), Waugh’s

Decline and Fall (1928), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), I will examine the effect of the

“comic spectacle” so germane to the first two texts, and a more elusive “comic interior”

exemplified by the particularities of Joycean humor. My analysis will rely on a collection

of philosophical thought from the likes of Bergson, Freud, Bahktin, Eco, and Aristotle

which will help to illustrate how the novel performs comically when the reader witnesses

expectations defied and morals profaned, both of which give rise to realism and a sense

of intimacy with the text.

Nace 2

Chapter 1 – Definitions of Comic Terminology in Novels

Introduction

The sensation of realism experienced in the reading of novels remains a peculiar

and mysterious problem for the scholarly reader. Indeed, it is a palpable sphere of

intimacy realized though the effect of realism that has attracted readers since the rise of

the popular English novel. A careful consideration of the novel’s relationship to comedy

and comic aesthetics offers a fascinating schematic of how the reader is so consistently

drawn into that state of connection with the text known as verisimilitude. Toward this

end, some students of literature claim that humor as it is recognized today is a modern

phenomenon and not the same species as what is experienced in ancient comedy. As

Octavio Paz states: “There is no humor in Homer or Virgil; Aristoso seems to foreshadow

it, but not until Cervantes does humor take shape . . . Humor is the great invention of the

modern spirit.” Similarly, Milan Kundera boldly asserts in Testaments Betrayed: “A

fundamental idea: humor is not an age-old human practice; it is an invention bound up

with the birth of the novel” (Kundera 5).

A primary focus of this thesis is to further develop Kundera’s claim that the rise

of the novel as a modern literary genre and the realization of modern comic aesthetics are

in fact inextricably linked, and that novels written in the modern tradition derive their

essential realist sensibilities in part from the participation that comic stimuli encourages

between the reader and the text. This interchange between reader and text, whether

overtly comic or, as will be investigated, borne of intrinsic comic virtues, challenges the

reader to perform according to a deliberate set of devices which are essential components

Nace 3

of what can be termed as comic aesthetics. These devices include the suspension of moral

judgment (bound up in one’s “sense of humor” as Kundera suggests) and the reaction of

laughter, both of which contribute to endearing the novelistic hero to the reader in such a

way that evokes empathy and solidifies the sense of interiority gained through the

intimate access to a novel’s various narrative techniques.

Quite often, academic discussions of the novel and its relationship to comedy are

concerned with reconciling the modern characteristics of the novel and comedy with the

historical circumstances that occurred during the rise of these two phenomena. Therefore,

a historical reading on the topic of comic aesthetics and the novel would be a largely

diachronic one, perhaps beginning with the rise of the eighteenth century English novel,

for example, or even reaching farther back to Rabelais’ work, as Kundera does, and

connecting these texts with what Lukács calls a historico-philosophical analysis. My

study on comedy and the novel, however, is predominantly a-historical and formalist in

its approach. It is for this reason that the three principal texts being analyzed do not span

a vast, sweeping range of the novel’s history that could be considered modern, but rather

were particularly chosen from the modernist literary movement they hail from, a period

that came to exemplify the correlation between comedy and the novel. John Steinbeck’s

1935 publication of Tortilla Flat was his first commercially successful work and,

although he felt as though it was a partial failure due to its pseudo-allegorical Arthurian

underpinnings being lost of its readership, its overt wit and comic charm made it an

endearing and accessible novel. Similarly, Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall

(1928), itself a searing indictment of the English Aristocracy, was loved mainly for its

acerbic wit and mirth. Finally, the third text analyzed here, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922),

Nace 4

relies on a strong current of comic moments that run throughout the book that keeps the

reader primarily engaged in its audacious conceit. In spite of the relative parity between

the years they were published, these three works come from diverse artistic milieus and

were crafted from varied literary projects; justifying their relationship in a Historico-

Philosophical reading would prove daunting. After all, Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall

are born of the comic novel sub-genre that came to be so popular in the modernist period,

whereas the breadth and controversy of Ulysses immediately imbued discussions about it

with a sense of critical gravitas. What links all three works in myhistorical and

synchronic reading, however, is the application and reliance on comedy to deliver to the

reader a tangible dose of realism. It is for this reason that the texts are discussed not in

chronological order, but instead by beginning first with a look into the comic spectacle, a

feature so germane to the first two texts, followed by the more elusive comic interior

model exemplified by the particularities of Joycean humor.

The position and order of these two primary focuses in this manner is justified by

a simple conceit. For most readers of novels, a comic moment is most often and

observably appreciated as a spectacle. When the reader confronts a comic spectacle – a

scene, for instance, where a character becomes the victim of an unfortunate circumstance

– he or she is encouraged to suspend any moral judgment of the action in question so that

a novel’s hero may be appreciated as possessing weakness and imperfection, attributes

that mimic the human condition. Thus, as Zach Bowen states in his book on Ulysses As

A Comic Novel, “when we laugh at the hero’s plight and his fumblings, we are assured –

without realizing that we harbor any pity and fear for the hero – that our problems are

universal” (Bowen 6). This universality that Bowen speaks of is indispensable to realism,

Nace 5

as it allows the reader to empathically identify with the novelistic hero by relating to his

or her struggles and imperfections. And because in a comic spectacle “we laugh at the

hero’s plight and his fumblings” as a means of experiencing this empathic connection

with the novel, there is an undeniable relationship between realism and the comic

spectacle. Therefore, because the comic spectacle is a more immediately tangible and

recognizable notion of this argument, it makes sense to begin these analyses by looking at

the comic spectacle first.

The second focus of the thesis investigates Joyce’s Ulysses in order to consider

the notion of a comic interior found in novels that are not overtly comic either in form or

reputation. Joyce, as will be revealed in the comic interior chapter, renders Leopold

Bloom in stark realism by way of confounding the reader’s expectations. Rupturing

reader expectation and affecting the sense that his primary hero functions outside the will

of the author, a technique of the realist novel that transcends even Joyce, is itself a

product of humor’s contractual relationship between the novel and the reader and a

fundamental principle behind comedy’s mechanics. This is precisely where comedy loses

its overt spectacle altogether, instead bearing out to the reader the novelistic hero’s

interiority in the most subtle and complex manner.

The collection of these three chapters on comic aesthetics and their relationship to

the novel aspires not simply to situate comedy as a curious characteristic of a narrow

moment in literary history, but to argue philosophically that comedy and the novel are

inextricably linked. This hypothesis, proven through formalist experiments, suggests a

wider and more nuanced appreciation of what is considered comic. By analyzing these

three modernist texts and their use of comedy as a means of achieving the effect of

Nace 6

realism, investigating comic aesthetics in novels written across the entire spectrum of

modernity will bear out a preponderance of evidence that comedy makes its way into the

overarching project of the novel as an art form.

Definitions of Comic Terminology in Novels

Although comedy is usually narrowly defined as a dramatic and performance-

oriented genre, reserved traditionally for the stage, and, in modern and now postmodern

times, sustained by the television and motion picture industry, one may perceive a

“comic” ethic applied across the entire spectrum of arts, particularly in relation to

literature. For the purposes of this argument – that the peculiar affectation of realism

experienced in the novel owes itself to the advent of what is considered comic in our

modern universe – it is important accurately to appropriate comedy’s jargon and

terminology: that which is “comic,” laughter, humor, satire – and how these terms, ill-

bred in their common usage for uncovering the phenomena of novelistic realism,

combine to form a methodology for better understanding how the novelist effectuates

realism through the device of comedy. Not only must this comic lexicon appropriately

express the apparatus of realism and its relationship to the comic spectacle found in the

novel, but it must also account for the presence of a comic mechanism found embedded

in novels that are not outwardly comic at first glance. I assert that the form of the novel,

at the center of its very conceit, is a product of the pure spirit of primordial human

laughter, a product that transcends the visceral, exhalable spirit that forms our immediate

sense of comedy. Therefore, to hold the comic methodology to only a limited sub-genre

of comic novels belies this charge.

Nace 7

“Comedy” is often presumptuously defined as a performance-oriented genre

imbued with humorous and satirical elements wherein the hero must confront and

overcome some type of adversity. While the term should not be limited to theatre and

performance, this prosaic definition of comedy provides insight into its interplay with the

realist spirit of the novel, speaking to its depiction of amusing people or incidents in

which the characters overcome adversity. What is found to be “amusing,” particularly

within the sphere of a novel, cannot be sufficiently reconciled as comic, since some

elements, such as the ironic gesture between two opposing forces, might incite unbridled

laughter, whereas the delicate minutiae of a landscape may simply enkindle an eager

curiosity within the reader. In either case, both sensations can be characterized at first

impression as “amusing” if they encourage and captivate the reader’s attention. Comedy,

as we will see in practice heterogeneously with three early 20th century novels, enkindles

within the reader not only the tacit spike in curiosity found in the state of amusement, but

also the more transcendent evocation of laughter imbued with a pathos which renders

heroes as seeming quite real to the reader of novels. Therefore, a comic moment in the

novel can be appreciated as any moment where fictional characters are effectively

humanized. Comedy illuminates not the ideal, but the profane, imperfect qualities of

novelistic heroes. Where scenes of weeping and tragedy in a novel are an extrinsic

manifestation, a sequence of denotative affectation, comic moments reveal truths that

their characters seek to keep hidden. Moreover, comedy exposes the imperfect interior

nature of characters that outwardly would seem perfectly constructed in the epic. And

where, in the epic, its hero is victimized by a tragic flaw that is deliberately applied by

Nace 8

outside forces (such as the gods), novelistic heroes suffer the flaws that exist in their

nature seemingly by their own doing.

In the first chapter of Testaments Betrayed, Kundera states that “the contract

between the novelist and the reader must be established from the outset; it must be clear:

the story being told here is not serious, even though it is about the most dreadful things”

(Kundera 4) the notion of juxtaposing the unserious with the dreadful is an allusion

consonant with the ends of comedy: even the most profane, victimizing comic moment in

a novel leads not to an erasure of realism, but rather a kind of humanizing reckoning

which allows its characters to assume autonomous idiosyncrasies that give the impression

of functioning outside the will of the author. For example, from the epic tradition,

Achilles’ flaw can be appreciated as an application of circumstance -- it was not borne of

his own trespasses or decisions, but by a divine force at work at the outset of his birth.

Because of this, the author of such an epic tale shows his hand in crafting a flaw or

weakness as an artifice; it functions not as a means of rendering Achilles as realistic to

the audience, but rather it simply occasions a means for Achilles to die. For when Lukács

aptly notes that “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no

longer directly given, in which the immanence of life has become a problem, yet which

still thinks in terms of totality” (Lukács 186), he conversely points out that the epic can

only succeed at representing this “totality of life” through presenting an extensive life

cycle which must naturally include death. Comedy, on the other hand, delivers in a

limited, synchronic gesture only a fragment of totality through the profane, grotesque,

even embarrassing revelations of its spectacle, thus portraying him in the light of an

autonomous character outside the will of the author. To be clear: this, too, is an artifice

Nace 9

that the novelist uses just as it used in Homer, yet the conceit of comedy is sufficiently

concealed behind the realistic sphere of the novel, obscured by the effect of realism itself.

This paradox is what makes comedy so effective as a means to creating a realistic sphere

in the novel; the comic artifice is hidden from the reader by the very thing – realism –

that it is producing. Thus, the comic moment originates not from external circumstance

but from inside the will of the hero.

Kundera’s passage also speaks of a “contract” between the reader and a

mechanism of realism which the novelist constructs, with the idea that this contract, a

dialogue implicit in the absorbing quality of the novel, is a critical discovery in

understanding the elusive illusion of realism. Kundera’s claim here is crucial: in order for

comedy to succeed in rendering novelistic characters as realistic, the reader must

participate in its conceit. There must be a reaction on the part of the reader in order to

confirm a comic moment. This necessity creates a kind of “circuit” between the reader

and text, as well as all of the mechanisms contained within the crux of the text, including

the deployment of comic aesthetics. The novel requires the reader to complete its dialogic

mosaic so that he or she may be wholly invested in its realistic sphere; the reader must

contribute a segment of reality, whether this is something authentic (real) that occurs

between the reader and the novel or merely an artifice. Once this contract is established,

it is only then that the reader experiences the full function of the novel’s mechanism of

realism. And for the circuit of comedy to be completed, one of the reader’s principal

contributions is laughter.

The simple definition of laughter, a fundamental human action characterized by a

completely physical and instinctive reaction to comic stimuli, whether that stimuli be

Nace 10

“lively amusement” or of a more derisive nature, requires further clarification in order for

it to be properly appropriated to this discussion. Laughter does not constitute an

unprovoked act – laughing without provocation or stimuli is typically the mark of a social

defect – but rather a reaction, perhaps the most basic and understood response, to comic

stimuli. And where popular comedy as found in the commercial media may constitute

“lively amusement,” it is the reaction to notes of contempt, derision, ridicule,

misunderstanding, and scorn which Kundera identifies as examples of primary comic

material in the crux of the novel:

Creating an imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of

enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop – that is,

individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of

good or evil . . . but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, their

own laws. (Kundera 7-8)

In this case, readers afford themselves a suspension of whatever moral code might

preclude them from denying responsive laughter and, by allowing these events to enter

their imagination, the art of the novel “teaches [them] to be curious about others” and

tries “to comprehend truths that differ from [their] own” (Kundera 8). These comic

implications marvelously expand the conventional notion of laughter. The reaction of

laughter on the part of the reader is an affirmation of suspended moral judgment: readers

will accept a comic moment because it either fails to tread upon their preexistent

morality, or they render that morality suspended and laugh. Therefore, as the reader

experiences comic moments in the story, his or her response is a product of the suspended

reflex of judgment that allows novelistic heroes to be experienced without prejudice.

Nace 11

Our initial definition of laughter, however, also presumes that it is to some extent

an instinctive or involuntary physical reaction. Does Kundera’s concept of a “suspension

of moral belief” and the reaction of laughter as an affirmation of this contradict the notion

of it being an instinctive reaction? After all, suspending a systemic construct of human

reaction seems like a suspension of something inherent or instinctive in our behavior as

readers. If laughter is instinctive and spontaneous, how do we reconcile it with a

deliberate suspension of our initial response to a text? The answer lies in the final

component of these critical comic definitions: humor. If the comic aesthetic denotes the

novelist’s conceit behind affecting realism in his novel, and laughter is the reader’s

instinctive response to that comic landscape, it is humor, the a priori contract, where the

occasion for comic suggestion is agreed upon between reader and author. Humor’s

definition need not be probed too deeply to arrive at this conclusion: where it might be

chiefly thought of as simply the quality of comedy, humor is also appreciated to be one’s

ability to appreciate a comic moment. Thus, having a sense of humor, in itself a kind of

virtue possessed by some and sorely lacking in others, is not inborn or assumed in every

individual. Humor is something to be cultivated and, more importantly in the sense of this

discussion, agreed upon. It is for this reason that what is considered to be humorous is

subjective and volatile from one person to the next; nothing has been found to be safely

and universally accepted as humorous. Even within the same individual, what strikes him

as particularly funny one day might offend him the next. All of these abstract examples

point to humor, the ability to perceive something as comic, as a well-appropriated

signifier of Kundera’s suspension of moral belief. The contract of humor must be agreed-

Nace 12

upon between reader and novelist so that the realist mechanism of the comic landscape

may commence.

These three definitions combine to create a “comic formula” that can be

appreciated within the genre of the novel: the deployment of a comic landscape by the

novelist, the agreement on humor between the reader and text, and the reader’s

responsive laughter, combine to become an invention of modernity, comprised through a

mechanism indigenous to the rise of the individual mind, of the secular. It is inextricably

connected with the birth of the novel. He goes on to say that “humor is not laughter, not

mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic” (Kundera 5). Kundera confirms

that humor is indeed not to be equated with laughter – laughter belongs solely to the

reader, or in a wider sense, to an audience. Rather, humor, for the purpose of this

discussion, is a shared status between the reader and the suggestive purpose of the comic

aesthetic found in the novel’s mechanism of realism. But in the above-referenced

quotation, Kundera describes humor as “a particular species of the comic.” How does he

arrive at this conclusion that there is a connection between humor and what is comic

within the discussion of the novel? The question remains largely unanswered, and is

precisely where one begins to unravel the mechanics of realism as it pertains to these

ideas of the comic aesthetic. Paz’s quote from the introduction provides a foretaste: by

rendering everything “ambiguous.” The ambiguity promulgated in the course of a novel’s

reading is really how the interiority of novelistic characters develop and subsequently are

able to succeed and fail in their roles in such a way that renders them as seemingly real.

As a result of this effect, the reader of novels experiences a novelistic character

who seems to function substantially outside the will of the author, at times failing to act,

Nace 13

react, fully realize, live up to and defy the expectations as established in the imbedded

suggestions of the novelist’s ventriloquated appendage, the narrative. Much is to be made

of reader expectation and the development of realistic novelistic characters: because the

reader’s expectation is often ruptured, characters seem to behave independently of the

author’s will as suggested in the narrative. The result, in all its reduced essence,

constitutes the implicit nature of comedy in the novel, realized not in outwardly

humorous tones, but in the interior of the novelistic hero. Both this interior quality of

comedy as well as the extrinsic nature of the comic spectacle interact with and challenge

the expectations of the reader, setting the novel’s path on a trajectory towards achieving

the effect of realism. We will see this substantially at work in Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat

and Waugh’s Decline and Fall in the following chapter concerning the comic spectacle.

Nace 14

Chapter 2 -- The Comic Spectacle

The comic aesthetic is a pervasive feature of the novels of the early 20th century,

both overtly and implicitly; secularism and the arts converged violently in the works of

Joyce, Woolf, Dunleavy, D.H. Lawrence, Flann O’Brien, some of Huxley, and early

Evelyn Waugh, so that many of their landmark novels were regarded as crass, base, and

even pornographic at the time of their publication. It is the culmination of these works,

however, which established a clear, discernable comic trend in the project of the modern

novel. John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall certainly

reside in this genre of the modernist “comic novel,” and therefore serve as prime

examples of the comic spectacle. More specifically, they were chosen to represent this

particular focus of my thesis because they are demonstrably spectacle-driven in their

deployment of comic aesthetics. That is to say that both novels, while strikingly different

in the characters and novelistic spheres they render, rely heavily on stringing together

hilarious comic events one after another that are played out not simply within the mind of

the hero’s interior, but rather out in the open, drawing the community backdrop as well as

the reader into a gyre of escalating laughter. And it is this reaction of laughter that breaks

down moral judgment in the reader and sufficiently humanizes novelistic heroes. This

brand of comic aesthetic I call a spectacle is so germane to these two novels because their

comedy is both extrinsic and spectacular at its very core.

This chapter, therefore, will first continue to build upon the principles of the

comic spectacle that were introduced in chapter one so that a close reading of Tortilla

Nace 15

Flat and Decline and Fall will present clear and poignant examples of novelistic comedy

in action. By concentrating on Kundera’s thoughts regarding “profanation” and “the

suspension of moral judgment,” the connection between comedy and realism in the novel

will be appreciated after a penetrating look into the engaging comedy of both Steinbeck

and Waugh’s memorable works.

Published in 1942, C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters can assist in ascribing the

essential connection between this extrinsic comic spectacle and the kind of “moral

profanation” that Kundera speaks of when he develops his notion of comedy within the

novel. By pursuing the moral implications of human laughter through his inverted

“diabolical attitude,” Lewis uses Screwtape, the seasoned, tenured tempter and uncle to

his demon-in-training nephew, Toadpipe, to parse out the subject of laughter with zeal,

explaining to his nephew, “I divide the causes of human laughter into joy, fun, the Joke

Proper, and Flippancy” (Lewis 53). Though he described the process of writing in

Screwtape’s voice as, “a sort of spiritual cramp” (Lewis 183), through this morally-

inverted character, Lewis explores each of these subdivisions separately and

syllogistically, with “the Joke Proper” and “Flippancy” being the fields which illustrate

the most promise in terms of Kundera’s notion of “moral profanation” and its function

within the comic spectacle (Lewis 54). In particular, Screwtape’s lesson on flippancy

offers a poignant insight into the profane nature of the comic aesthetic in the novel,

declaiming that:

Humor is for [the English] the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing grace

of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. . . Mere cowardice

is shameful; Cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque

Nace 16

gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful – unless the cruel man

can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous,

jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that

almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but

with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke. (Lewis

55)

Thus, the power of moral ambiguity begins to take shape, so that the black-and-white

hierarchies of morality are suppressed and moral judgment of any behavior may be

suspended for the sake of appreciating the totality of a novelistic hero’s interior. This

point is where the comic spectacle can be appreciated as a component of the mechanism

of realism, that multi-faceted, creative device of the novelist that deploys a myriad of

techniques and artifices directed at humanizing its sphere so that the reader experiences

the sphere of the novel as seeming real. The comic spectacle works toward morally

neutralizing or equivocating about an event or behavior within the story that would

otherwise seem grave or even tragic. By encouraging the reader to appreciate an aspect of

the novelistic hero’s self outside of his or her moral proclivities, the novelist utilizes the

comic spectacle to “explain away” questionable behavior with the same set of delusions

that we as individuals engage in internally. It is for this reason that the comic spectacle

taps into the spirit of the human condition and prompts the reader to project themselves

into the minutiae of the novel.

Screwtape accurately identifies this transcendent power of the comic spectacle

and the condition of humor, this agreement between two parties discussed in Chapter one

– in his example, the progenitor of the Joke and the audience – potentially to expose

Nace 17

everything between them to profanation, a commitment to excluding nothing, however

sacred it may be, as enough to transmute shameful cruelty and blasphemy into an

endearing quality when performed in what Lewis casually refers to as a “joke,” but what

we as readers identify in the novel as the comic spectacle.

The harvest of early 20th century novels, British and American alike, exemplifies

these comic ideals in the English language canon. Though few writers were consciously

outlining these aesthetics as a specific technique, the first third of the 1900s saw an

expansion of the “comic novel” as a sub-genre of the novelistic species in Literature.

These works are predicated on a purveyance of the comic spectacle; clearly, their

narrative is built upon the Flippancy which Screwtape heralds, explaining that, “Among

Flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it;

but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already

found a ridiculous side to it” (Lewis 56). What novelists comes to understand, then, is

that the landscape of their novelistic world need not be constructed on gravitas and

tragedy in order for its characters to succeed in achieving the effect of realism, a

fundamental quality of the novel as experienced through the vicarious imagination of the

reader that is unmatched by any other genre in rendering its fictional sphere as palpable.

Furthermore, a potential exists, particularly in the modern novel, for Lewis’ “flippancy”

to overturn the moral stability found throughout the classic literary genres, such as the

epic, where, “One can only accept the epic world with reverence; it is impossible to really

touch it, for it is beyond the realm of human activity, the realm in which everything

humans touch is altered and rethought” (Bahktin 17). On the other hand, comedy’s ability

to alter, rethink, render ambiguous, and even profane every convention, every dogma

Nace 18

illustrates, “Precisely here, in popular laughter, the authentic folkloric roots of the novel

are to be sought” amidst the novel’s comic, meandering tendencies, which Bahktin agrees

are, “originally the objects of ambivalent laughter” (Bahktin 21). Indeed, provided that

comic spectacles intersect with the interiority of our novelistic heroes, the reader

confronts an increasingly more fleshbound, mortal, fallible, and autonomous cast of

characters, exposed to the harsh and unpredictable elements of circumstance, with

Kundera’s axiom: that a story can in fact be “not serious, even though it is about the most

dreadful things” (Kundera 4), coming to light in both the “light reading” of the overtly

comic novel as well as the expansive, heterogeneous narratives of Joyce and Woolf.

Tortilla Flat

In 1935, John Steinbeck published Tortilla Flat, a slim novel not frequently

discussed by critics, and most certainly a comic novel to the very core of its conceit,

which not surprisingly was his earliest commercial success on account of its spectacular

comic underpinning and jocund narrative. It was a particular frustration to Steinbeck that

the Arthurian conceit of his novel was never fully perceived or appreciated by his

readership, and much of the scholarly work done on Tortilla Flat concerns itself with

either highlighting the Arthurian structure and allusions or justifying why the book’s

audience missed them1. Although Steinbeck critic Arthur Kinney recognizes that “it is the

comic that is Steinbeck’s salvation” (Kinney 44) with regards to the commercial success

of the novel, few (including Steinbeck perhaps) fail to embrace the simple claim that

Tortilla Flat is a successful work of Literature primarily because of its comedy. As a

1 For more research on this critical discussion of Tortilla Flat, see Joseph Fontenrose’s essay “Tortilla Flat and the Creation of a Legend.”

Nace 19

result, it offers us an ideal entrance into novelistic comic aesthetics. A sequence from the

middle of the book is a good place to begin, since it demonstrates the progression of a

comic spectacle: The morning after Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus Maria Corcoran accidentally

burned down their rented house, amidst the “square black ashes and twisted plumbing

which had once been his other house,” Danny, their lackadaisical landlord, dear friend,

and gallant leader, battles through mild anger and resentment towards his careless,

drunken comrades and arrives finally at “his true emotion, one of relief that at least one

of his burdens was removed. ‘If it were still there, I would be covetous of the rent,’ he

thought. ‘My friends have been cool toward me because they owed me money. Now we

can be free and happy again’” (Steinbeck 51). This interior revelation of Danny’s is

expected, given the similarly interior scope of the novel -- the nonchalance of Paisano

culture, which is well-developed by Steinbeck from the outset and the particular avarice

toward materialism which Danny ruminates on throughout the story. In his own

idiosyncratic way, Danny arrives at the conclusion that the burning down of his second

house is actually fortunate, since it will facilitate that which he genuinely cherishes – not

money, power, and property, but drunken reverie and camaraderie with his fellow

Paisano amigos. Certainly up to this point in our examination, we observe the novel

doing what it does best: giving the reader candid access into the mind of the hero.

Yet, without a comic turn, the reader’s emotional reaction may remain at mere

curiosity. When the reader is informed that, “Danny knew he must discipline his friends a

little, or they would consider him soft,” (Steinbeck 51) it is the juxtaposition of Danny’s

interior thoughts and outward actions, a prime example of the comic spectacle, which sets

him in the midst of an ambiguous, unpredictable world that the reader recognizes to be

Nace 20

remarkably like his own. Therefore, armed with the insight into Danny’s true feelings

toward the whole event, the reader enjoys the fleecing of Danny’s friends who come to

him penitently, bearing stolen and lascivious gifts in meek reparation:

Danny saw them coming, and he stood up and tried to remember the things he

had to say. They lined up in front of him and hung their heads. ‘Dogs of dogs,’

Danny called them, and ‘Thieves of decent folks’ other house,’ and ‘Spawn of

cuttlefish.’ He named their mothers cows and fathers ancient sheep. (Steinbeck

53)

The reader instantly understands the ramifications of this scene: what Danny feels

internally and how he is obliged by his own ethics to comport himself outwardly in order

to maintain his leadership status among his cronies, and what Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus

Maria must do to be accepted back into their leader’s graces, lavishing Danny with stolen

picnic fare, and finally presenting him with a pink brassiere as a gift for Mrs. Morales,

which he consequently deems too extravagant for the likes of her. It is important to

appreciate that the comedy of this scene is only fully developed and appreciated after

Danny’s interior thoughts and intentions collude with the outward, external reaction

toward his shameful friends. The reader appreciates the contradiction between Danny’s

interior self and external actions, a contradiction that mirrors human reality in the way

that people may think one thing and do another. It is in this way that the comic spectacle

works toward the realistic goals of the novelist, playing off the interior thoughts of its

hero in order to illustrate the genuine nature or interiority and the delusion of outward

action.

Nace 21

Tortilla Flat is a comic novel explicitly constructed on spectacle – one mishap or

malfeasance almost systematically leads into the next. Consistently throughout this string

of comic spectacles, the interior conditions of the novel’s heroes fuel the comedy of the

extrinsic spectacle; without the reader gaining access into the inner realities of the

characters, the contradictory, deluded, and sometimes absurd external reactions of the

heroes would not function comically. In the following example, even the narrator

functions as a means of exacerbating the comic spectacle: it was a blessed candle which

burned Danny’s second home down, the mishap ascribed to the curse of St. Francis as

punishment for the behavior and drunken carelessness of the tenants. The narrator states,

“In the sky, saints and martyrs looked on with set and unforgiving faces. The candle was

blessed. It belonged to Saint Francis. Saint Francis will have a big candle in its place

tonight” (Steinbeck 47). Here the narrator re-appropriates the tragic force found in the

epic, where the deliberately applied outside force of the gods victimizes the hero. Instead,

the narrator absorbs the superstitions and religious beliefs of its novelistic heroes so that

the misfortune of burning down Danny’s house comes only as a result of their own

careless shortcomings. It is in this way that Steinbeck wields the comic spectacle: the

spectacle here is heightened not by the literal divine punishment of St. Francis and the

communion of saints, but rather by the imaginations and delusions of Pilon, Jesus Maria,

and Pablo so that their sufferings here come as a result of their own beliefs as much as

from their actions.

Kundera’s appreciation of the sequence of scenes in the art of the realist novel

supports this notion: “The scene becomes the basic element of the novel’s composition . .

. anything that is not scene is considered and felt to be secondary, even superfluous”

Nace 22

(Kundera 127). Thus, the progression of this comic spectacle gives rise not only to jocose

laughter on the part of the reader, but also to an endearing quality one senses of these

comic heroes. None of them is morally uni-dimensional; it requires a moral complexity

for Pilon to wholly excuse his thievery for the sake of making reparations to Danny not

only for himself, but for his friends as well. The comic spectacle, then, affords a novel

like Tortilla Flat the dexterity to oscillate between themes of forgiveness, honor,

generosity, deception, debauchery, and mischievousness; the suspension of moral

judgment agreed upon in the comic moment juxtaposes both good and evil and, because

of that state of being, temporal and virtual as it may be in the moment of the novel, a

comic scene registers as quite real in the heart of the reader.

Steinbeck is demonstrative in this particular component of his novel, and it is no

wonder that he ascribes to Pilon’s character, perhaps the conflicted Launcelot figure

given Tortilla Flat’s homage to Arthurian legend, a pirouetting path between the moral

and immoral. Much is invested in Pilon, since he is the moral leader of the troupe, a

cavalcade that is “merely lovable; worse, they can also be laughable and foolish” (Kinney

44). Ironically, it isn’t the immorality, but the morality of these figures that compel the

reader. Critic Joseph Fontenrose states: “The paisanos are great moralizers, but their

moralizing too often consists in finding noble reasons for satisfying desires at a friend’s

expense . . .” (Fontenrose 21). Kinney concurs in this notion, noting that, “there is no

moral norm in Steinbeck” (Kinney 44) and that “Steinbeck’s morality in Tortilla Flat is

never fervent; it is relaxed and comic” (Kinney 43). Pilon’s prevailing moral logic always

seeks to equivocate, as here when he pilfers Mrs. Morales’ chicken:

Nace 23

Pilon mused, “Poor little bare fowl. How cold it must be for you in the early

morning, when the dew falls, and the air grows cold with the dawn. The good God

is not always so good to little beasts.” And he thought, “Here you play in the

street, little chicken. Some day an automobile will run over you; and if it kills

you, that will be the best thing that can happen. It may only break your leg or your

wing. Then all of your life you will drag along in misery. Life is too hard for you,

little bird.” (Steinbeck 15)

This long passage needs to be seen in its entirety in order to appreciate the comic

mechanism at work. Here, Pilon’s internal monologue here is discursive, syllogistic. He

has employed a delusive thought-process that is so developed and airtight in its moral

equivocation that it is quite difficult for even the reader to see the conceit behind it that is

working towards committing an immoral act. It isn’t that Pilon has abandoned his

morality – in fact, the reader finds Pilon’s moral mechanism in full employ, working

toward justifying the mercy killing of the chicken while extracting theft from the ethical

equation altogether. Once again, the audacity of the comic spectacle causes a rupture not

in the morality of the novelistic hero, but in the reader himself; it is the reader who must

suspend moral judgment. Again, the onus for this comic moment originates from Pilon’s

interiority and progresses outward into his external actions. Finally,

That chicken, which Pilon had prophesied might live painfully, died peacefully, or

at least quietly . . . The little rooster, picked and dismembered, was distributed in

his pockets. If there was one rule of conduct more strong than any other to Pilon,

it was this: never under any circumstances bring feathers, head or feet home, for

without these a chicken cannot be identified. (Steinbeck 15)

Nace 24

The narrator’s proclamation of Pilon’s essential “rule of conduct” – to be sure to “cover

one’s tracks” in the act of thievery – sustains Steinbeck’s use of the narrator as a comic

arbitrator, injecting the moral paradoxes and inconsistencies of Pilon into his nefarious

behavior. After the deep moral and ethical consideration that Pilon gives to the decision

to kill and steal Mrs. Morales’ chicken, it is this vulgar ethic – the ethic of a criminal –

that concludes the sequence. Given this exposé into Pilon’s moral character, it isn’t

inconsistent with his modus operandi that he later commands his marauding picnic

thieves: “’Do not bring the basket if you can help it’” (Steinbeck 52). This brief vignette

involving Mrs. Morales’ chicken, a fleeting scene that merely foreshadows a closer

examination of Pilon’s character in chapter three, establishes a moral consistency that the

reader comes to identify as paisano virtue; a thread runs deep throughout the novel which

links Danny and his four “knights” in a quest for selflessness and altruism, generosity,

and magnanimity – it is of no consequence to the narrator that, at face value, the success

of this ongoing quest rests on the victimization and exploitation of Tortilla Flat proper.

After all, “Since the novel’s purpose is to deceive, lying is the law by which it abides . . .

since its reality derives from it” (Robert 66). The narrator, indeed a flippant, tongue-in-

cheek commentator on the exploits of Danny, Pilon, and the others, turns a blind moral

eye to the heroes’ questionable tactics, and by doing so prompts readers to share in the

mirth by retracting their own judgment. And yet, because of the tenderness and complex

emotional motivation of its heroes, Danny is not on a mock quest; the journey here is both

sincere and earnest. Without the comic spectacle, these scenes would be dreadful to

behold. However, with the ambiguity of comedy clouding the moral clarity of characters

Nace 25

like Danny, an emotional totality is presented to the reader – sincerity, delusion, charity,

and selfishness – which renders Danny as a strikingly real novelistic hero.

Here a schematic of the comic spectacle begins to take form: when novelistic

heroes are made to bear the brunt of injustice, victimized by irony or circumstance, or

when they themselves are the instrument of such malicious proclivities in their own

sphere of life or in the lives of other characters, the reader responds to this cue

emotionally – for laughter is a species of human emotion, unchained by the agreement

instituted by one’s sense of humor – because, at its root, the reader feels empathy for the

victim of comedy and, more importantly, the provocateur of mischief, the hypocrite,

challenges the reader to love him in spite of his audacity. In this way, “suspending moral

judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands

against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone. . . “

(Kundera 7). What Kundera says of Panurge – “not only does this coward, this liar, this

faker, provoke no indignation, but it is at the peak of his braggadocio that we love him

most” (Kundera 7) – could also be said of Pilon. The novel makes no moral judgment of

Pilon’s provocative acts; in fact, the narrator, as already noted, audaciously decrees that,

“Pilon was an honest man” (Steinbeck 19) and, “Honor and peace to Pilon, for he had

discovered how to uncover and disclose to the world the good that lay in every evil thing”

(Steinbeck 61). So, by extension, the response of readers is similar, laughing as they read,

enkindled by the bond they share with Pilon, this fictional character who, like themselves,

constantly confronts the nuance of human morality. The narrator and the reader are both

inextricably linked with the conceit of the comic spectacle, with the collusion of the

narrator and characters like Pilon encouraging us as readers to collude with the

Nace 26

questionable nature of his being and in turn appreciate him in the light of human

imperfection.

The comic spectacle is the most immediately recognizable brand of comedy. A

spectacle, an absurdity which rises out of the real in order to be seen, by definition

transcends the mundane, prosaic, predictable, and is regarded as “spectacular” by way of

how the event departs from what the onlooker perceives hegemonically as the norm. Not

all spectacles, to be sure, are necessarily comic, since humor, as we’ve surmised, must be

agreed upon between author and audience so that moral judgment is sufficiently

suspended. Comic spectacles such as the ones discussed here are identified as extrinsic

for the purpose of identifying them in novels because they take place not between the

prompting of a narrator and his novel’s hero, but rather between the hero and his foils, or

the hero and his own external, unpredictable environment. What is decidedly comic in the

novel is the occasion where the hero thinks one thing and does another, all at the expense

of someone or something. The introduction of the Pirate in chapter seven and his

subsequent admittance into Danny’s circle of friends illustrates the power of the comic

spectacle in the novel and how these mechanisms portray to the reader a realist portrait of

the heroes concerned in the story. For both the Pirate and Pilon complete an opposing

circuit of comic characterization – the Pirate being the principal comic target in this

sequence and Pilon acting as the provocateur – which, by virtue of these character’s

particular moral qualities and choices, lead the reader into perceiving both of these

characters as sufficiently humanized within the crux of the novel.

Steinbeck presents the Pirate as an antidote for the disordered moral perspectives

of Danny, Pilon, Pedro, and Jesus Maria. His inclusion in their syndicate evokes a

Nace 27

sustained shift in the behavior of our mischievous paisanos; due in large measure to his

altruistic lifestyle and philanthropic mission – to earn a thousand two-bitses so that he can

purchase for the church a golden candlestick for his favorite saint, the patron saint of his

beloved pack of dogs, St. Francis of Assisi. The Pirate later explains to his newfound

friends: “‘Once I had a nice dog, and that dog was sick; and I promised a gold candlestick

of one thousand days if that dog would get well. And,’ he spread his great hands, ‘that

dog got well.’ ‘Is it one of these dogs? Pilon demanded. ‘No,’ said the Pirate. ‘A truck

ran over him a little later’” (Steinbeck 76). This early characterization of the Pirate

portrays him as a pathetic character as well as a product of Steinbeck’s use of the comic

spectacle. Like the burning down of Danny’s house being explained by the anger of St.

Francis, the Pirate ascribes his inner faith and beliefs to the miracle of his dog

overcoming his sickness, in spite of his eventual demise underneath the wheel of a truck.

Although this scene involving the Pirate’s deceased dog is once removed from the

narration – he is assuming the role of narrator here, telling the story to his new friends –

he is also inadvertently telling it to the reader and functioning much in the same manner

as the narrator.

This admission of the Pirate’s intention to invest in a candle for the church comes

as a great disappointment to Danny and his friends, since, “no one except Pilon knew

everything the Pirate did. Pilon knew everybody and everything about everybody”

(Steinbeck 58), and, in the same manner that Pilon justifies his stealing and killing of

chickens, theft of other people’s property, and groping of other men’s wives, he is aware

of the Pirate’s cache of coins. Because he is so able, “to uncover and to disclose to the

world the good that lay in every evil thing,” (Steinbeck 61), it is not merely theft, but also

Nace 28

a sincere concern and commitment to stewardship on Pilon’s part that motivates him to

acquire the Pirate’s money and spend it for him: “He felt very sorry for the Pirate. ‘Poor

little half-formed one,’ he said to himself. ‘God did not give him all the brain he should

have. That poor little Pirate cannot look after himself’” (Steinbeck 60). Here we can see

the cycle of the comic spectacle beginning, with Pilon laying the groundwork for morally

justifying his intention to eventually steal the Pirates money. As with the chicken, Pilon’s

rationale progresses syllogistically:

“Would it not be a thing of merit,’ he thought, ‘to do those things for him which

he cannot do for himself? To buy him warm clothes, to feed him food fit for a

human? But,” he reminded himself, “I have no money to do these things, although

they lie squirming in my heart. How can these charitable things be

accomplished?” (Steinbeck 61)

Because the reader implicitly understands Pilon’s basic intention here, the ensuing comic

suggestion only functions as a result of the reader suspending moral judgment of Pilon’s

desire to rob the Pirate. Only by agreeing to this contract of humor can this thought

process progress into the realm of the comic, where Pilon’s thoughts, while completely

devoid of any clue of moral self-deception, are a unified nexus of self-delusion for the

sake of morally justifying his actions. But the delusion is so complete, so true to itself,

that it is only the narrator’s interjection that reminds the reader of the conceit here: “Now

he was getting somewhere. Like the cat, which during a long hour closes in on a sparrow,

Pilon was ready for his pounce” (Steinbeck 61). It is only through this allusion and

suggestion that Pilon’s thought process has a purpose outside of mere altruism that the

reader appreciates the true spectacle of this moment. When Pilon finally concludes, “I

Nace 29

will give freely of my mind. That shall be my charity toward this poor little half-made

man” (Steinbeck 61), the construction of Pilon as a morally-complex man is complete. To

be sure, Pilon is not to be seen as a morally conflicted character; in fact, his moral

decisions are fundamentally decided upon before any new mission in begun. But it is the

moral process that the reader experiences inside of Pilon’s head and the ensuing spectacle

that results from his moral decisions that ultimately render him as realistic.

Does the reader question Pilon’s sincerity? Surely his rationalization smacks of

wholesale self-deception. And yet, as opposed to Pilon conspiring with himself simply to

pilfer the coins from the Pirate – a morally-atrocious act, to be sure, but simpler and more

definitive – Pilon’s seemingly sincere and selfless reach for a charitable angle for his

desire is terribly profane and at the same time endearing. The narrator only furthers the

effect, opining on the goodness of Pilon’s resolve: It is astounding to find that the belly of

every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the

concealed parts of angels are leprous . . . Enough for Pilon to do good and to be rewarded

by the glow of human brotherhood accomplished (Steinbeck 62). The narrative of Tortilla

Flat remains consistent in doing one thing: rendering the morality of its characters as

ambiguous, as per Kundera’s faithful model. The narrator’s perspective is not merely an

apologist for the likes of Pilon; in fact, he celebrates his righteousness with great fervor.

Is the narrator being serious or sarcastic? If the latter, no clue is ever offered to prove it

conclusively, yet, given our expectations as readers, inherently we come to realize that

the narrator is not serious. But the lack of seriousness doesn’t preclude Tortilla Flat or

any comic novel from exciting pathos in the heart of its reader.

Nace 30

The conflation of Pilon’s equivocation and the narrator’s heraldry is only trumped

by the sincere and authentic nature of the Pirate, a simple character both in the eyes of his

friends and in his contextual construction, whose purity and transcendent good-

heartedness finally triumphs over any designs to bilk him out of his money, and in turn

bonds him to the circle of friends not through debauchery, but through demonstrative

altruism. Upon learning from Pilon that Danny and company are concerned for him, the

Pirate is overwhelmed:

The Pirate was following [Pilon’s] words with breathless astonishment, and his

brain tried to realize these new things he was hearing. It did not occur to him to

doubt them, since Pilon was saying them. “I have all these friends?” he said in

wonder. “And I did not know it. I am a worry to these friends. I did not know,

Pilon. I would not have worried them if I had known.” He swallowed to clear his

throat of emotion. (Steinbeck 64)

Here Steinbeck establishes the Pirate as an authentic, sincere, sentimental figure and a

foil to Pilon’s complex, morally ambivalent nature. So authentic is the Pirate’s genteel

nature that, upon witnessing it himself, Danny comments to his men after inviting the

Pirate to live with them, saying, “’Poor little lonely man. . . If I had known, I would have

asked him long ago, even if he had no treasure,’” and, “A flame of joy burned in all of

them” (Steinbeck 69). In keeping with Steinbeck’s constant cycling from one comic

spectacle to another, in spite of the fact that, “[The Pirate’s] friends were kind to him.

They treated him with a sweet courtesy: but always there was some eye open and upon

him” (Steinbeck 70) in search of his money, the Pirate’s naive trust in his cronies,

eventually leading him to trust them with the task of safeguarding his money so that it

Nace 31

will not be stolen, hiding it under Danny’s bed of all places, the comic axis is inverted,

and the provocateurs become themselves victimized:

In time they would take a certain pleasure in the knowledge that this money lay

under the pillow, but now . . . their defeat was bitter . . . The Pirate stood before

them, and there were tears of happiness in his eyes, for he had proved his love for

his friends. “To think,” he said, “all those years I lay in that chicken house, and I

did not know any pleasure. But now,” he added, “oh, now I am very happy.”

(Steinbeck 75)

In a similar manner to Pilon’s deluded exercises toward the Machiavellian, the Pirate’s

naive realization of happiness and security for him and his dogs leaves a trial of comic

victims in its wake, the onus for laughter, constructed on the foundation of humor as

contract between the author and reader. As opposed to victims of tragedy, our comic

victims are subjected not to the decisive, objective damnation of death, an extrinsic force

which results in a permanent, static, and external termination of a literary character, but

to a dynamic potentiality of moral development. One need only to look comparatively at

Shakespeare’s works to see this point fundamentally illustrated: Hamlet realizes an epic

conclusion at his death, all possibility of revelation irrevocably terminated, whereas the

newly-married couple realizes a new beginning at the end of The Taming of the Shrew.

Decline and Fall

The theme of rebirth is a byproduct of the novel, distilled from the genesis of

novelistic comedy. Rebirth is the prerogative of the novelistic hero, after all, since it is a

theme bound up in the manner in which characters develop internally. Rebirth and

Nace 32

interior development appeals to the reader of novels because, contextually, they are

essential attributes of realism; just as it is our right to develop as individuals, reinvent

ourselves, and begin again, so it is that when novelistic heroes are designed by the author

and permitted by the narrator to behave in a similar manner, the reader then experiences

the hero in a similar reality as his own, able to influence his interiority, if only that.

Clearly rebirth is unattainable in a tragedy, and wasted on an epic character, and in both

of these cases heroes of these genres arrive at a strictly external victory or demise.

Comedy, on the other hand, often affords its heroes a “second chance” at their life, which

is assumed to continue even after the book has ended; the comic effect in novels leaves

the reader with a sense that our novelistic hero’s life existed before the first page of the

book and will continue after the last. Thus, the use of comedy in the novel, while merely

an artifice wielded by the author, contributes to exposing the reader to the hope, freedom,

and possibility for the world of a novel to seem tangible and unaware of its fictiveness.

Quite a contrast to Steinbeck’s world of lazy paisanos living on a dusty hill above

Monterey, Evelyn Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall, a novel that established the

author as a capable comic novelist, reveals instead the absurd pomposity of the English

aristocracy in the early 20th Century. In spite of their subject and stylistic differences,

both novels thrive equally on the unrelenting chain of comic spectacles. Like Tortilla

Flat, Waugh’s novel rarely allows itself any gravity, and yet manages to achieve a

standard of realism that the modern reader has come to expect. More importantly,

Decline and Fall exemplifies the novel’s urge to see its heroes reborn and redeveloped

through the influence of the comic spectacle.

Nace 33

Stephen Greenblatt aptly states that, “one of Waugh’s favorite satiric devices is

suddenly to catapult a totally naïve individual into a grotesque and uncontrollable world .

. . “ (Greenblatt 8). To be sure, our protagonist Paul Pennyfeather is immediately

portrayed as a naïve victim of his particular circumstances: with the prelude beginning on

the evening of the Bollinger hazing occasion at Scone College, Oxford, the narrator

reports that, “It was his third year of uneventful residence at Scone . . . At home he lived

in Onslow Square with his guardian, a prosperous solicitor who was proud of his progress

and abysmally bored by his company” (Waugh 4). And, unlike Pilon, who wrestles from

beginning to end with his inner demons, “Paul Pennyfeather was reading for the Church .

. . and had, as his report said, ‘exercised a wholesome influence for good’ in the house in

which he was head boy” (Waugh 4). To be sure, these first impressions of Pennyfeather

are indicative and representative of his character in action; he scarcely makes a moral

misstep, and his propensity toward meekness and submissiveness renders him a constant

target for comic victimization, of which he complacently complies with and ultimately

finds his life destroyed and rebuilt anew.

Pennyfeather’s luck begins to decline rapidly in the preface as he returns back to

his dorm after attending a meeting of the League of Nations, the organization that would

eventually lead him to prison. Waugh introduces his first comic cue – that Paul’s striped

tie, “bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club . . . “

(Waugh 5), a club he was wholly unaware of – which centers on the often replayed theme

so aptly identified by Kundera when he remarks that, “Realizing that our destiny is

determined by something utterly trivial is depressing. But any revelation of some

expected triviality is a source of comedy as well” (Kundera 45). A comic cycle of

Nace 34

misfortune is tipped off by nothing more than the unpredictable circumstance of a

mistaken tie – a Bollinger tie, ironically, which is the premiere aristocratic club on

campus. But unlike the various circumstances of Tortilla Flat that lead to the hilarity of

its comic spectacles, Paul’s susceptibility to comic victimization comes not as a result of

his own shortcomings, but instead by random circumstance and the viciousness of the

various aristocrats he comes in contact with. Thus, as a result of this opening triviality,

Pennyfeather’s nemesis, Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, hazes our unsuspecting

hero, stripping him of his clothes and sending him scampering through the college quad

naked.

In this opening comic exchange, Waugh expose the crux of his novel: he clearly

defines his own particular brand of comedy – the comic spectacle situated around the

trivial and the circumstantial. Like the Pirate and Pilon, there is an axis of morality

represented by Paul, a moral character, educated and raised amidst the English

aristocracy though definitely set apart from it, and aristocratic characters like

Trumpington, a bourgeois archetype who manages to reappear throughout the novel

(again, circumstantially and seemingly at random) as the novel’s antagonistic force.

Waugh’s use of the comic spectacle functions around presenting Paul as a protagonist

who is born more out of apathy, ambivalence, and submissiveness than bravery,

principles, and autonomy. He is essentially the butt of all jokes in the novel, in near

constant reception of a combination of negative circumstances that are beyond his control

and other characters’ questionable and reprehensible behavior toward him. It is through

this constant subjection to comically cruel treatment and misfortune, however, that the

Nace 35

reader appreciates Paul’s palpable rebirth into society as a result of his function in

Waugh’s comic idiom.

Similar to Tortilla Flat, Waugh is keen to compound his own comic spectacles: if

the Bollinger hazing incident wasn’t humiliating enough, the Masters of Scone, all the

while witnessing the incident, resolve to expelling Paul. Yet while the circumstances

behind Paul’s initial hazing incident were clearly random, the reaction of the deans

introduce the theme repeated throughout the novel that the aristocratic powers above Paul

are acting in concert to destroy him for the sake of their own amusement:

“The case of Pennyfeather,” the Master was saying, “seems to be quite a difficult

matter altogether. He ran the whole length of the quadrangle, you say, without his

trousers. It is unseemly. It is more: it is indecent. In fact, I am almost prepared to

say that it is flagrantly indecent. It is not the conduct we expect of a scholar.”

“Perhaps if we fined him really heavily?” suggested the Junior Dean. “I very

much doubt whether he could pay. I understand he is not well off. Without

trousers, indeed! And at that time of night! I think we should do far better to get

rid of him altogether. That sort of young man does the College no good.” (Waugh

6-7)

Similar to Pilon’s internalized, delusive sequences where we witness him working up

toward committing a crime, or how Danny feels relieved when his house burns down, but

must chastise his friends all the same, here we see the comic spectacle at work in how the

injustice and absurdity of the deans is repressed by their own seemingly unearned will to

see Paul expelled. Although it is obvious to the reader that Paul represents absolutely no

kind of threat to Scone – he possesses no particular clout on campus and is an unknown

Nace 36

entity – the deans work themselves into a distaste toward Paul for no apparent reason

aside from the fact that he is not wealthy. Random and unaccountable forces are all that

can account for Paul’s misfortunes, and one misfortune compounds into another, thus

compiling the comic material of the scene. As Henri Bergson observes in his study of

comedy: “No sooner, then, does the comic poet strike the first note than he will add the

second on to it, involuntarily and instinctively. In other words, he will duplicate what is

ridiculous professionally with something that is ridiculous physically” (Bergson 27). Not

only does Paul fail to offer any bit of defense to this unjust aggression toward him, he

even submits to paying the nit-picking fines to the domestic bursar for two minor

cigarette burns in his dorm. For as Greenblatt notes, Paul “is a shadow-man, completely

passive, completely innocent” (Greenblatt 8). Alas, the reader might easily be compelled

to lose patience with Paul’s inscrutable obsequiousness and compliance with such abject

injustice levied against him.

As these offenses against his wealth, career, and future continue on, one would

expect the reader’s pity toward Paul to quickly transform into disdain; he is a perennial

pacifist who refuses to fight, not cynically, as though he realizes he can never defeat the

predestined privilege of his aristocratic nemeses, but simply because it is not built into his

nature. We will explore how this quality clearly designed to function within the milieu of

comic realism, enables Waugh to develop and unfold his novelistic landscape in a

remarkably fresh way, however, what must be noted here is how remarkably Paul’s

pacifism serves him well as a sympathetic comic hero: the reader, immediately detecting

a conceit, understands that the torrent of disaster visited on Paul, undeniably hilarious,

will lead him to a conclusion of dynamic development. With a serious hero, taken from

Nace 37

tragedy or from epic realms, the reader would lose hope, since the tragic hero eschews

the condition of the body and attends to the soul, and at the very least cannot permit

himself to be subjected to such injustice (Bergson 25). Yet, because “Any incident is

comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person . . . “ (Bergson 25), with Paul,

our comic hero, the reader laughs, and the occasion for laughter endears Paul to his

readers, since his submissiveness toward all the misfortune he is subjected to, however

unacceptable it may be deemed to our logic, through the comic imagination reinvents the

mechanism of realism radically. So Paul is meek, yes, but his character function is

audacious as a result of the comic spectacle he is subjected to.

Ultimately for Waugh, justice for Paul is served by way of comic aesthetics. Just

as the comic spectacle is morally restorative for the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, their

salvation only realized after the Pirate invests all of his love and trust in them, dashing

their hopes of stealing his money, so too does the chain reaction of comic spectacle

restore Paul’s contentedness at the onset of the story. All he loses in his expulsion from

Oxford and eventual entrance into the high society are the blessings which seemed not to

occupy him while studying for the Church at Scone: his engagement to Margot Beste-

Chetwynde and the shallow, opulent lifestyle that envelops her. The comic genius of

Decline and Fall delivers Paul from a seven-year prison sentence back to his life at Scone

in the manner of a mock Christ figure. After being publicly pronounced dead from a

staged appendix operation, reclining in the lap of luxury one last time at Margaret’s

German villa, he receives a communiqué from her, ironically now married to

Trumpington:

Nace 38

That morning Margot had sent him a bunch of Press cuttings about himself, most

of them headed “Wedding Sensation Echo” or “Death of a Society Bridegroom

Convict.” With them were his tie pin and the rest of his possessions . . . He felt the

need of the bustle of the cafes and the quay side to convince him fully of his

existence. He stopped at a stall and bought some Turkish delight. It was odd being

dead. (Waugh 279-80)

Paul’s passive, narrow vision of his own existence impairs him from realizing exactly

what has transpired in the tumultuous year or so which took him from Oxford to the

verge of a society marriage to jail and finally a faked death. Waugh continues to suggest

the allusion of a mock Christ figure when Paul finds himself still buried in the tomb, no

longer subjected to the victimizing profanation of the comic spectacle, and not yet

restored to his old life in a manner that the absurdity of comedy could deliver. It takes the

insight of Otto Silenus, that nihilist architect of Margot’s modernist manor house,

“King’s Thursday.” Several time Waugh employs his secondary characters to

ventriloquize his own moral directives, and finally Silenus puts Paul into perspective for

him, relating life to “the big wheel at Luna Park” (Waugh 282). He explains candidly:

“Now you’re a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and

if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got onto the wheel, and got

thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It’s all right for Margot, who can cling

on, and for me, at the centre, but you’re static. Instead of this absurd division into

sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There’s a real distinction

there, though I can’t tell you how it comes. I think we’re probably two quite

different species spiritually.” (Waugh 283-284)

Nace 39

Foreshadowing the commensurate classification of novelistic characters, Silenus

unwittingly interchanges terms for the characters in Decline and Fall. Considering his

role as protagonist at the center of the novel, Paul is at first glance a static character of

sorts, since his inner self fails to realize on his own any significant truth or revelation. Yet

the conceit of the novel is funneled through his static propensities; as flat as he may seem

in contrast with other novelistic heroes, no other character vies for central position – they

are all markedly flat, static characters, tagged as archetypes, so that by committee they

portray a widespread flatness that Waugh seeks to indict the English aristocracy with.

Thus, Paul in his static, bland, unaware manner is as dynamic as Decline and Fall can

allow, and his passivity allows him to function as a transparent camera lens for the reader

to see into the cross-section of such a society. As a novelistic hero, Paul would be a

failure if he was not situated in Waugh’s brand of comedy: that the series of victimization

can ultimately resurrect him to the life he had initially chosen for himself reconciles him

to the status of a sympathetic character. In their own ways, all of the remaining characters

are betrayed by their own flatness, with his pupil Peter, now attending Scone himself, the

most defiled, himself now a drunk:

“Paul, do you remember a thing you said once at the Ritz – Alastair

[Trumpington] was there – that’s Margot Metroland’s young man, you know –

d’you remember? I was rather tight then too. You said, ‘fortune, a much-maligned

lady.’ D’you remember that?” “Yes,” said Paul, “I remember.” “Good old Paul! I

knew you would. Let’s drink to that now; shall we?” . . . “You drink too much,

Peter.” “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?” (Waugh 292)

Nace 40

Waugh chooses to end his novel grotesquely, with Peter, himself a victim of the

shallowness and dysfunction of the upper class, presented to the reader as a stark

reminder of the realities of the privileged life that Paul was ultimately delivered from.

Even though “the grotesque, the unreasonable, and the cruel are always asserting

themselves in the satirist’s world . . . “ (Greenblatt 10), the sum total of the victimization

of Paul culminates not in his demise but in his deliverance; at his most prosperous

moment, engaged to Margot, leading the life of a bon vivant, the reader finds him at his

most unrealized self, drifting toward becoming the man he is not. The narrator even

makes a deliberate gesture toward outlining this provocative shift in Paul’s character

when he says:

This was the Paul Pennyfeather who had been developing in the placid years

which preceded this story. In fact, the whole of the book is really an account of

the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not

complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important

part of hero for which he was originally cast. (Waugh 163)

The narrator’s attempt at prompting the reader’s expectations corroborates the conceit

behind Waugh’s comic design. Again, in a more dramatic setting, the didactic

presumption of the narrator here might appear as amateur on the part of Waugh, failing to

remain a transparent vehicle for presenting the story. However, in the comic novel, with a

peculiar hero such as Paul Pennyfeather so isolated from his own fictiveness, yet left to

the discretion and disposal of nearly every external force which he confronts, the narrator

helps here to establish the reader’s expectation that Paul is in fact a developing character,

a detail easily missed due to his passiveness. It is only because “the most outrageous

Nace 41

events are reported with cavalier disregard” (Greenblatt 10) that we as readers can

associate this device as overtly comic.

With the exception of its dark ending and like Tortilla Flat, very little of Decline

and Fall registers to the reader as critical or serious. To all intents and purposes, it is a

work of fiction, which faithfully bears the terms “novel” for its quirkiness and satirical

proclivities. In spite of its comic sensibilities, how far removed in project is it from

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? As we have shown, the functioning realism of Paul’s character

is manifested comically, himself the consummate victim. Though rebirth is the thematic

achievement of the novel, Waugh realizes this through a series of comic spectacles that

envelop Paul no matter where he is or what he is doing. And where with Steinbeck the

catalyst for the comic spectacle typically involves the absurdity of some extrinsic event,

with Decline and Fall many of its comic spectacles thrive on Paul’s own intrinsic flaws.

Spread evenly across the story, Paul faces the unmitigated scourge of never being

taken seriously by the other characters he associates with. Waugh is unrelenting in

deploying this comic mechanism and, when Salinus finally accurately defines Paul as “a

person clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still,” the reader is certainly unable to

deny that fact. The full measure of mirth is shared with the reader in these crass, profane

comic moments, such as when Mr. Levy, who is looking to place Paul as a teacher at

Llanaba, reads the job requirements, which include teaching, “Classics and English to

University Standard with Subsidiary Mathematics, German, and French. Experience

essential; First class games essential” (Waugh 13). When Paul admits, “But I don’t know

a word of German, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t play

cricket,” Mr. Levy simply deflects, saying, “It doesn’t do to be modest . . . It’s wonderful

Nace 42

what one can teach when one tries” (Waugh 14). And to add to this, Mr. Levy says,

“Between ourselves, Llanaba hasn’t a good name in the profession . . . I think you’ll find

it a very suitable post. So far as I know, there are only two other candidates, and one of

them is totally deaf, poor fellow” (Waugh 14). The preceding example typifies a

masterstroke of the comic genius in action.

In a similar manner, Paul is so confronted with the moral question of whether or

not he should accept from Trumpington a sum of twenty pounds in reparation for his

prank, which led to Paul’s expulsion from Scone. Attempting to explain his inner conflict

to his colleague Grimes, he explore the complexity of matter, saying:

“It is a test case of the durability of my ideals . . . I suppose it’s largely a matter of

upbringing . . . Owing to his party I have suffered irreparable harm. My whole

future is shattered . . . By any ordinary process of thought, the money is justly

mine. But . . . there is my honour. For generations the British bourgeoisie have

spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other

things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that

distinguishes the gentlemen from both the artist and the aristocrat. Now I am a

gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s born in me. I just can’t take that money.” (Waugh

54)

Paul’s first moment of principle is Kafkaesque in nature – he senses for the first and last

time in the story an instance where he is obliged by his own morality to decline

Trumpington’s money. Herein the overarching conflict of the novel – to expose the

viciousness of the English aristocracy – set firmly in Paul’s passions on the subject. And

then, of course, Waugh delivers a comic blow, when Grimes admits:

Nace 43

“I was afraid you might feel like that, so I did my best for you and saved you from

yourself . . . Dear old boy, don’t be angry, but immediately after tea I sent off a

wire to your friend Potts: tell Trumpington send money quick, and signed it

‘Pennyfeather.’” (Waugh 54).

In a pivotal moment for Paul, where for only the first time the reader gains access to his

ideals and experiences his unbridled feelings regarding the incident at Scope, Grimes

disregards and undermines Paul’s grave decision. For where Paul is the victim of the

comic spectacle in Decline and Fall, “Grimes is a powerful life-force existing outside the

pale of conventional morality . . . “ (Greenblatt 11) and the vehicle by which Kundera’s

notion of profanation speaks to the crux of the novel. At once Paul tries and fails to assert

himself over the bourgeoisie, only to be robbed of his noble intentions. Again, like

Kafka’s Karl Rossman, Josef K., and the surveyor, the moment for decisive action is

missed, or the hero’s perception that such a moment exists, proves to be erroneous –

laughable, even. This variable is indeed a species of the comic spectacle, which

summarily invalidates idealism.

Throughout his experience at Llanaba, Paul’s decisions and desires continue to be

transgressed. Not wanting to endear himself to the seedy butler Philbrick, he repeatedly

attempts to stifle the conversation between them:

“I expect you wonder how it is that I come to be here?’ said Philbrick. “No,” said

Paul firmly, “nothing of the kind. I don’t in the least want to know anything about

you; d’you hear?” “I’ll tell you,” said Philbrick; “it was like this –“ “I don’t want

to hear your loathsome confessions; can’t you understand?” “It isn’t a loathsome

Nace 44

confession,” said Philbrick. “It’s a story of love. I think it is without exception the

most beautiful story I know.” (Waugh 63-4)

This example highlights a recurring theme in Decline and Fall where Paul possesses no

power to control his own fate. Just as he is powerless to control his own fate at Scone, he

also cannot control the actions of his friends on his own behalf, nor can he simply decline

conversations. Later, when the school sponsors a day of poorly administered sports as a

prerogative for entertaining the parents of some of the most well-to-do students, the

caustic lady Circumference introduces herself to Paul, asking, “So you’re the Doctor’s

hired assassin, eh? Well, I hope you keep a firm hand on my toad of a son. How’s he

doin’?” (Waugh 85). When Paul responds, “Quite well,” she dismissively retorts,

“Nonsense!” which is the same exact response he receives later in the novel when he

explains to the Governor of the prison he is confined to: “I don’t want to have my

appendix removed. In fact, it was done years ago when I was still at school” (Waugh

271).

Almost all of these examples exemplify the comic spectacle, clearly invented in

Decline and Fall as a means of subjecting Paul to humiliation and ruin, which in turn acts

as the primary catalyst for his own inner development. For when these instances occur –

when Paul’s opinions are disregarded, his admissions dispelled, his desires contradicted,

it comes as a revelation to him that a kernel of truth about himself arises, and, although

the onus for these revelations are extrinsic, they are nonetheless revealing for Paul and

the manner in which he develops. In the case of Trumpington’s money, immediately

afterward Paul is grateful to Grimes for acting on behalf. And it is the mock-appendix

operation that Margot concocts so that Paul may escape from his harsh prison sentence

Nace 45

and eventually leads to his new identity (who, coincidentally, also has the last name of

Pennyfeather) and second chance at finishing his education to become an Anglican

minister. It can be said that there is a kind of serendipitous magic bound up in all of these

proceedings, a formidable force evidenced in both of the novels analyzed here, which

functions not simply as a secondary component of the novelist’s style or for some other

superfluous reasons, but rather as an all-encompassing method for achieving what the

reader of novels appreciates most – realism. For inasmuch as laughter for us soothes the

sufferings rendered in the past and reveals the chaos of the present, so does the comic

landscape, it complexities and perplexities converging, construct a scaffold – however

much an artifice it may be – for the novelistic hero to thrive in a world as boundlessly

ambiguous and profane as our own.

Nace 46

Chapter 3 -- The Comic Interior in Novelistic Heroes

While there exists an endless array of varying ideas on the subject of novelistic

realism, it is principally the exposition of a novelistic character’s interiority, that intimate

world where readers of novels unlock the similitude that exists between them and their

textual counterparts, where the novelistic world generates its own illusion of a tangible

“third dimension” as Bakhtin calls it. In this sphere, the reader gains access to the novel’s

heroes and is actively involved in reconciling their interiority not only with the novelistic

universe surrounding them, but with their own sensitivities as well.

This phenomenon of the novel is precisely where the stratum that separates the

epic hero from the novelistic hero shifts. This shift in Literature, away from the extrinsic

qualities of the epic hero and toward the intrinsic idiosyncrasies of the novelistic hero,

relates to the project of this thesis in that the purpose of the novelistic hero is to establish

realism in the novel, and, by extension, the presence of comic aesthetics can be

appreciated as a result of the rise of the novel. In the case of the epic, “the story has

taken place and can no longer be denied,” and the epic hero “has been made real through

a development of temporal events” (Eco 108). The epic hero’s audience cannot

experience him as a “living” being in the novelistic sense since the epic hero is always

relegated to either the past or some other abstract timeframe, a tangential plane which

defies the temporal necessities of a human individual, who, in spite of his obsessions

regarding both past and future, is positively a creature of the present. Bakhtin supports

this claim, stating:

Nace 47

The epic was never a poem about the present, about its own time. . . . The epic, as

a specific genre known to us today, has been from the beginning a poem about the

past, and the authorial position immanent in the epic and constitutive for it . . . is

the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible. . . .

(Bakhtin 13)

Key to Bakhtin’s comment is the idea of inaccessibility: the arcane nature of the epic

hero, disconnected from the reality of the present, only touches the reader as a nostalgic

character, not a particularly realistic one. The idea of crafting fictional characters in a

realistic light is not of particular concern to the epic poet; the epic hero serves as a

mouthpiece for the epic poet to ventriloquize through to the audience, utilizing the

subject matter of the ancient past, not the potentiality of the near future, nor the reality of

the present, to edify and entertain the audience. Thus, it is not necessary for the audience

to identify personally with the epic hero in order for the epic art form to be a success; the

epic audience looks back into the past through their epic hero, unlocking an abstract truth.

Conversely, the success of the novel depends greatly on portraying its novelistic hero in a

manner that must delicately depict the reality of the individual in its realization of the

present and its speculation of the future as an indefinite, shapeable unknown. Therefore,

any truth that the reader of novels comes to realize through its novelistic hero is as a

result of the personal, intimate world he or she accesses and not as a result of abstract

platitudes. Umberto Eco explains:

The “civilisation” of the modern novel offers a story in which the reader’s main

interest is transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen and,

therefore, to the plot invention which now holds our attention. The event has not

Nace 48

happened before the story; it happens while it is being told, and usually even the

author does not know what will take place. (Eco 109)

Eco’s contrasting of time elements in the epic and the novel illustrate one of its

overarching features: its real-time function as a fiction of the present is a key factor in

engaging the reader’s imagination with regard to what expectations he applies to the hero.

In other words, it is the situation of the present and the anticipation of the future in the

genre of the novel that leads the reader to engage in expecting and predicting what may

happen and, more important, what the novelistic hero may or may not do in response to

the circumstances of the near future. And it is this set of expectations that affects the

elements of realism as the plot unfolds and the characters react to its unpredictable

nature. For, “The mythic character embodies a law, or a universal demand, and therefore

must be in part predictable and cannot hold surprises for us; the character of a novel

wants, rather, to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as unforeseeable

as what may happen to us” (Eco 109). From this, we can surmise that, using one of Eco’s

constructions, there is an “elisional similitude” between the predictable nature of the

extrinsic, mythic character experienced in the epic, the past, passive temporality of the

epic story which the reader perceives, and the absence of an interior self on the part of the

epic hero; he is a construct of the “national tradition” and therefore all edifice.

Conversely, the novelistic character, situated in the present-minded visage of the

narrative, benefits from the unforeseeable and unexpected, and in turn, renders its reader

a more engaged participant in the mechanism of realism by thinking ahead and predicting

how the hero may behave or react. It is this act of prediction as well as the reaction of the

novelistic hero that I will situate in the discussion of comedy, realism, and the novel.

Nace 49

For the sake of this argument, Umberto Eco’s landmark semiotic book The Role

of the Reader affords us a helpful apparatus for establishing the brand of comic aesthetics

at work in the project of modern novelistic realism. The tenets of Eco’s ideas will then be

applied to Joyce Ulysses which, as will be revealed, renders its hero Leopold Bloom in

stark realism by way of confounding the reader’s expectations as schematized by Eco – a

species of humor’s contractual relationship between the novel and the reader and a

fundamental principle behind comedy’s mechanics – and, by affecting the sense that his

primary hero functions outside the will of the author. This is precisely where comedy

loses its overt spectacle, its extrinsicity, altogether, instead bearing out to the reader the

novelistic hero’s interiority in the most subtle and complex manner. As discussed earlier,

because comic aesthetics are achieved only by way of a participation and agreement

between the author and reader – because the empathetic reaction of laughter can only

commence once the contract of humor is established – an understanding of the

relationship between a novelist’s text and its reader is essential to drawing from a novel

the essence of intrinsic comic features and how they serve as catalysts for the purpose of

establishing the effect of realism. I argue that the comic aesthetic is present to some

degree in all remarkably realistic novelistic heroes, however muted the reaction of

laughter may be in the heart of the reader. I claim that a comic nature exists inside the

spirit of the most beloved novelistic heroes, regardless of how outwardly comic the

project of the novel that hosts them may be, and that both the comic spectacle as well as a

novelistic hero’s comic interiority achieve a perceived reflection of our own lives by way

of suspending and frustrating the biases and expectations of the reader. And though Eco’s

semiotic research does not address comedy directly, its “macropropositional” application

Nace 50

to the overarching function of novels allows the comic focus I am addressing here, itself a

formal element of the novel, to be plausibly conjoined with Eco’s ideas concerning the

role of the reader. Kant’s idea of laughter and expectation states this claim plainly:

“Laughter is the result of an expectation which, of a sudden, ends in nothing (sic)”

(Bergson 42).

One of the first principles that Eco defines in his discourses is the idea of “The

Model Reader,” a fundamental segment of his semiotic argument that parses the author’s

role in stirring the conceit of the novel by way of anticipating and prompting his reader

with cues (Eco refers to them as “codes”). In his discussion of the Model Reader, he also

considers the conditions that arise when a congruity is established between the concealed

will of the author and the participation of the reader. He states:

To organize a text, its author has to rely upon a series of codes that assign given

contents to the expressions he uses. To make the text communicative, the author

has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared

by his possible readers. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible

reader . . . supposedly able to deal interpretively with the expressions in the same

way as the author deals generatively with them. (Eco 7)

In the context of the comic aesthetic, Eco’s quotation reveals how the author anticipates a

reader who is capable of entering into the contract of humor wherein Kundera’s

“suspension of moral belief” can be realized. Such a reader is necessary in order to

foresee the project of novelistic realism achieved – in this case through the comic

aesthetic. For, “if there is a ‘jouissance du texte’ (Barthes 1973), it cannot be aroused and

implemented except by a text producing all the paths of its ‘good’ reading” (Eco 10). Eco

Nace 51

identifies a key concept: that the novelist must pave expectational pathways between the

text and the reader that are both identifiable and clear in their function in order for a

novel to succeed as a realistic text. And it is this kind of text – a text that streams a series

of cues for its readers to interpret, the kinds of texts that largely concern the critical

reader and scholar – which Eco calls “an open text.”

Even though a text may be seen as “open” by Eco’s standards – its felicitous

communicative exchange between the author and reader deemed successful based on its

ability to involve the reader in responding to expedient cues – its openness is not a

product of ambiguous composition, but rather it is meticulously established through, “the

exactness of the textual project” which, “makes for the freedom of its Model Reader”

(Eco 10). Quite the opposite of ambiguous composition, the superstructure of cues which

guide the reader are expertly deployed when the comic apparatus is well-represented in

the conceit of the novel. Paradoxically, it is the hidden nexus of carefully-plotted cues

which lead the reader toward abandoning a restrictive moral reading and embracing an

existential ambiguity in his perceptions towards the novelistic hero. As Eco aptly states,

“In the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like

structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you

to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpolation” (Eco

9). Eco’s analysis here is extraordinary in that it identifies how the novel effectively

guides and even manipulates the reader along a carefully-crafted pathway. Along this

pathway, the reader is confronted with expectational occasions that are both unavoidable

and necessary for exploring the sphere of that particular novelistic sphere. Eco’s idea can

be seamlessly matched with the comic attributes of expectation established by the

Nace 52

novelist, cued within the context of the narrative, and consummated by the cooperation of

the reader. A text’s openness is defined not simply by what is left out for the reader to

complete, but also by its moral flexibility; its willingness to defy its own pre-established

rules and order. Itself a functional idea of novelistic realism, the same can be said for the

efficacy of comedy: unpredictability is a necessary condition for laughter in the same

manner that it can serve as a precondition for the composition of realistic novelistic

heroes.

Eco’s investigation into the temporal element of the Model Reader continues,

parsing this expectational cognition into two contrasting processes – the fabula and the

sjuzet. These formalist Russian terms deal directly with the interpretative mode of the

reader and how in an open text both are simultaneously appropriated in the practice of

critical reading:

The fabula is the basic story stuff, the logic of actions or the syntax of characters,

the time-oriented course of events. It need not necessarily be a sequence of human

actions (physical or not), but can also concern a temporal transformation of ideas

. . . The plot [sjuzet] is the story as actually told, along with all its deviations,

digressions, flashbacks, and the whole of the verbal devices. (Eco 27)

Whereas the sjuzet constitutes a more discursive and initial surface sense of what Eco

calls “micropropositions,” the fabula, “through an imprecise series of mediatory

abstractions . . .” allows the reader to “elaborate a more precise series of

macropropositions” (Eco 28). Eco’s claim here illustrates a crucial feature of the comic

aesthetic: Because the fabula is not arrived at by the reader once the plot has been fully

unwound at the end of the book, but rather it is a characteristic of the reader’s on-the-fly

Nace 53

processing of the cues as provided by the narrative (Eco 31), the reader’s processing of

cues and manufacturing of expectations is ongoing, applying new ones at the same time

that previous ones are being met or missed by the protagonist.

Eco anticipates that the study of the fabula in novels may be handled in a more

restrictive manner, such as it is for the purpose of enhancing our understanding of how

ruptured expectation is intertwined with the comic aesthetic in the novel. His restricted

definition of appropriating the fabula, “requires, for instance, for any action an intention,

a person (agent), a state or possible world, a change, its cause, and a purpose – to which,

one can also add mental states, emotions, and circumstances” (Eco 30). As we will see

later on in the analysis of our sample text, these materials of the fabula are indeed the

very evidentiary building blocks of the comic interior of novelistic heroes. Even Eco

identifies the presence of these features as an ideal environment for the reader’s

expectations to be utilized for the purpose of facilitated communication, suggesting that:

“A description of an action should then be complete and relevant while the actions

described should be difficult, the agent should not have an obvious choice . . . the

following events should be unexpected, and some of them should be unusual or strange

(van Dijk, 1974)” (Eco 30). This difficult situation staged by the author and traversed by

the novelistic hero – himself an agent (aware or unaware) for the thematic discourse of

the novel – gives rise to a sense of autonomy and realism on the part of the hero that the

reader beholds as endearingly comic. The hero is endearing precisely because not only is

he an agent of theme, but also an agent of reacting to the expectations that the reader

measures him by. Eco explains that: “To expect means to forecast: the reader

collaborates in the course of the fabula, making forecasts about the forthcoming state of

Nace 54

affairs. The further states must prove or disprove his hypothesis” (Eco 32). This idea is

essential to understanding how the comic aesthetic fits into the realism of the novel.

While the reader is actively engaged in postulating forecasts as suggested by the author

through a myriad of narrative mechanisms, the novelistic hero plods along unknowingly,

himself ignorant of his own fictitious existence and the realist mechanism of the fabula in

operation around him. And as he confronts the plot points of the sjuzet, with the reader’s

expectations infused into their camouflage, it is here that the novelistic hero can blossom

into comic splendor, missing the mark – however obvious it may seem to the reader – or

finding his or her own way of meeting the heroic challenges posited by the story’s forces

of antagonism. As a rule, only the unexpected is funny and only the unexpected seems

gravely real; convention and status quo only have a place in comedy as expectational

cues for the purpose of conditioning the audience for the comic moment which invariably

deviates from the prosaic. This communicative junction, encountered tautologically in a

wide cross-section of communicative media, is at work most subtly and pervasively in the

art of the novel, as we will witness by exploring one of the genre’s most revered modern

works.

Ulysses

While certainly not lacking in its moments of mirth and wit, Joyce’s Ulysses has

never been strictly categorized as a comic novel. Given its grandiosity and timeless

literary relevance since its publication in 1922, claiming it as a work of comedy would

for Joycean scholars limit the appreciation of its linguistic and narrative significance:

Ulysses is almost Biblical in scope, a work of obsessive beauty and design, polyphonic

Nace 55

and exhaustively inclusive in detail. Joyce’s claim that if Dublin were destroyed, his

novel could rebuild it brick by brick, is at first a claim of braggadocio. And yet, merely

the intricate superstructure of background, of setting, of landscape, of early 20th Century

Dublin, which, by virtue of the minutiae of its kinetic current of life – almost atomic in its

attention to detail – seems to live on timelessly even after the book is closed. This

aesthetic is centrifugal to Joyce’s project: that mortaring brick after brick of obsessive

detail drives the novel infinitely towards the real. Kundera heralds this aesthetic to be

indispensable to the affectation of realism in the novel. First, speaking of the history of

the background scene in painting, he states that, “the imbalance, in a painting , between

the privileged areas and those that are, a priori, secondary still had to be compensated for,

remedied, brought back into balance” (Kundera 155). With this idea of balance in mind,

Kundera appreciates novelists such as Joyce to be part of a movement of writers who, by

their construction of novelistic spheres realize that, “since it is meticulous casual logic

that makes events so convincing, no link of the chain can be omitted (However devoid of

interest it may be in itself)” and, “since the characters must appear to be ‘living,’ as much

data about them as possible must be reported (however unremarkable)” (Kundera 154).

These are two crucial mechanisms which comprise “a whole apparatus for fabricating the

illusion of reality” (Kundera 154). Thomas Mann, of similar mind on this topic, echoes

this idea in his foreword to The Magic Mountain in which the narrator states that he:

. . . shall tell [the story] at length, in precise and thorough detail – for when was a

story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space

required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we

Nace 56

are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly

entertaining. (Mann xii)

Indeed, the meticulous array of detail greatly contributes to the reader’s sense of realism

in a novel such as Ulysses. After all, one of the most remarkable qualities of the novel as

a genre is how, from its origins, it has managed to captivate its readers not by weaving

epic tales of larger-than-life heroes functioning on the vaguest of moral platitudes, but by

depicting no more than the typical and the mundane in the external lives of its heroes, and

the most private and intimate in their interior, reaching, “its apogee, its very monument,

in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which in nearly eight hundred pages describes eighteen hours

of life . . . In Joyce, a single second of the present becomes a little infinity” (Kundera

129). With this feature omnipresent in the novel, it is no wonder that obsessive detail and

a variety of narrative approaches capture our contemporary understanding of one

characteristic which marks a novel as impressive.

And so, when we contemplate the period of the 1920s and 1930s, including

Ulysses with a discussion of the comic aesthetic in novels that began with Tortilla Flat

and Decline and Fall may seem dismissive of its literary importance. And yet, Ulysses

can be seen as Bakhtin’s quintessential novelistic model when he describes novels as

becoming, “more free and flexible, their language renew[ing] itself by incorporating

extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become

dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, [and] elements of self-parody . . .”

(Bakhtin 7). All of these elements (with special emphasis on humor and laughter) account

for Joyce’s hefty layer of detail. However, although the arc of realism might progress

exponentially and infinitely towards the Real in fiction as more and more detail is

Nace 57

accrued, the reader never experiences as fully as it is experienced in the exposition of the

novelistic hero’s interiority: the most brilliantly-conceived background stage set can

never replace the actors who comprise the foreground; without its characters, the

narrative would only have façade to behold. Iser states that, “The unstructured material of

Ulysses is taken directly from life itself, but. . . it cannot be taken for life itself” and so

“When details no longer serve to reinforce probability or to stabilize the illusion of

reality, they must become a sort of end in themselves, such as one finds in the art-form of

the collage” (Iser 198). Since the claim here is that comic aesthetics are at work in the

preponderance of realism in the novel, Ulysses offers an astoundingly sophisticated,

connotative deployment of comedy. Myles na Gopaleen aptly recognized that Joyce “was

a great master of the banal in Literature. By “banal,” I mean the fusion of uproarious

comic stuff and deep tragedy” (from G xiv), which is indeed the concoction that leads

readers of novels toward verisimilitude.

Of its panoply of themes and allusions, Ulysses achieves its cogent and elemental

themes of love and the railing against hatred and history by reappropriating the

characteristics which comprise a hero. While the previous two centuries of the European

novel had all but exploded the epic model from its heroes, Ulysses, as Richard Ellmann

states in his preface, finds its heroes to be “reconceived: they offer new blends of heroism

and mock-heroism” (Ellmann ix). Indeed, a primary component of Joyce’s success in

achieving such a fresh approach to the novelistic hero stems from the fact that, “their

thoughts are disclosed in internal monologues that register the slightest waverings of

consciousness or of the world that surrounds consciousness” (Ellmann ix). To be sure,

Nace 58

reworking the Odyssean hero is implicit in Ulysses, or otherwise the Homeric parallel,

itself an apparent cue for such discursiveness, would be deemed superfluous.

Instead, Joyce recreates the Odyssean hero not in the epic tradition, but rather by

utilizing the power of the novel: Iser notes that the novelistic revision of the epic is

implicit in the entirety of the novel’s details, stating that as the reader experiences the

novel,

. . . he finds that everyday life in Dublin is, so to speak, continually breaking its

banks, and the resultant flood of detail induces the reader to try and build his own

dams of meaning – though these in turn are inevitably broken down. . . . [T]he

apparent lack of connection between the many details creates the impression of a

thoroughly chaotic world . . . one wonders what the return of Ulysses in modern

trappings is supposed to signify. (Iser 199)

Here we see how this ambiguous, subjective, “chaotic” minutiae of urban life teeming

uncontrollably behind the foreground is in itself a stage set for comic aesthetics to thrive.

The unpredictability of the background leads the reader to experience the seemingly

uncontrolled, autonomous nature of its novelistic hero, whose sense of realism rises out

of this chaos. Leopold Bloom assumes the role of the modern novelistic hero through the

interplay between the manners in which his interiority unknowingly defies the

expectation of the reader as established by Joyce through his panoptical narrative

medium. Bloom succeeds in obtaining this heroic status by saving Dedalus and his own

marriage while defending his commitment to the novel’s virtuous themes against the

forces of anti-Semitism and hatred.

Nace 59

The comic nature of this fulfillment is realized not because Bloom possesses a

decisive, epic nature, but rather because of his tendency to perform against the reader’s

expectations, and his propensity for being victimized by his own weaknesses. Bloom

conceived of and portrayed as a half-bred Jew together with the contextual Christ figure

cue can be seen as a particularly prime example of this idea, and might be easily

categorized not as heroism but of mock-heroism. However, the widespread and consistent

reappearance of its conceit throughout the novel deserves careful consideration, not

simply to be dismissed as mere satire. Joyce’s appropriation of it demonstrates the notion

of the comic interior, an aspect of Bloom’s spirit which, as a mechanism of realism,

serves Joyce in drawing Bloom as one of the more mystifying creatures of realism found

in the 20th Century novel. Even before Bloom’s introduction in chapter four, Joyce

establishes for the reader a streak of deep-rooted anti-Semitism which Bloom repeatedly

encounters, finally concluding with him and Dedalus when they meet in the latter

chapters of the book. But for the purposes of understanding Bloom as a comic character,

we must first appreciate Stephen’s role as his tragic foil.

Prior to Bloom’s entrance, we find Stephen Dedalus enduring his employer, Mr.

Deasy: “Mark my words, Mr. Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all

the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the sign of a nation’s decay”

(Joyce 28). Deasy continues his anti-Semitic banter at the very end of chapter two when

he quips to Stephen as he departs the school:

-- I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honor of being the only

country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you

know why? He frowned sternly on the bright air. – Why, sir, Stephen asked,

Nace 60

beginning to smile. – Because she never let them in, Mr. Deasy said solemnly. A

coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of

phlegm. (Joyce 30)

As we see here, before Bloom appears in chapter four, Joyce positions Stephen in such a

way that he must confront these sentiments in the figure of Mr. Deasy, who, self-

possessed with his prejudices, personifies the anti-themes of both history and hatred that

later bonds him and Bloom so impressionably. Deasy’s sentiments are in lock-step with

the men that Bloom must confront in the pub later on in the novel. Joyce has so deftly, so

subtly fitted such a lofty thematic axiom into the milieu of the life of this young Dubliner,

as though testing it first against the tragic construct of Stephen before it is to be unleashed

on Bloom. The forces of anti-Semitism will be the onus for Bloom to interact with his

elusive Christ figure role, thus engaging the occasion for his own interior comic

tendencies to develop. But for now the reader has only Stephen to consider: how he reacts

to these anti-Semitic sentiments, and then, later on, how his reactions to them will differ

from those of Bloom.

Stephen does manage to mount a defense against these anti-Semitic ideas –

chapter two and his command of the classroom is perhaps Stephen’s sole attempt at a

heroic moment in the novel – both at the expense of his students and Deasy. After

confounding the former with his convoluted riddle, Stephen answers Mr. Deasy’s anti-

Semitic comments: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to

awake,” and then, “from the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.

What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?” (Joyce 28). Deasy answers Stephen’s

indictment of history with a platitude, a vapid abstraction of the historical mindset,

Nace 61

replying that, “all human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God,”

to which, “Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: -- That is God,”

indicating the children at play (Joyce 28). Stephen’s response encapsulates the ideology

of Ulysses, the heroic ideology that Bloom wrestles with for the remaining majority of

the novel. In this manner he is an asset to Joyce and, in this rare and particular moment,

where Stephen manages to make his feelings known rather lucidly to both the reader and

to Mr. Deasy, he functions according to his predetermined role.

However, Stephen’s tragic nature as Bloom’s foil is unable to perform heroically

against these forces of history and hatred. It is a character trait that Joyce hard-wires into

Stephen’s construct: from the outset of the novel, he is repeatedly victimized and hurt by

the world around him: by his friends and peers, his father, the sinister violence of the city,

and even his own inner voice. Over and over again, Stephen suffers at the hands of a

novelistic world utterly incongruous with himself, which, as Eco states, “involves the

character in a series of events, reversals, recognitions, pitiful and terrifying cases that

culminate in a catastrophe” (Eco 110) – much more so than the previously-studied works

which exploit the comic spectacle to their own realist ends – and yet the result is not a

comically realistic character, but rather a figure of tragedy, a foil for the reader to contrast

against Bloom. Stephen Dedalus, aware of these lofty themes at play in his own decline –

the lack of love left in the vacuum of his mother’s death and the alienation from his

family, as well as his incongruity with the hegemony of modern Irish culture – has,

unlike Bloom, such a focused, realized perspective of how these elements frustrate and

conquer him. As a result,

Nace 62

The perplexing effect of the monologue derives mainly from the fact that the

individual sentences or passages, which all deal with recognizable but unrelated

themes, are simply set side by side without any apparent connection. Thus the

vacant spaces in the text increase dramatically in number . . . They prevent the

reader from correlating what he observes, with the result that the facets of the

external world – as evoked by Stephen’s perception – are constantly made to

merge into one another. (Iser 209-210)

And because of this self-omniscience, inherent in his construction as a novelistic

character, there is little left to be developed in him through the imagination of the reader;

he is a tragic character, whose only function is to assist Bloom in completing his own

inner reconciliations with his emotional estrangement from Molly, the loss of his infant

son Rudy, and the hostile community that he encounters in his daily life, and to assist the

reader in experiencing Bloom as a remarkably autonomous novelistic hero. To be sure,

juxtaposing a tragic figure or “straight man” alongside a comedian is a well-known

convention. Clearly the complementing nature of Stephen and Bloom functions similarly

in order to tease out the magical moments where Bloom becomes so tangible to the

reader. But of course, this isn’t to say that Stephen’s character never converges on comic

landscapes.

Joyce introduces Ulysses to the reader not with drama, but with levity, a smart,

Wilde-like wit. Buck Mulligan, a comic archetype that might just as well be found in the

comic works of Waugh or “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is the ordained master of

ceremonies, a profane, flippant cynic and intellectual, “the spirit that always denies”

(Joyce xiii) and, for all intents and purposes, a bully. He ascribes a litany of jeering

Nace 63

nicknames and diminutives to Stephen from the outset, calling, “Come on, Kinch! Come

up, you fearful Jesuit!” (Joyce 3). All throughout the chapter, Buck lampoons his friend,

exploiting Stephen’s secular humanist beliefs, his work as a scholar, and the events

surrounding the death of Stephen’s mother, all of which Stephen anguishes over, unable

to defend himself in the wake of Mulligan’s wit. The “Stately, plump” Buck Mulligan, if

he can be so easily understood as a mere composite, clearly foreshadows the robust

forces of the novel’s antagonist, not as facile and straightforward as a villain, but rather a

network of sinister psychological threads which Joyce establishes throughout the milieu

of Dublin life.

Stephen is portrayed as passive, powerless, and fearful of these forces, his own

passions and talents nothing more than manifestations of his ineptitude, reminders of his

own personal failures. From the moment of his introduction into the novel, looking

“displeased and sleepy,” he endures Mulligan’s mock blessings, finally inquiring, “How

long is Haines going to stay in the tower?” (Joyce 4). Fearful of being killed during one

the Englishman’s violent, raving nightmares, Stephen admits to Buck, “You saved men

from downing. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off” (Joyce 4). In

addition to suggesting Stephen’s subsequent expulsion from the tower, an expulsion that

he fully anticipates, this quote illustrates one of Stephen’s tragic qualities which

disqualify him from possessing a truly comic interior: he fully realizes what he is and

what he is not; he is in command and fully aware of his tragic condition and remains

static within it. Joyce builds off of this foundation, exposing the reader to the bits of

rambling frustrations he encounters emotionally in the midst of the morning spent with

Nace 64

Haines and Buck. Mulligan challenges him, “Look at yourself, you dreadful bard!”

(Joyce 4) upon which:

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked

crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This

dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too. – I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room,

Buck Mulligan said. . . . Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from

Stephen’s peering eyes. (Joyce 4)

The construction of this fleeting moment is indeed witty, not at all dissimilar from the

comic examples already discussed in both Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall: the action of

the scene – Buck Mulligan continuing to mock Stephen and admitting that he has stolen

the mirror from a skivvy – is indeed comedic. However, what deflates the opportunity for

comic realism to be realized in Stephen here is his connectedness to the will of the

author, his acquaintance to the expectation that he is indeed a somber, defeated victim,

playing the puppet role for Joyce and building toward his role as tragic foil for Bloom.

The scene may have continued in comic fashion, but Stephen’s internal monologue

squelches that opportunity. “As he and others see me” is a recurring concern for Dedalus,

and it reveals his designated sensitivity to the sources on conflict throughout the novel.

He is, however, unable to traverse them heroically as Bloom does; he can only be

victimized by them, awaiting rescue. Following his gaze into the mirror, “Drawing back

and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness – it is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked

lookingglass of a servant” (Joyce 4). Stephen ascribes symbolic meaning to the mirror

since it aptly pictorializes the distorted vision it maintains according to his own

perceptions, a sensation that Bloom relates to as well. As he peers into this “symbol of

Nace 65

Irish art,” realizing that it criticizes him through its distortedness (“It asks me too”), he is

powerless to even turn away from it – Buck finally removes it from his sight:

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him around

the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. –

It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? He said kindly. God knows you

have more spirit them any of them. Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as

I fear that of his. The cold steel pen. (Joyce 4)

Though evoking a mental image of a comic spectacle, the levity, the wit, and the subtle

irony that, situated in the comic aesthetic, is left to be discovered by the imagination of

the reader, is suppressed by Stephen’s incessant, obsessively sensitive internalization of

the moment, embodied in his need to parse every dialogue, every exposure, to the

strengths and weaknesses of his character. There are many examples of this realization in

the scenes that involve Stephen and Mulligan, with Mulligan’s antics further illustrating

Stephen’s shrill, tragic internal voice. And because it is Stephen’s mind that the reader

has access to, the comic nature of Buck Mulligan only augments Stephen’s tragic

qualities.

The alienation from Irish hegemony which bonds Stephen and Bloom is again

tested against Stephen’s tragic manner in Chapter one as well when the milkmaid arrives,

complimenting Mulligan: “Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to

a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights” (Joyce

12). Dedalus feels everything slipping from him – in more esoteric terms, his Irish

identity, and in the moment of this particular day, his residence at the tower. He

recognizes it before it has even happened, his frustration brimming over when he finally

Nace 66

confronts Haines, who comments: “Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal

God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?” to which Stephen replies: “You behold in me,

Stephen said with a grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought” (Joyce 17).

This final rupture leads Stephen to realize that he will depart from the tower for good: “A

wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He

wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key, too.

All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes” (Joyce 17). Just as we see here, there are few

examples of success or vindication in Stephen’s experiences throughout Ulysses – he is

consistently subjected to the tragic forces of the novel. Even when he is absent, the

verdant, witty mirth of his father in conversation with Bloom as they travel to Paddy

Dignam’s funeral seems to further Stephen to an ineffectual, incapable tragic figure.

By the end of the chapter, Stephen finds himself participating in his own

victimization, or unable to prevent it from happening, just as he was unable to turn from

the oppressive gaze of the cracked mirror. As Buck is bathing, he says to Stephen:

Give us that key, Kinch . . . to keep my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key.

Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. – And twopence, he said, for a

pint. Throw it here. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing,

undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly: He

who stealeth from the poor lendth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra. (Joyce 19)

At first glance at this quote, with Stephen giving in to Buck’s commands, one might

equate Stephen’s passive servility to similar acts of fleecing and bilking observed in both

Tortilla Flat and Decline and Fall. However the nature of Stephen’s victimhood is quite

different in that his responses are what the reader might expect, given his static nature:

Nace 67

Stephen himself is left powerless in the vacuum of his humorless interior; the contract

between the reader and novel is disengaged, and Mulligan’s coarse spirit, encompasses a

wide spectrum of the comic mechanism, from familiar mirth to biting derision, leads not

to an expose of Stephen’s empathy-evoking innocence, but to a presentation of

antagonistic forces – the subtle forces that replace the epic monsters of The Odyssey –

which Bloom subsequently must face not only for himself, but for Stephen as well.

Stephen is the consummate victim, a tragedy waiting to be saved.

The compiling of these various examples portray Stephen’s role as a tragic foil

and “soul in need of saving,” operating outside of the comic paradigm and therefore

functioning as an agent of the author and his thematic intentions, so that, in contrast,

Leopold Bloom can be accurately appreciated as a beneficiary of the comic interior

model. For as we will see, Bloom, too, is subjected to a myriad of antagonistic forces in

Ulysses which parallel the ones cited in our observation of Stephen. To be more precise,

Bloom’s centrality to the novel brings him in near constant contact with these forces –

much more so than Stephen – though his reaction to them is markedly different from

Stephen’s, and this difference brings the comic interior into focus for a novelistic hero.

Where the reader witnesses Stephen behaving in accordance with his assigned role as per

the will of the author and the expectations of the reader, playing off his narrative cues and

teasing out the thematic frames of the story, Bloom on the other hand fails to perform

commensurately with the cues and expectations which manifest themselves throughout

the day; he unknowingly defies them, and fulfills Eco’s claim that: “the character of a

novel wants . . . to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as

unforeseeable as what may happen to us” (Eco 109). When Joyce cues the reader and

Nace 68

piques expectation, Bloom benefits from the realist artifice of the comic aesthetic found

in novels. For, when one’s expectations are unfulfilled in the atmosphere of humor’s

suspended state of ambiguity, amidst the veiled voyeurism of the novel reader’s

privileged position of observation, what is discovered is a novelistic hero who appears to

exist outside the will of the author.

Bloom’s interplay with the suggested failed Christ figure provides a fascinating

entrance into Joyce’s use of exploding readers’ expectations by way of comically

subjecting his hero’s interiority to the novel’s antagonistic forces. The “issue” of anti-

Semitism deeply pervades Ulysses, and it serves as the hegemonic pretense for Bloom’s

proximity to the Savior imagery imbedded both in the narrative and in his own conflicted

thought patterns. Like a series of Freudian slips, these allusions and suggestions

intersperse with vagaries and vulgarities, their deliberate, suggesting power lost on the

unsuspecting Bloom: only the reader, observing high above the labyrinth of various

voices, narration intermingled with internal monologue, the camera lens panning from its

central focus, understands the meticulousness of imbedded cues Joyce leaves for him. It

seems at times it is only Bloom who misses them altogether. Yet it is this particular

quality of Bloom’s that the reader finds endearing and leads to such a peculiar brand of

heroism on his part, a realist-steeped heroism defined in comic terms. For, “There is

nothing heroic about Bloom, nothing outstanding in any way; it is difficult at first sight to

see why anyone should want to write about him” (Watt 207). It is this quality that

personifies Bloom as a comic hero, since the unaware, unassuming quality of his

character is what makes him so heroic: when Bloom finally manages to achieve a victory,

Nace 69

whether it be internally or externally, the victory seems to the reader to be truly earned by

Bloom’s own doing, and not merely led to conquest by Joyce.

Chapter five’s scene in the church introduces the Christ cues to the reader. Here

the narrator, Joyce’s lesser-used narrative agent, suggests an expectation for the reader to

apply to Bloom: a tactile, spiritual calling which draws Bloom into the church: “The cold

smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps, pushed the swingdoor and

entered softly by the rere” (Joyce 66). The reader expects something spiritual,

transcendental in the works with Bloom as the narration gives way to his autoresponsive

stream of consciousness. The ensuing succession of thoughts, however, explodes that

expectation:

Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place to be next

some girl. Who is my neighbor? Jammed in by the hour to slow music. That

woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Woman knelt in the benches with

crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch knelt at the alterrails.

The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the thing in his hands. He

stopped off at each, took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in

water?) off it and put it neatly in her mouth . . . waiting for it to melt in their

stomachs. (Joyce 66)

Here we notice a reversal of expectation that is undeniably comic in its conception.

Rather than cueing on the solemnity of the mass, Bloom quite naturally, quite

automatically sensualizes the moment, keying on the church as a locale for sexualized

fantasy as opposed to piety. This passage exemplifies Kundera’s idea that the profane is

bound up in the mechanics of comic realism. Yet interspersed between these banalities,

Nace 70

Bloom’s mind fires in Christo-centric “artifacts,” punctuated by question marks which

denote Bloom’s own surprise at their appearance. In the above quotation we recall “(are

they in water?)” a suggestion of Baptism, then as the paragraph continues: “What?

Corpus: body,” an allusion to “this is My body,” and, later on, “Christ or Pilate? Christ”

an unconscious acknowledgement (Joyce 66-67). These examples of Bloom’s half-

conscious self-analysis shows that the Christ figure expectation emanates from the will of

the author telegraphed into Bloom’s stream of consciousness: the suggestion even

manifests itself in the form of self-questioning moments of near-revelation. But it is

Bloom’s consciousness, exquisitely real, that suppresses them into an ordinary or sexual

thought.

It is the suppression of these suggestions that continuously render Leopold Bloom

as a novelistic hero that seems to function completely outside the will of the author. A

prime example of this occurs as Bloom observes the priest after Communion has been

distributed to the sodality:

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant

before it, showing a large grey boot-sole from under the lace affair he had on.

Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do. Bald spot behind.

Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I

have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

(Joyce 66)

Again, the narrator only sets the scene and summarily recedes so that Bloom’s thoughts

may come to light. In this thought sequence, Bloom only notices the banal, the temporal,

the corporal dimension of the priest, focusing on the dark boot peeking out of an

Nace 71

otherwise angelic façade of the priest’s undergarments. Bloom’s concentration on the

mortal element leads again to a confrontation with hints of his Christ role, when he

corrects “I have sinned,” with “I have suffered,” and finally, “Iron nails ran in,” a

powerful suggestion of the crucifixion.

As the reader observes this exchange of suggestions and propositions by the

narrator and Bloom’s failure to realize it, his failure to consummate this expectation

renders him in the image of our comic model. For his own limitations and idiosyncrasies

– the kind that the reader identifies with – limit him from realizing the role of the Christ-

like savior he is at first seemingly positioned to assume. And Bloom failing to perform in

the Christ figure expectation serves Joyce well, since by failing to perceive the Christ

role, he negates not only the expectation for an epic hero to emerge in Bloom as

suggested by the Homeric parallel embedded in the conceit of Ulysses, but also the

infallibility of the Christ figure, which would if realized by Bloom close up the occasion

for moral failure and ignorance that Joyce relies on in order for Bloom to seem so real in

the eyes of the reader: “If one looks at Bloom against the background of Ulysses, one is

immediately struck by . . . the many features of [his] conduct that either go beyond or fall

short of what we know of Ulysses’s character” (Iser 229). So the reader looks with

sympathy, with fondness on the unknowing, unsuspecting Leopold Bloom – the position

of an omniscient creature – who recognizes Bloom to be comprised of the same imperfect

proclivities, made in his image and likeness. The scene ends with Bloom catching himself

not in the midst of this comically connotative moment of nonfulfillment, but rather a bit

humiliation which goes unnoticed by everyone in the church, by all except the reader:

“He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time? Women

Nace 72

enjoy it . . . Good job it wasn’t farther south. He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the

aisle and out through the main door” (Joyce 68). Whereas the comic spectacle is

extrinsic, proceeding within the sphere of the novel’s own universe, here the comic

aesthetic of Bloom’s interior proceeds between he and the reader, so that this

embarrassing moment only impacts Bloom’s interior and the perceptions of the reader.

Thus, whereas, “a character in a tragedy will make no change in his conduct because he

will know how it is judged by us,” we find exemplified in Bloom that, “a comic character

is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is

unconscious” (Bergson 8). He is “a person embarrassed by his body,” (Bergson 25)

grounded to the affectation of realism not through his platitudes, but rather his banalities.

The same is true of the fleeting echoes of the Christ role that pass unappreciated

through Bloom’s mind. Joyce repeats it intermittently throughout the novel: at the end of

Chapter five, Bloom muses, “This is my body” (Joyce 71) as he soaks in his bath, an

image which recalls the church scene just before, and at the start of Chapter eight, when a

young evangelist hands Bloom a religious pamphlet: “A somber Y.M.C.A. young man,

watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a

hand of Mr. Bloom. Heart to heart talks. Bloo . . . Me? No. Blood of the Lamb. His slow

feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the

lamb” (Joyce 124). Though a random ordinary moment on the streets of Dublin for

Bloom, the reader understands the importance of this scene. Again, Bloom’s own psyche

is imbued with the suggestion of a Christ figure, emanating from a coded question that he

asks himself, sparked by a quick misreading of the religious pamphlet. “Bloo . . . Me?”

links Bloom’s name with “Blood of the Lamb,” the powerful allusion to Christ’s sacrifice

Nace 73

on the cross in the book of Revelation, an example of an even more direct cue than those

that were cited earlier, which again goes awry. As he continues to read, Bloom’s heroic

qualities ruminate in the Christ imagery, while Bloom himself is ignorant of his power

and destiny in this light; whereas Stephen’s meta-cognitive stream of thoughts

foreshadow for the reader all that is at stake thematically, Bloom’s human traits only

allow him to live in the moment of the word, a tangential trait borne out of his

independence and autonomy as a novelistic hero.

The ingenuity of Ulysses’ comic realism owes itself in part to the ever-reaching

panoply of narrative textures: while the tonic narrator is functioning in a third person

omniscient voice, Joyce constantly modulates this perspective, allowing the thoughts of

his primary characters as well as various narrative constructs (such as the play-like

narratives featured in Chapter fifteen, complete with stage direction) to overtake the

narrative, eventually reducing the omniscient narrator to nothing more than introductions

and egress: “In order to moderate, if not actually to neutralize, the interpretative nature of

style, Joyce called upon virtually every stylistic mode that the novel had evolved during

its comparatively short history” (Iser 203). It is in this way, by accentuating its limited

narratives, and then presenting an obsessive number of them to the reader, that Joyce

continues to suggest the Christ figure expectation for Bloom as the chapters continue,

eventually shifting the cues from the intrinsic to the extrinsic. Chapter twelve’s scene at

Kiernan’s pub gives way to this limited, prejudiced narrative, infused with the novel’s

forces of hatred, and Bloom put to the challenge of confronting and defending the virtue

of love and indicting these destructive forces in the face of his own victimization. It is the

first overt realization of Bloom as a hero, standing up to his peers, defending his position.

Nace 74

His ejaculations would appear as positively epic if it wasn’t for the comic element

interwoven in this clash of thematic forces: Bloom’s defense of love’s virtue is so

understated, so unstable in spite of its truthfulness and honesty, that the reader cannot

help but perceive him as an honest, independent broker of the novel’s themes, not simply

acting on behalf of the author’s will. And the ensuing persecution and mockery the reader

experiences after Bloom’s agree solidifies both the expectation the reader is primed for

and the autonomy that Bloom enjoys by failing to perform by it.

Because Chapter twelve’s narrative voice is quite limited, and because the reader

loses access to Bloom’s rambling interiority for the duration of the scene, Joyce implants

the Christ figure cues into the insinuations of the secondary characters’ conversation. The

suggestions begin just as Bloom appears at the doorway of the pub, fearful of entering

because of an intimidating dog:

—There he is again, says the citizen, staring out. – Who? Says I. – Bloom, says

he. He’s on point duty up and down there for the last ten minutes. And, begob, I

saw his physog do a peep in and then slider off again. Little Alf was knocked

bawways, Faith, he was. – Good Christ! Says he. I could have sworn it was him.

(Joyce 248)

From the very beginning of this scene, the narrator and his allies foster an immediate and

derisive attitude toward Bloom and, because the reader has no access to Bloom’s

thoughts on the matter, he is effectively objectified. As their conversations maunder

along, Bloom’s personality in these conversations finally gives rise to the narrator’s ire:

So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis . .

. And of course Bloom had to have his say too . . . if you took up a straw from the

Nace 75

bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw?

That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would at

talk steady. (Joyce 260)

Bloom’s parsing, reaching intellect, in search of nuance, disrupts the flatness of his

cronies: the complexity of his character is precisely what drives them to resent him and

foment their anti-Semitic prejudices. Later on in the conversation when Bloom tries to

change the subject after Blazes Boylan is mentioned, his cronies take to blatant snubs:

—I heard so and so made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf. – Who? Blazes?

Says Joe. And says Bloom: -- What I meant about tennis, for example, is the

agility and training the eye. – Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on

the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time . . . And Bloom cuts in

again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, asking Alf: -- Now, don’t

you think, Bergan? – Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. (Joyce 261)

Bloom’s exasperating desire to shift the conversation away from Boylan is palpable. And

the ensuing lack of respect that Alf pays him in this broken interchange is only seconded

by the narrator who aptly highlights it for the reader. Thus, the reader beholds his hero in

a disagreeable situation, unable to control the conversation, given his colleagues’ biases

against him. From Bloom’s role as the booby, however, emerges his first portrayal of the

novelistic hero, set in the atmosphere of the comic interior.

Joyce overtly intermingles the cues and implications of the Christ figure in the

midst of this comic moment, when Bloom stumbles across the crux of Ulysses’ thematic

message. The subject is broached by accident, when the citizen carelessly comments:

“Pity about her . . . Or any other woman marries a half and half” upon which Bloom

Nace 76

nervously replies, “How half and half? . . . Do you mean he . . .” (Joyce 263). The issue

of Bloom’s Jewish roots periodically appear throughout the novel, and in the cold

empirical voice of Chapter seventeen, when the narrator asks: “Had Bloom and Stephen

been baptized, and where and by whom, cleric or layman?” he answers, “Bloom (three

times)” as if baptizing him three times would wash away his Jewishness (Joyce 558). As

the tension mounts, Bloom’s resolve to defend his heritage increases and, in a turn that

can only be appreciated as comically ironic, comments to the citizen: “Some people . . .

can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own” (Joyce 267),

ironic, of course, that Bloom’s heroic candor here is built on the words of Christ.

It is here that we witness the conflation of the comic with the pathos-driven drama

of the novel: the platform of mockery and suppressed invective that Bloom is subjected to

in this hostile scene – a scene where he is depicted as victimized by the vanity of these

pub mates and Bloom’s status as a denizen (he even refuses to drink with them, opting

for a cigar instead) – that we see Alf’s careless comment allow the moment to cross from

comic victimization into gravitas. Absent Bloom’s thoughts on the matter, the reader is

engaged in contemplating this scene as an inverse of the previously-discussed selections;

to be sure, it is by far Bloom’s most epic, extrinsically-heroic moment, his whole being

acting in solidarity. The reader sees in him the beginning of his heroic fulfillment. After

the citizen challenges him by asking, “What is your nation if I may ask?” Bloom

demonstrably answers, “Ireland . . . I was born here. Ireland” (Joyce 272). Given the

“Irishness” of Ulysses – the obsessively detailed construction of its Irish façade – the

reader understands implicitly that Bloom has challenged the representatives of the

negative forces in the novel to defend the most serious stake – that of the identity of

Nace 77

Ireland. There is no greater threat to the pub mates than to have Bloom – the intellect, the

lover of love, the supposed Freemason, and the half Jew – define their homeland.

The reader brings to this conflict the full measure of bloom’s fallibility, having

collected along the way all his vulgarities and banalities, as well as his psychic limits. In

short, the reader carries over Bloom’s interiority, painted in the atmosphere of the comic

aesthetic, to this pivotal moment in the novel where Bloom fulfills his Christ role, albeit

unknowingly, when he continues: “And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated

and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant . . . Robbed . . .

Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very

moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle”

(Joyce 273). Though the reader can only judge by his actions and words, Bloom’s

diatribe yet again inverts an expectation. It is an expectation constructed over the course

of the novel which grooms the reader into regarding Bloom as similarly passive-

aggressive as Stephen, noncommittal in moments where the antagonistic forces must be

met. In light of that regard, Bloom disrupts the reader’s expectations of his heroic

capabilities; the portrait of the delionized cuckold, the misfit, rallies his will to confront

not only the ideas of hatred, but the forces at work at destroying him “at this very

moment . . . putting up his fist.” It is precisely here that Bloom proves his heroic worth,

and it allows the reader yet another occasion to witness his character confounding all that

might be expected or anticipated of him. This scene sets the stage for his saving of

Dedalus from similar forces of hatred – engendered in the likes of Buck Mulligan and

Haines – and his eroding relationship with Molly as well.

Nace 78

The conflict concludes with Bloom’s most Christ-like declaration of theme in the

entirety of the novel. When Bloom answers the citizen’s mockery by stating, “I’m talking

about injustice,” John Wyse responds aggressively in a manner expected by the likes of

this group, saying, “Right . . . stand up to it then with force like men,” and the narrator

adding sympathetically a mocking gesture aimed at Bloom: “That’s an almanac picture

for you. Mark for a soft-nosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a

gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweeping-brush, so he would, if only he had a nurse’s apron on

him” (Joyce 273). Joyce again shifts Bloom’s reaction to this invective away from

immediate expectation. In contrast to his raised fist,

. . . he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet

rag. – But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, humanity, all that. That’s not life for

men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very

opposite of that that is really life. – What? Says Alf. – Love, says Bloom. I mean

the opposite of hatred. (Joyce 273)

Indeed it is true that Bloom’s final thought on the matter equates to “twisting around all

the opposite.” Unlike any of his adversaries, who remain on one simple trajectory of

aggressiveness, Bloom’s behavior here is complex, irregular, and altogether

unpredictable, having modulated first from an uneasy meekness to angst and then finally

arriving at Love, an abstraction that the reader only allows Bloom to arrive at legitimately

because it is uttered in the midst of such a sincere, humanized moment of intellectual

exhaustion. Bergson aptly points out that this inner duality, while a proponent of realism,

isn’t necessarily a fundamental quality of the comic, stating that:

Nace 79

. . . [the] duel between two opposing feelings will not even then be comic, rather it

will appear the essence of seriousness if these two feelings through their very

distinctions complete each other, develop side by side, and make up between them

a composite mental condition, adopting in short, a modus vivendi which merely

gives us the complex impression of life. But . . . make him oscillate from one to

the other . . . by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish

contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all laughable

objects, something mechanical in something living; in fact, something comic.

(Bergson 38)

In the case of this example, there isn’t anything “inelastic” in Bloom’s heroic moment;

nothing particularly mechanical or divergent from life in his oscillating gesture.

However, there is a contrivance behind Bloom’s oscillation, but it is not of Bloom’s will,

but of Joyce’s.

In fact, Bloom is wholly unaware that this comic mechanism is at work inside of

his character, which makes him all the more endearingly delicate and real: “There are

innumerable comedies in which one of the characters thinks he is speaking and acting

freely, and consequently retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed from a certain

standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of another, who is playing with him”

(Bergson 38). To be sure, the privileged seat of the reader, now able to partake both in

Bloom’s performance and the comic apparatus functioning through and behind him,

emboldens the reader to imagine his hero voyeuristically, perhaps because, “Instinctively,

and because one would rather be a cheat than be cheated, in imagination at all events, the

spectator sides with the knaves . . .” (Bergson 38). Joyce’s use of this particular comic

Nace 80

apparatus is absolutely essential to delivering such a crucial thematic turn in Ulysses, and

it remains to be seen if it could be earned in the eyes of the reader had it been undertaken

using the tenets of the epic.

The simple utterance of “love” is of course a dangerous conclusion here for the

reader of novels, since by the nature of the genre, the novel seeks a more nuanced

epiphany than such an epic abstraction. Joyce, however, manages to earn this simple

explanation for Bloom through the confluence of the comic threads which meet in a delta

of realism: first, the realization of Christ’s essential message in a man who has no

concept of the suggestion working in and around him, as well as the epic utterance of

“love” followed by, “I mean the opposite of hatred.” As Ellmann aptly states, “It is a kind

of parody that protects seriousness by immediately moving away from intensity. Love

cannot be discussed without peril, but Bloom has nobly named it” (Joyce xiii). In the

final revolution of this confrontation, Bloom’s most bravely-stated terms are one final

time complicated by a reduction – a comic reduction, since, as is demonstrated in this

argument, comic and tragic forces reduce one another.

Although this collection of ideas and readings constitutes a concerted effort to

understand the relationship between comedy and realism in the novel, in many instances,

the appreciation of comic notions discussed in my thesis was facilitated not by an intense

analysis, but rather by relaxing my close, critical reading skills and allowing myself the

occasion to appreciate the gestures of these great authors as being funny. In the case of

Ulysses, for example, the intensity of that novel’s reputation can intimidate the reader to

such a point that the wit and comedy that Joyce most certainly intends can be lost amidst

Nace 81

his or her efforts to consume all of thematic matter and intricate allusions built into the

structure of the novel. As both Kundera and Eco clearly argue -- albeit in different ways

-- if the reader comes to the reading of a novel as an “open reader” (Eco’s term), or as a

reader who can effectively suspend their moral belief (Kundera’s term), then the

endearing magic of comedy will be detected and appreciated in numerous texts, whether

overtly comic or not. Moreover, the reader can come to appreciate how these moments of

comic mirth often coincide with the moments were one feels closest to the novel’s

protagonist.

Certainly, an entirely historical approach to discussing the theme of this thesis

could greatly expand our understanding of the link between the rise of modern comedy

and the genre of the novel. Very little work of that kind is manifest in this thesis, since to

balance a historical discussion with the close reading of these novels would constitute a

much larger work. However, the abundance of examples of the comic aesthetic found in

Tortilla Flat, Decline and Fall, and Ulysses point to the implicit relationship between the

rise of comic aesthetics, the secular individual, and the genre of the novel in Europe and

America. This new modern person entertained a new curiosity for a smaller, globalized

world, a self-centered existence, and a life that could be enhanced by the immutable rise

of the spirit that comes through the euphoria of human laughter.

Nace 82

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M[ikhail] M[ikhailovich]. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter – An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Clodesley

Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005.

Bowen, Zack. Ulysses as a Comic Novel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

------. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Trans. Ellen

Esrock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

------. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1992.

Ellmann, Richard. Preface to Ulysses. Ulysses. By James Joyce. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler.

New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Fambrough, Preston. “A Carnival Tortilla Flat.” CLA Journal 47.3

(2004): 326-342.

Fontenrose, Joseph. “Tortilla Flat and the Creation of a Legend.” From The Short Novels

of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Ed.

Jackson J. Benson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 19-30.

Gass, William H. Introduction to At-Swim-Two-Birds. At Swim-Two-Birds. By Flann

O’Brien. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.

Golden, Leon. Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.

Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Nace 83

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Kaul, A.N.. The Action of English Comedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Kinney, Arthur F.. “The Arthurian Cycle in Tortilla Flat.” From Steinbeck: A Collection

of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Murray Davis. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,

1972.

Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins,

1996.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Lucács, Georg. “from The Theory of the Novel: A Historio-Philosophical Essay on the

Forms of Great Epic Literature.” From Theory of the Novel. Ed. Michael

McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 185-218.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books,

1995.

Riffaterre, Michael. “The Poetic Functions of Intertextual Humor.” Romanic Review 65.4

(1974): 278-293.

Robert, Marthe. “from Origins of the Novel.” From Theory of the Novel. Ed.

Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 57-70.

Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.

Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1956.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Nace 84

Works Consulted

English, James F.. Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of

Community in Twentieth-Century Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Genette, Gerard. “Frontiers of Narrative.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and

Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 844-853.

Gentry, Robert. Nonteleogical Thinking in Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat.” From The Short

Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism.

Ed. Jackson J. Benson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 31-38.

Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel. London: Routledge, 1999.

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. “Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals.” Theory of the

Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2000.

Shupak, Greg. “Decline and Fall as a Critique of Marxism.” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter

and Studies 36.2 (2005): 3-6.

Stanley, William Chad. “Debasement and Abjection: The Ambivalent Comedics of

Ulysses.” Notes on Modern Literature. 12.1 (2000): 50-56.

Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. “Social Satire in John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and

Cannery Row. Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor. 17.1 (1997): 51-60.