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Laughter Without Humor: Affective Passages Through Post-War Culture

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Laughter Without Humor: Affective Passages Through Post-War Culture Laughter without Humor: Affective Passages through Post-War Culture by Fran McDonald Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Matthew Taylor ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses ___________________________ Joseph Donahue Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 ABSTRACT Laughter without Humor: Affective Passages through Post-War Culture by Fran McDonald Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Matthew Taylor ___________________________ Michael Valdez Moses ___________________________ Joseph Donahue An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 Copyright by Fran McDonald 2015 Abstract There is a scene in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale in which Offred, eponymous handmaid to the totalitarian theocracy that now governs America, is overwhelmed by the sudden need to laugh. Spasms wrack her body. She crams her hands into her mouth, she fears she will vomit, she imagines she is giving birth. Finally, well aware that her convulsions would register as subversion to a regime that polices bodies and supervises affects, Offred crawls into a cupboard in an effort to “compose herself.” Laughter without Humor arose from this passage, from the inexplicable laughter that overwhelms Offred’s disciplined body and demolishes her carefully composed self. The suspicion that laughter challenges the self-contained “I” has always been buried in our idioms: the subject “dissolves” in laughter, the individual proliferates suddenly into a “barrel” or “bundle” of laughs, ontological boundaries are breached as we “roar” or “bark” with laughter. In the twentieth-century, laughter appears across a wide variety of artistic forms as a vigorous affective force capable of convulsing being and exploding calcified structures of thought. This project examines the interrelationship between fictional depictions of humorless laughter and the dissolution and reconfiguration of the subject in poststructuralist theory. The field of humor studies, which counts Aristotle, Kant, and Freud among its contributors, avoids laughter’s irrational properties and instead offers scientific iv reasons—physiological, evolutionary, and psychological—as to why we laugh. In contrast, Laughter without Humor seeks to understand laughter on its own terms by posing an alternate question: what does laughter do ? In four chapters, I consider four discrete strains of humorless laughter: the dankly corporeal flow of a specifically female “dangerous laughter” (Chapter 1), the blustering wave of “ecstatic laughter” associated with mystic experience (Chapter 2), an infectious “grotesque laughter” that tosses the individual back and forth between ontological categories with uncanny fervor (Chapter 3), and the shattering shriek of “atomic laughter” that indexes the experience of total nuclear annihilation (Chapter 4). In particular I focus on literary work from William James, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, Nathanael West, Henri Michaux, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kubrick, Margaret Atwood, and Steven Millhauser; and on philosophical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Glissant, Brian Massumi, and Eugenie Brinkema. I ultimately argue that the messy burst of laughter disturbs the intelligibility of both self and text. In so doing, it clears a space to imagine new, provisional models of personhood that are based on affective entanglement rather than rational self-containment. v to my mother and father Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii Preface............................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One. Dangerous Laughter in American Literature ................................................ 13 In The Shadow of the Asylum ............................................................................................ 19 Passionate Philosophy or, Reading Otherwise ................................................................ 22 Hysteria .................................................................................................................................. 35 The Rhythm That Laughs You............................................................................................ 42 Dangerous Laughter ............................................................................................................ 50 Chapter Two. Ecstatic Laughter and Humour Noir .............................................................. 62 André Breton and Humour Noir ....................................................................................... 70 Georges Bataille and Ecstatic Laughter ............................................................................. 75 Nitrous Oxide Philosophy ................................................................................................... 83 Henri Michaux and Transreality ........................................................................................ 94 Chapter Three. Desires in Motion: Grotesque Laughter in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust . .................................................................................................................................... 110 The Affective Dimensions of The Day of the Locust ..................................................... 112 Self-Reflexive Laughter and Aesthetic Fixity ................................................................. 121 Grotesque Laughter and the Burning of Los Angeles ................................................... 132 Epilogue: The Siren Wail ................................................................................................... 149 Chapter Four. Shattered Thought, Shattered Being: Atomic Laughter, American Black Humor, and Planetary Thinking. ............................................................................................ 152 Black Humor, or, Thinking the Unthinkable .................................................................. 158 Laughing in the (Missile) Gap .......................................................................................... 170 “See The Cat? See The Cradle?” ....................................................................................... 181 Planetary Thinking ............................................................................................................. 193 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 206 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 223 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, Priscilla Wald, for the unwavering support and generosity she has shown me during my time at Duke. Our conversations over the last six years, which have taken place in corridors and coffee shops, museums and forests, across Thanksgiving dinner and the Atlantic Ocean, have been instrumental in shaping this project in particular and my scholarly aspirations in general. I am forever grateful to Tom Ferraro, who first sparked my interest in laughter by pressing a copy of The Day of the Locust into my hands. His irrepressible kindness and warmth has helped me sustain my own passion for literature during the writing of this dissertation. My thanks also to Matthew Taylor, who urged me to deepen and develop the theoretical aspects of this project, and without whose guidance I would surely have floundered. I am especially grateful to Joe Donahue and Michael Valdez Moses for offering to read my dissertation, and for their valuable insights and suggestions for improvement; thank you. I owe an enormous intellectual debt to Fred Moten, whose early comments and criticisms caused me to transform the trajectory and redefine the stakes of my work. Funding provided by the James B. Duke Fellowship, the Pope Family Fellowship, and the English Department have made it possible for me to complete this dissertation. I am particularly grateful to the English Department for financing my travel to various conferences, where many portions of this dissertation first found an audience. This dissertation was produced not in seclusion but at various houses, cafés, picnic tables, and pubs scattered around Durham and Chapel Hill. I am grateful to those of my friends and colleagues who have typed across from me during these sessions. Thanks in particular to Sean Mannion for enduring my sudden outbursts of frustration or restlessness with an admirable stoicism, and to Brenna Casey for many things, not least her willingness to struggle
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