An Eden with No Snake in It: Pure Comedy and Chaste Camp in The

An Eden With No Snake in It: Pure Comedy and Chaste Camp in the English Novel by Joshua Gibbons Striker Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Victor Strandberg, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Katherine Hayles, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades ___________________________ Michael Moses 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 2019 ABSTRACT An Eden With No Snake in It: Pure Comedy and Chaste Camp in the English Novel by Joshua Gibbons Striker Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Victor Strandberg, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Katherine Hayles, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades ___________________________ Michael Moses 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 2019 Copyright by Joshua Gibbons Striker 2019 Abstract In this dissertation I use an old and unfashionable form of literary criticism, close reading, to offer a new and unfashionable account of the literary subgenre called camp. Drawing on the work of, among many others, Susan Sontag, Rita Felski, and Peter Lamarque, I argue that P.G. Wodehouse, E.F. Benson, and Angela Thirkell wrote a type of pure comedy I call chaste camp. Chaste camp is a strange beast. On the one hand it is a sort of children’s literature written for and about adults; on the other hand it rises to a level of literary merit that children’s books, even the best of them, cannot hope to reach. Since 1964, the year in which Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” was first published, literary camp has been defined as exclusively queer, and therefore unchaste and entirely grown-up, and in the process the purity of its comedy—and most of its comedy, as well—has been ignored. I trace these two unfortunate developments to the rise of critique, a method of literary criticism defined by its cynicism about literature’s relationship to the world outside of art. A novel, play, or poem that is not interrogating the status quo is, according to practitioners of critique, doomed to sustain it. Reading Wodehouse, Benson, and Thirkell closely, rather than subjecting them to critique, shows that chaste camp offers a superior, artificial and therefore very durable alternative to the status quo—as most good literature does. To insist that literature adjust itself to the ever-changing aims of critique, and fit itself into the real world, is to demand that it be something unliterary. The wonderful paradox of pure comedy, of which chaste camp is perhaps the preeminent type, iv is that its artificiality makes it timeless. It is in the world, but emphatically not of the world. These, then, are my conclusions—that Wodehouse, Benson, Thirkell, and Evelyn Waugh wrote camp; that camp is a type of comedy; that there is a kind of camp that has gone unnamed, whose name is chaste camp; that chaste camp is a kind of pure comedy; finally, that close reading in combination with the judicious use of literary scholarship reveals these and other truths that critique, in its slavish devotion to novelty and fashion, keeps hidden. v Dedication To Debra, who made it possible. vi Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................ vii Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 1. Camp and the Canon ..................................................................................... 12 1.1 The Canon Then and Now (but Mostly Then) ................................... 15 1.2 Aesthetics and the Canon; or, What About Beauty? ......................... 23 1.3 The Tinsel on the Tree: Can Camp Be Canonical? .......................... 50 2. Fifth-Formers Forever: P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves ...................... 54 2.1 Chaste, Not Pure: How Camp Works in Wodehouse ........................ 67 2.2 The Seriousness of a Schoolboy ...................................................... 83 3. Camp by Accident: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ......................... 103 3.1 The Book of Common Snobbery ..................................................... 113 3.2 Heaven Can’t Wait .......................................................................... 126 4. The Joy of Insincerity: E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia ................................ 128 4.1 Queen of Camp: Lucia as Head Boy ............................................... 135 4.2 La Bella Lingua: Baby Talk in Benson ………………………………. 146 4.3 Bad Detective: Chaste Camp and the Virtues of Concealment ..…. 159 5. A Good Game: Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire ………………...…………..…. 165 5.1 Toying Your Life Away: Chaste Camp in the Courtship Game ....... 172 5.2 A Safe and Comfortable Man: The Taming of David Leslie ..……... 178 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….. 197 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 204 vii Acknowledgements Without the kind and patient help of Katherine Hayles and Victor Strandberg, this dissertation, if it had been written at all, would have taken a much less pleasant form. I also thank Michael Moses and Kathy Psomiades for sitting on my committee, and Maryscot Mullins, who so cheerfully shepherded me from coursework through preliminary exams to this final stage of my life as a graduate student. Finally, I must thank my wife Debra, for her unfailing love, patience, and generosity of spirit over the past five and a half years. viii Introduction The great task of the literary critic is I think to celebrate literature as literature, to say why it is unique and good and therefore worth reading. Literature is not an occasion for criticism. Criticism is an occasion for better equipping the reader to appreciate good literature. Appreciation, as I understand it, is enjoyment plus a certain kind of attentiveness, a way of observing how the writer achieves the best, rarest, and most remarkable of his literary effects. My method, therefore, is celebratory. I am conducting what Glen Cavaliero calls a “celebratory investigation” into my subject: camp, the “playful, anti- serious” subgenre of comic literature (Cavaliero ix; Sontag Reader 116). The “whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious,” for camp is “the sensibility of failed seriousness” (Sontag Reader 115). This fact has been lost in the academic study of camp. I mean to find it again, to reclaim camp for comedy. I will do this by showing that P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, along with some of those of E.F. Benson and Angela Thirkell, belong to a type of pure comedy I call chaste camp. This is a kind of camp that until now has gone unnamed. I will also make the case that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is a badly distorted reflection of chaste camp. My chapter on Waugh is comparative; it allows me to shine a slightly different light on my subject, by comparing Waugh’s version of camp to that of Wodehouse, Benson, and Thirkell. It is surprising that Brideshead Revisited should be camp, but not chaste. Waugh’s adoration of Wodehouse suggests that he, too, would write chaste camp. The catch is, Waugh did not know that he was writing campily. He wrote seriously— 1 Brideshead Revisited is “his first major effort not to be funny, to be other than a comic novelist”—and his seriousness failed so spectacularly as to become the sort of unintentional comedy that Sontag calls “naïve, or pure, Camp” (Wykes 168; Sontag Reader 112). This is a “seriousness that fails” (Sontag Reader 112). Failed seriousness perfectly describes critique, the sort of criticism that fills English departments today as does muck a swamp. To the extent that critique requires of its writers and readers what Rita Felski calls “a pervasive cynicism and negativity,” as well as the sort of puffed-upness that ignores or disparages the sheer pleasure of reading a good story well told, critique fails (Limits 12). It fails by shrinking literature to “againstness” and ignoring all “other salient desires, motives, agendas that drive acts of reading” (Limits 17). To emphasize “the ‘de’ prefix,” meaning the power of literature “to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the “re” prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception”, is to “shortchange the significance of art” (Limits 17). Works of art do not only subvert but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation). (Limits 17) The laughter that comes from unaffected pleasure is the best of all unexpected surges of affinity. It is the perfect blend of thought and feeling, the great expression of agreement and affection. Pure laughter is a purely literary response, and so it is the great enemy of critique. Critique demands that 2 literature leave the literary realm and enter real life, that drab, dismal place. If it is not “ ‘interrogating’ the status

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