Subject: Re: no laughing, please, I'm an American
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 12:51:24 EDT
Three things, Scottie...
1. Once we've shown we get the joke, what do we say after that?
2. You need to blame a bunch of Brits for this situation at least a
little bit -- esp. guys like Matthew Arnold, who wanted to use
literature as a replacement for traditional religion. T.E. Hulme also
observed that English Romanticism was "spilt religion," the religious
impulse carried over into other areas of life, esp. literature. When
you make all literature a sacred text, it becomes hard to get the joke.
3. It'd be a sad irony to argue too hard with you on a list dedicated to
an author to dedicated at least one of his works to "amateur readers"
and hated critics...
Jim
Robert Bowman wrote:
>
> Why do Americans find it so hard to see the joke?
> Or is it just Americans who write to listservs?
>
> I belong to three 'literary' lists - those for Jane Austen,
> Hemingway & Salinger (& also, at one time, Trollope)
> - where the great majority of contributors have been,
> at least from where I'm sitting, Transatlantic.
>
> Austen wrote highly contrived, romantic stories about
> young women catching husbands - but all of them in
> a wonderfully elegant, satiric style where the humour is
> what raises the whole enterprise from the trivial to the level
> of genius. But on Austen-L all you ever read are endless
> technical discussions of the old English inheritance laws
> or solemn, po-faced agonisings over the deep moral dilemmas
> of her light hearted heroines.
>
> Same with Hemingway, whose every second line was an ironic
> joke. (He himself once remarked to the effect that though we
> are all growing out of the common earth, the people he cherished
> the most were those where the soil had been liberally fertilised
> with jokes.) But how many laughs on Heming-L? Nary a one.
> Only a grim hunt for symbolic fish or a lot of balls about the tragedy
> of the corrida - or recipes for rum cocktails.
>
> And what about us here?
>
> I wonder is the problem that most Yanks come to Salinger during
> their school years? Is it possible that Holden is embraced & identified
> with by readers who, as adolescents, are at the most intensely
> self-regarding period of their lives - a period when they are least
> capable of laughing at themselves?
>
> I was almost thirty when I first encountered Holden. I was
> absolutely ravished by the book: by its hilarity, its wildness,
> its irreverence, its freedom. I was remembering how it had
> been for myself fifteen years earlier - &, ruefully, how in many
> ways it still was.
> But it never occurred to me for one moment that this was
> some kind of poignant tragedy about the tender sensitivity
> & evanescence of youth. Which is how it's usually treated
> hereabouts.
>
> Even when we come to the Glasses (& thank God the Kingdom
> has, in Robbie, at least one other upright man of wisdom)
> although those dreadful caring eyes are beginning to fill with tears,
> there still remains a good deal of the Marx Brothers - from Bessie
> to that marvellous little old bloke with the top hat in the taxi.
>
> I can't put my finger on it, but in one of the recent pieces about
> Salinger one critic, himself an American, made the point that,
> in 'literature', humour is something Americans have never taken
> seriously. That's certainly how these lists feel to an outsider.
> It's like being back in some Victorian classroom where only
> the worthy, the serious & the edifiying is truly acceptable.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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