The Comic Bildungsroman: Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, and Philip Roth
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The Comic Bildungsroman: Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, and Philip Roth By Matthew David Seidel A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Eric Falci, Chair Professor Katherine Snyder Professor Luba Golburt Fall 2010 Abstract The Comic Bildungsroman: Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, and Philip Roth by Matthew David Seidel Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Eric Falci, Chair This dissertation argues that the relationship between comedy and the Bildungsroman is symbiotic rather than subversive, indicative of a fundamental affinity between mode and genre. The Bildungsroman is a genre supremely anxious about the social, professional, and romantic definition its heroes seek, an anxiety that leaves it highly vulnerable to the incursions of comedy. Definition is about limits, ends, bounds, and stability. I argue that comedy attacks all these things mercilessly, and finds in the Bildungsroman’s preoccupation with definition, limits, and bounds a fertile ground for its own forces of indefinition, limitlessness, and boundlessness. Therefore, small, sometimes trivial examples of comic indefinition can be traced back to the larger definitional stakes of the Bildungsroman form. The comic twentieth-century novels I take up, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and The Loved One, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Company, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater, feed on the Bildungsroman’s ever-present, latent comedy. Comic Bildungsromans, anti-Bildungsromans, parodic Bildungsromans: a rose is a rose is a rose. Whatever the name, the comic Bildungsroman doesn’t so much distort the image of the Bildungsroman as reflect its truest form. 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank those who have helped me along during my own unintentionally comic Bildungsroman: Mom, Dad, Eileen, Dina, Daniel, Timmy, Mickey, Rachel, and my fellow English graduate students who helped make five years fly by. Thanks also to Eric Falci for gregariously guiding me through teaching and writing, and to Katherine Snyder and Luba Golburt for being such warm, insightful readers. i Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Twentieth-Century Comic Bildungsromans Defined man is an anomaly; defined man yields satire. (Kenner, The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy) Plato had defined the human being as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s human being.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails.’ (Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers) Diogenes’s demonstration of the literal inadequacy of Plato’s attempt to define a human being unwittingly reveals a more suitable definition for man than a bipedal, featherless animal having broad nails: man as a defining animal who can never be adequately defined. The faulty Socratic alembic appears doomed to a potentially endless series of qualifications and distinctions which, even as they multiply, get us no closer to a satisfactory definition of either human or fowl. I begin with this little fable about comic indefinition to set up my contention that there is a seed of comedy in every coming-of- age tale. This contention supports another: that the comic Bildungsroman is not a variant but the essential form of novels concerned with representing the aims and prospects of human development. If man is a defining animal who can never be defined, then the Bildungsroman, the genre about how man defines himself vis-à-vis society, must, as Hugh Kenner mordantly remarks, yield a form of comedy: satire. More precisely, the Bildungsroman is a genre supremely anxious about the social, professional, and romantic definition its heroes seek, an anxiety that leaves it highly vulnerable to the incursions of comedy. Definition is about limits, ends, bounds, and stability. I argue that comedy attacks all these things mercilessly, and finds in the Bildungsroman’s preoccupation with definition, limits, and bounds a fertile ground for its own forces of indefinition, limitlessness, and boundlessness.1 In its understanding of comedy as a genre of indefinition and boundlessness, my study is indebted to the theoretical framework of Stephen Booth’s King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. Booth comes at the issue of generic definition from an etymological angle (as I will in my discussion of the comic elements in the modern Bildungsroman). In his essay on tragedy and the limits of Aristotelian definition, Booth argues that “‘definition’ (from finis, a limit, end) of tragedy is a contradiction in terms; and ‘tragedy,’ because it is a “term” (from terminus, a boundary, limit, end), denies the essence of what it labels: an experience of the fact of indefinition” (85). According to Booth, “successful dramatic tragedy…makes tragedy bearable; it lets us face truth beyond categories by presenting that unmanageable and undiminished truth inside the irrationally comforting framework of the absolutely man-made, man-suited, and man- 1 In King Lear, Tragedy and Indefinition, which I will discuss in more detail shortly, Stephen Booth points out that definition comes from the Latin finis: a limit, end. 1 limited order of the play (86). In that same study, Booth extends his discussion of generic definition to comedy, and notes that “the closer I felt myself coming to a definition of tragedy, the closer my generalizations came to defining comedy (74). Thus when he turns his attention to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Booth claims that “the largest fact of the work—its failure to reach its generically appointed end—is manifested in its smallest elements” (63). Booth’s broader point is that generic signals are “opportune scaffolds,” ready-made frameworks of “arbitrary limits” (61) which the artist manipulates. I take a similar position in my contention that the relationship between comedy and the Bildungsroman is symbiotic rather than subversive, indicative of a fundamental affinity between mode and genre. I argue against the prevailing view that the modern Bildungsroman arises from a moment of cultural rupture, a result, so the story goes, of the “breakdown of traditional forms of identity and of normative, harmonious socialization” (Castle 5). To argue for such a stark cultural and artistic shift would be to take seriously the bloviating protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J. Reilly, in his claims for the unique status of his never-completed autobiography: “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip” (6). Reilly’s contention that “once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen” (379) is only half-right. The novel is in fact an intensification of the conflict between culture and the individual that all Bildungsromans dramatize, and this intensification manifests itself in an intensified combat with (in his case physical) limits; A Confederacy of Dunces’s comic hero is different only in degree, not kind, from other, less absurd heroes. “Forced to function” (51) in a century which he loathes, Reilly is a walking burlesque who physically represents and resists confinement, his “whole being…ready to burst” (2). The novel is one long test of boundaries: Reilly’s hunting cap “squeeze[s]” his “fleshy balloon of a head” as its earflaps fail to contain the ear hairs sticking “out either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once” (1); Reilly’s “bulging boots” struggle to contain his “swollen feet” (2); his stomach is filled with “trapped gas, gas which had character and resented its confinement” (29-30); faced with being committed to a mental hospital, Reilly fears that the effort to “fix him up” (384) will land him “crammed into a cell three feet square” (384), though he is confident he would be “able to smash out all of [the] windows” (393) of the car the hospital sends for him. A Confederacy of Dunces, and by extension the comic Bildungsroman, is ultimately less concerned with us taking seriously the contention that “with the Breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy” (28) than with exploring the comic possibilities of the question posed to Reilly by Myrna, his only friend: “Where will you ever end?” (248). The explicitly comic or parodic twentieth century novels I take up, Decline and Fall, The Loved One, Murphy, Company, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Sabbath’s Theater, feed on the Bildungsroman’s latent tendency towards systemic incompletion. The dominant critical explanation for the explosion of “anti-Bildungsromans” in the twentieth century is that since the Bildungsroman is a form best-suited to transmit ideology, the comic Bildungsroman arose to block that transmission, to challenge the production and reception of prevailing social norms. Rather than viewing genre and sub-genre as two combatants in an ideological arms race, I identify the shared comedic forces in each to argue that anti-Bildungsroman is a redundancy; the genre’s parodies don’t seek to refute 2 or work against its serious expressions, but rather opportunistically exploit the form’s ever-present, latent comedy. Comic Bildungsromans, anti-Bildungsromans, parodic Bildungsromans: a rose is a rose is a rose. Whatever the name, the comic Bildungsroman doesn’t so much distort the image of the Bildungsroman as reflect its truest form. By tracing the ways that Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, and Philip Roth use the comic Bildungsroman form at different points of their careers, I wish to identify the pervasive forces of comic indefinition, demonstrate the affinity between genre and mode, and contest Henri Bergson’s notion that the comic artist is incapable of Bildung. Bergson’s famous essay on comedy exempts the comic artist from development: “However interested a dramatist may be in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, to the extent of trying to discover his own.