Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“The Comrades are Sweet, but They Never Chat, They Make Speeches All the Time”: On Laughter and Linearity in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love

2023; Routledge; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2023.2239696

1545-5866

Lewis MacLeod,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. “Challenge” not in the sense that Mitford ever “challenges” anything. She never stages any direct kind of confrontation, never “takes issue” with this or that critical method or value; she simply evades all of them. She is “a challenge” rather than “a challenger,” a figure of frustration for critical impulses toward seriousness, knowledge and containment.2. NB: the gender construction is Jacobson’s, not mine.3. I originally encountered this example in Michael Billig’s Laughter and Ridicule.4. This deadening effect is at the root of Mitford’s abiding disaffection for the entire 19th century. In The Water Beetle, she bemoans “the heavy atmosphere of the nineteenth century with its messages and meanings, its reforms, its scientific discoveries and German philosophy, [which] fell like a wet blanket on the world, extinguishing the flame of pure pleasure” (92). I was reminded of this passage reading Allan Hepburn’s “The Art of Conversation.”5. In the terms employed by Laurent Berlant and Sianne Ngai, the comic does not reside in this or that formal property but arises (or, better, is enacted) as “a pleasure spectacle of form’s violation” (234).6. This is also what Freud means when he says, “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things” (9).7. This is not to say that “Nazi comedy” did not persist after WWII. In various genres “It’s That Man Again,” Colonel Blimp, even Hogan’s Heroes, continued to find success through the 1960s. Still, I would argue that such comedies were only possible then because the historical reckoning was (more) incomplete. That is, those comedies could only succeed if their fictional worlds were successfully bracketed off from bigger picture, real life, events; in Mitford’s terms, if what “has happened” isn’t permitted to enter the field of vision. In Hogan’s Heroes, for example, Colonel Klink is more in the mode of the bumbling high school principal (with the American soldiers as students) than the mode of military or moral threat. Admittedly, the more recent success of Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit complicates this vision, but Waititi has also been very clear about the many difficulties he faced trying to get the film made; praise for it was not universal. Writing for the New Yorker, Richard Brody called it “the world’s unfunniest comedy,” a film that “sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself,” objecting on precisely the grounds outlined above.8. Hereafter Pursuit of Love to be rendered as PoL.9. For example, even when I write an essay such as this, intended for a specialized academic audience, I still (try to) write in a style designed to distance myself from the comic type of the bloated, “learned,” boring professor. I regard this as a method of convincing the reader that I’m a “good guy,” that I’m trustworthy, down-to-earth, etc. Occasionally, I run into editors who want a more serious, formal style. A minor culture war ensues, in which we both regard each other as preposterous for opposite reasons: because I’m insufficiently serious or because they’re insufficiently relaxed. Even in these cases, though, neither party could easily admit to being humorless.10. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai frame this idea in even more drastic terms: “If we have conflicting views about what should produce empathy, if we don’t finally feel it for the same things, we can find each other shallow and prefer ourselves—but it’s different to disrespect what gives someone pleasure as funny. It’s experienced as shaming, as condescending; as diminishing. It may be that we hold our pleasures closer than our ethics” (242).11. In some ways, this is to return to the issues Northrop Frye was discussing decades ago in A Natural Perspective. One of the key distinctions between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson was that Shakespeare created “plays,” Jonson “Works,” and this originary, conceptual difference is at the root of the triumph of “quick-witted, ignorant Shakespeare [over] ponderous learned Jonson” (22). Jonson’s self-seriousness makes it impossible for him to play; he’s arguing while Shakespeare is ironizing.12. This is what Barry Hertz feels as both terrifying and exhilarating in his review of JoJo Rabbit. The whole movie is balanced (or not!) on the “trickiest tightrope,” always “teetering on the edge of bad taste.”13. Nicola Humble locates something similar in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel. Including Mitford in her list of “middlebrow” women writers, Humble suggests there may be “psychosis beneath [the] ebullient fripperies” (6).14. She later revisits the idea in the following terms: “The point is to wrest from pain a momentary victory in laughter; it makes no other claims” (11).15. Ross is specifically referring to Waugh, though the position applies just as well to Mitford.16. As Billig notes, one of the results of such discursive conflation is a kind of a priori assumption that regressive or “hostile humor” is categorically distinguished from “genuinely funny humor.” Such a distinction “implies that ridicule and mockery, even if they provoke laughter, cannot be genuinely funny” (22). It’s worth noting, however, that, as regards humor anyway, ideological positivism is distinct from political correctness because the former is focussed directly on positive humor, the latter on positive political positions. Political correctness isn’t interested in humor for its own sake; ideological positivism is.17. In one telling exchange, Linda’s lover, Fabrice, asks, “Do you always laugh when you make love?” Linda responds saying, “I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I’m happy and cry when I’m not” (139). This laughter is eruptive and amusing in the same way tears are eruptive and unsettling. Neither has anything to do with a stable state of happiness. I know what Allan Hepburn means when he says, “marriage is not the locus of happiness” for Mitford (“The Fate” 345), but, as Fanny’s observation above makes clear, marriage may well be the locus of happiness; it just isn’t very amusing.18. Scott specifically frames “lightness” in terms of a specific “disinclination to engage with historical and political realities” (12). Mitford’s lightness, then, is of a very particular sort, involved with uncharacteristically heavy materials.19. This impulse-to-engage without any corresponding impulse-to-understand is what Selina Hastings is talking about when she says that, throughout her life, Mitford remained, “politically immature, her opinions too frivolous and too subjective to be taken seriously—a limitation which restrained her not at all in the airing of those opinions” (95). I was reminded of this quotation by Allan Hepburn’s article on diplomacy.20. Scott makes a similar comment about Candide: “the substance of the story [can] only be described as tragic (7). The novel is “an unremitting litany of misfortunes and atrocities, yet Voltaire (whom Mitford admired tremendously) somehow manages to avoid adding … affective weight” (7).21. Again, I think of Frye and his notion that “all art is conventionalized, but where the convention is most obvious and obtrusive the sense of play … is at its strongest” (4–5). That is, the backdrop of convention provides the context for the author’s playful departure from it.22. The procedural similarities between the novel’s opening and concluding pages, then, ought to be clear, but even this sameness isn’t a sign of stasis so much as endlessly renewing opposition, of the ways in which things constantly double-back rather than accumulate or move forward.23. When his daughter runs away to California, it’s understood by everyone that Matthew could never manage the travel necessary to find and/or retrieve her. The effete Davey goes instead.24. Joke may be the wrong word here; it’s difficult to imagine the Kroesigs laughing. They simply regard Matthew as anachronistic and absurd.25. These qualities will later be revisited in The Blessing via the figure of Heck Dexter. As Allan Hepburn rightly puts it, Dexter’s relentless, linear, thesis-driven conversation “reduces complexities to homilies”; the result is that “conversation” ceases to be conversation in any meaningful sense; in social scenarios where he ought to be “conversing, he sermonizes” instead (“Conversation” 173).26. It is not a coincidence that Lord Merlin, a marker of irony and dynamism, takes the reverse approach: “his two black whippets wore diamond necklaces” (38).27. Somewhere back behind this observation lurks Kant’s distinction between “the good” and “the beautiful.” We affirm things that are good under general principles because we must. “The concepts even number and table already exist and unambiguously provide the rule my judgment follows…. There is little room for disagreement” (426). The beautiful does not subscribe to the conceptual. “Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined and called foliage; these have no significance, depend on no determinate concept, and yet we like them” (433). As with love, “favor is the only free liking” (434).28. Given the above, it’s not, perhaps, surprising that Fabrice is thoroughly up-to-date on “What’s Hot.” When he first meets Linda, he alerts her to the fact that her suit is “last year’s. Jackets are getting longer you will find” (PoL 137). In context, this suggests not that he’s superficial but that he’s been paying attention, that he’s been observing and processing his life on a season-to-season basis.