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'Others Have a Nationality. the Irish and the Jews Have a Psychosis'

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Scuola Dottorale di Ateneo Graduate School Dottorato di ricerca in Lingue, Culture e Società Moderne Ciclo XXVI Anno di discussione 2015 ‘Others have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis’: Identity and humour in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question and Paul Murray’s An Evening of Long Goodbyes SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: LIN/10 Tesi di Dottorato di Sofia Ricottilli, matricola 955797 Coordinatore del Dottorato Tutore del Dottorando Prof. Flavio Gregori Prof. Shaul Bassi 2 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ 6 PART I A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ........................................................................ 8 1.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 9 1.2. The Jews, the Irish, and postcolonial theory ........................................................................ 14 1.3. Stereotypes and humour.......................................................................................................... 24 1.4. Bakhtin‟s hybridity and Bhabha‟s self-ironic jest: two reading keys ................................. 29 PART II ANGLO-JEWRY: IDENTITY AND HUMOUR............................................. 37 2.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 38 2.2. Representations of the Jew in British literature ................................................................... 42 2.2.1. Shylock and The Merchant of Venice .................................................................................. 45 2.2.2. Matthew Arnold‟s Culture and Anarchy............................................................................ 48 2.2.3. Fagin, Trollope‟s Jews and Daniel Deronda ................................................................. 50 2.2.4. Joyce‟s Ulysses: „Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet‟ .............................................. 53 2.3. Gendered projections: the Jewish woman ............................................................................ 59 2.4. Anglo-Jewish writing and rewriting ....................................................................................... 64 2.4.1. Women writers and Israel Zangwill ............................................................................... 64 2.4.2. Julia Frankau and Amy Levy ........................................................................................... 67 2.4.3. Post-war writers ................................................................................................................ 69 2.4.4. Contemporary writers ...................................................................................................... 74 2.5. Jewish humour .......................................................................................................................... 80 2.5.1. Origins: the Bible and the Talmud ................................................................................. 81 2.5.2. Diaspora Jews and the blooming of Yiddish humour ................................................. 85 2.5.3. The Yiddishization of American humour ..................................................................... 94 2.5.4. Jewish humour in Israel and in Britain ........................................................................ 100 3 PART III HOWARD JACOBSON’S THE FINKLER QUESTION ........................ 105 3.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 106 3.2. The Finkler Question ................................................................................................................. 112 3.3. Treslove, an unreliable witness to his own life .................................................................. 117 3.3.1. In search of the Jewish essence .................................................................................... 126 3.4. Finkler, the principled amoralist .......................................................................................... 134 3.5. We‟re all anti-Semites: the Yellow Star mentality .............................................................. 140 3.5.1. It‟s a freak, it‟s a Jew. The protean instability of the Jew .......................................... 148 3.6. When I do comedy, it bleeds ................................................................................................ 151 PART IV THE IRISH COMIC TRADITION ................................................................. 160 4.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 161 4.2. Continuity between the Gaelic tradition and Anglo-Irish literature ............................... 165 4.3. The Irish brogue and the birth of a stereotype .................................................................... 170 4.4. A social perspective on the Irish joke ................................................................................. 174 4.5. The tradition of the comic Irishman ................................................................................... 178 4.5.1. The rustic fool ................................................................................................................. 179 4.5.2. The comic rogue ............................................................................................................. 184 4.5.2.1. The folk hero of the outlaw tradition ................................................................... 184 4.5.2.2. From folklore to literature: William Carleton‟s Phelim O‟Toole ..................... 188 4.5.3. The Stage Irishman ......................................................................................................... 192 4.5.4. The Comic Hero of John M. Synge ............................................................................. 196 4.6. From stage Irishman to stage Gael: the construction of a national identity ................. 202 4.6.1. Joyce and the Anglo-Irish Revival ................................................................................ 205 4.6.2. Urban clowns: Sean O‟Casey and Juno and the Peacock ............................................... 210 4.6.3. Murphy, the ruins of the ruins of the broth of a boy ................................................. 214 4.6.4. Flann O‟Brien, The Joseph K of the Western World ............................................... 217 4.6.5. Tarry Flynn, the wise fool ............................................................................................... 222 4.6.6. From stage Irishman to stage writer: Brendan Behan and The Hostage ................... 225 4 4.7. Comic writing in contemporary fiction ............................................................................... 231 PART V PAUL MURRAY’S AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES ................... 237 5.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 238 5.2. The collapse of the past ........................................................................................................ 244 5.2.1. Amaurot and the big house novel ................................................................................ 244 5.2.2. A cancerous cell of reality .............................................................................................. 249 5.2.3. There‟s Bosnians in my attic! ........................................................................................ 254 5.2.4 Interlude: A charming holiday with W. B. Yeats ......................................................... 260 5.2.5. Architectural salvage: a parody of a parody? ............................................................... 267 5.3. The envy of all of Europe: the Celtic Tiger‟s shadows and lights .................................. 271 5.3.1. From mansion to theatre ............................................................................................... 272 5.3.2. A deeper look at the Celtic Tiger .................................................................................. 275 5.4. „Nothing but a blasted sham‟: Celtic Tiger‟s gnashing fangs ........................................... 284 5.5. Intertextuality and humour ................................................................................................... 292 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 299 APPENDIX 1 AN INTERVIEW WITH HOWARD JACOBSON ............................. 302 APPENDIX 2 AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL MURRAY .......................................... 311 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 321 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Shaul Bassi, who supervised the development and completion of this thesis, for supporting the project, for his encouraging and thought-provoking commentaries to my writing. I do hope this work repays the faith which he has invested in me and this project. I am deeply grateful to Howard Jacobson and Paul Murray for the pleasant conversations we had. Their words have been a real source of inspiration. They have stayed
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