Anatomy of Black Humor
Feldman, Burton
IF SOME CRITICS ARE RIGHT, Black Humor may be the only new or important de velopment in American fiction since World War II. The important writers are John Barth, William Burroughs,...
...There is always Auschwitz, or King Leopold in the Congo, or Hiroshima...
...F F OR BLACK HUMOR'S LITERARY TERRORISM is mated to affluence...
...That would be an enviable position, but the suspicion grows that such detachment connives with the middle-class rather than opposes it...
...They convince us that to oppose cosmic fraud or political repression will cost heavily—and that such opposition can thus ennoble and even give joy...
...Disdainful and ruthless, from his impregnable aesthetic fortress, he strikes out at fraud...
...But Black Humor has one great advantage over the real terrorist—as over a Melville or Sinyavsky: it risks nothing...
...it merely mimics the violence in front of the scene...
...Instead of much blackness or humor, there is a nightmarish neutrality and grotesque deadpan, an elaborate novelistic impasse to feeling and judgment...
...Such a complaint about Black Humor springs neither from outraged liberal idealism nor from an old-fashioned preference for uplifting literature...
...It may seem paradoxical that Black Humor is at once so detached and yet so existentially drenched in these American realities...
...And the Black Humorist hopes to be that passenger beside you who helpfully fondles an ice pick while telling unnerving stories...
...It is only playing, one knows that...
...and then Black Humor slips off into fantasy and parody...
...Rigid European parallels are again misleading: a better comparison is with the "older" American novel...
...IF SOME CRITICS ARE RIGHT, Black Humor may be the only new or important de velopment in American fiction since World War II...
...Black Humor is existential in an academic way...
...But the Black Humor manner short-circuits any strong response to this...
...Talking plain American, it is more like a shift from buying to spending...
...As its reliance on parody shows, Black Humor does not unmask the illness hidden under our bland surface...
...Black Humor likes nutty plots, mischievous messages, and an acrobatic style...
...and Burroughs gets more detached as his prose gets more chaotic...
...make them a little excited and then frustrated, yes...
...Perhaps "Black Humor" never was a good coinage —this kind of writing might better be called "Affluent Terrorism...
...It has no kinship with the novels of Sartre or Camus, where absurdity earned its right to speak amid the painful actualities of politics and history...
...This is odd because Black Humor scarcely wishes to be so mild or merely "literary...
...One might say that the older American novelist—so self-educated, so distrustful of the Academy—got used to earning what he had to know and wanted to know...
...In Hemingway and Dos Passos, European Marxism got transmuted into a peculiarly American kind of compassionate anarchism...
...Black Humor stands to existentialism as the American social novel of the thirties stood to European left-wing thought and revolution...
...In this joyless literary burlesque house, the stripteasers and blue comedians will do anything but really enrage or satisfy the customers...
...Reading the perfect Black Humor novel would be like driving on ice...
...is something of the terrorist in the Black Humorist...
...There were before...
...So the reader may be pardoned if he casts aside literary gentility and gets a little remorseless himself...
...It foments no revolutions, but only literary disdain for its perplexed and perplexing culture...
...The ordinary reader will find that he can trump the nihilism or apocalypse of these novels in a twinkling...
...The Black Humorist is sometimes said to be a new intellectual, when in fact he is merely academic...
...He did this painfully, stubbornly, badly, and often went broke (no second acts in American literature...
...Nothing personal is intended...
...this writing would like to disavow and destroy any moral or sympathetic bond between itself and the reader...
...Like the classic terrorist, he nurses contempt for the middle class, and seeks a shortcut solution to the problems of complacency and hypocrisy...
...Such a reader can only be agreed with if he concludes that the world is surely worse than Black Humor is telling him...
...One suddenly realizes how the AmericanEnglish novel, like Anglo-American philosophy and political thinking, has always been a moral agent as well as a realistic image...
...The real terrorist was often a man of resentment, dispossessed and declassed...
...Their view of life is audaciously "black"—subversive, enraged, even apocalyptic...
...But to mention Melville is only to emphasize how tame Black Humor seems...
...If there seem to be pain or degradation or death on the page, the effect will be made incongruous with the fact, sidetracked into a gag, hammed up, parodied away...
...Barth invents a wondrous echo-chamber that no longer needs a human voice...
...Far from being too audacious, Black Humor isn't audacious enough for a world like ours...
...But no new age of American urbanity is predicted...
...Black Humor novels burn knowledge with abandon, as gaily and irresponsibly as the millionaire lighting his cigar with a $1000 bill...
...These issues are clear...
...But the older American novelist typically is self-educated...
...The Black Humorist spends learning, rather than earning it...
...The stage groans with the wreckage of bewildered innocents and sinister megalomaniacs, cannibals, and intellectual rapists...
...Black Humor novelists are This does not mean that Black Humor "educated" as American novelists never intends its violence to be decorative...
...The novel used to teach us to resist social pressures...
...On the contrary...
...To all these temptations, however, Black Humor stays cool...
...The novels stay coolly "humorous," murderously farcical, coldly zany, cosmically slapsticky...
...Black Humor does not differ in its rejection of affluence, but only in rejecting it affluently...
...Given the wretchedness and folly of our century, a genuinely scathing blackcomic view would be a welcome purgative...
...Sometimes, as in Fitzgerald or Mailer, he even has the imagination and nerve to want to conquer and enjoy them...
...feeling cheated, he could turn into a deadly enemy of his society...
...It wants to be utterly remorseless toward all the pieties and proprieties...
...Needless to say, any American novel of worth has resisted the same cultural corruptions...
...If we can't have tragic poets, we could certainly use some Swifts...
...We may now have to learn sobriety and plainness so we can resist at least some of our novels...
...But Black Humor's violence, though tiresomely inflated, is passive...
...The iciest novel in American literature, Melville's The Confidence Man, is itself a "comically" uncanny and savage assault on national and cosmic fraud...
...It becomes clear that one genuinely new aspect of Black Humor is its appearance in the novel...
...Nihilism becomes a mere literary convention...
...It is a generation of college graduates, with higher education assumed at birth...
...The truth is that Black Humor disappoints because it is not as pitilessly black or comic as it pretends to be...
...It is only there, a vast middle-class moonscape...
...All these novels are inconceivable without the hoary themes behind them of absurdity, alienation, nihilism, and the exhaustion of an age...
...It is no paradox...
...Black Humor exploits the existential style without the substance...
...By contrast, the saddest side of Black Humor is that it can find no compliments to pay its enemy...
...ANATOMY OF BLACK HUMOR B B UT IT MAY BE AS IRRELEVANT to talk about Black Humor in terms of Auschwitz as to compare Barth or Pynchon to a Russian satirist like Sinyaysky...
...The old-fashioned novelist is rarely indifferent to sex or power: they pull at him ferociously...
...Indeed, the grand theme of Black Humor is nothing else than fraud...
...One can call Black Humor a literature of the academy even while admitting that it takes up the American novel's homely themes of sex, money, loneliness, and the rat-race...
...The older American novelist is often described as antiintellectual, when in fact he is usually antiacademic...
...Black Humor instead seems to be wrestling with something subtler, more insidiously shapeless—American culture in all its permissive restrictions and glossy emptiness...
...In short, Black Humor would like to be a pitiless comedy...
...The point is not sheer learn BURTON FELDMAN ing, but the attitude held toward learning...
...This ambivalence shows up again in Black Humor's obsession with violence...
...Sinyavsky satirizes an unmistakably powerful and dangerous political regime...
...It can afford to be zany or inhumanly aloof, out of it, punitive with impunity...
...Purdy portrays the most intense events with a calculated deadness that stalemates his subject...
...In turn, Black Humor Americanizes existentialism into a merciless anarchism...
...Existentialism has always spoken for commitment...
...For Black Humor has little or nothing to do with what lies behind existentialism as nourishing and steadying forces—Kierkegaard's Christianity, Nietzsche's aspiration to greatness, or Sartre's and Camus' experience during the Resistance...
...For all the violence of its assault on American culture, Black Humor gives no sense that this enemy is worth attacking...
...For the first time, we may have an intelligentsia at work in the American novel...
...Neither Melville nor Sinyaysky demeans his themes...
...By comparison, Black Humor makes such commitment—unspecific as it is—seem like the Ten Commandments...
...What results from this hot-and-cold douche is an enigma...
...his independence of insight as well as parochialism of judgment rise from this...
...No one will get hurt...
...Melville was genuinely erudite, and the rest were scarcely ignoramuses...
...Black Humor however springs from affluence, not deprivation...
...The important writers are John Barth, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon—but also James Purdy, Joseph Heller, J. P. Donleavy, Bruce Friedman, John Hawkes, and Terry Southern (according to really ambitious critics, there is even a Grand Tradition which includes everybody good from Andy Warhol and Voltaire back to Aristophanes) . The label fits some of these writers poorly, but generally they do share a new mood and manner...
...It wishes to reform but also to indulge us...
...Melville's later and bitter obscurity may provide a clue here, as may Sinyaysky's recent imprisonment for "subversion...
...to scourge us and yet leave us comfortably what we were, neutralized...
...Black Humor is our most knowing and sophisticated novel...
...But something seems to be going wrong...
...Committed only to detachment, Black Humor can never be betrayed or duped or ever be wrong...
...It is violence stylized, theatricalized, overblown—but static...
...But the strangest result is this: the effect of all this savage gesture and cold comedy is disappointingly mild, even harmlessly "literary...
...Auschwitz is after all an unmistakable horror...
...The power of their work springs in part from their ability to make us feel the really formidable stature of the enemy...
...Melville's ferocity could convey awesome energy because it was an active force...
...It may be goodbye to all that...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
