9. The Perspectives of Negation: The Satiric, the Grotesque, the Monstrous, Farce and their Attenuation by , , and the Comic Mode

We will conclude the book with a brief discussion of the perspectives of incongruity and negation, , the grotesque, the monstrous, farce, and their attenuation by , play, irony, and the comic mode. These modes of fiction need a more extensive analysis against the background of their own history. There is no space here for such a comprehensive treatment, which will be furnished in another book. Postmodern fiction is a self-reflexive art-form, with a keen suspicion of the referential function of language, and therefore without any stable relationship to the external reality or to previously accepted codes of production. Literary standards and rules are exposed as the conventional and artificial, frequently clichéd formulas they are; our normal expectations of temporal and thematic progression and univocal meaning are suspended and shown up in their artifice. Self-reflexivity has its own narrative perspectives. Our study has emphasized the narrative attitudes that correspond to the self-consciousness of the novel and to the doubts of author, narrator, or character about the world and their own art. They are the critical stances that arise out of sheer incongruity and lay bare the deficits of society in morals, standards, and beliefs, in knowledge and under- standing. We will here emphasize the postmodern use of these perspectives of incongruity and deconstruction, and their interaction. It may suffice to note at this point that all the perspectives mentioned have a more or less independent status as conceptualizations of both attitudes and modes of writing. As such they have the advantage of designating both general human viewpoints and literary categories. By relating the different stances of evaluation with one another in a chain of categories, the scheme of perspectives provides for transitions and overlaps and thus becomes more flexible. Though the satiric, the grotesque, the parodic, and the comic modes are understood as models of understanding with 606 From Modernism to Postmodernism inherent structures of their own, with different profiles of contradiction and negativity, they all depend on a basis of incongruity and have a similar dualistic structure. Satire thus aims at criticism of social deformation from a safe value-point; the grotesque grows out of satire when no value-horizon any longer fits that which is being done; it denotes the inexplicable deformation of humans by humans; farce may render the grotesque “lightly; “the monstrous is an outgrowth of the grotesque, denotes the ineffable extremity of evil. The common base makes their interaction possible and attractive, while the more or less sharp edge provides for variability and change. The attitudes of play, irony, and the comic mode are means of attenuating the stricter modes of negation, satire, the grotesque, and the monstrous. They prepare the ground for a multiplication and superimposition of attitudes and viewpoints and the resulting complexities of the postmodern text. Traditional definitions of satire often lump the comic and the satiric together into one category, naming as targets of satire the duality of Folly and Vice: “individual and collective villainy, cowardice and hypocrisy” (A. Clark 36), “vice and folly” (37), “hypocrisy, vanity and folly” (Feinberg 38), “folly and vulgarity” (Kernan 1959, 14), “idiocy and viciousness” (Kernan 1971, 4), “folly and evil” (Quintana 261), “falsehood” (Sutherland 11). The combination of folly and vice as target areas tends to subsume the comic view under the satiric one, as was common after the Renaissance and up to the eighteenth century, or to subordinate the satiric to the comic, as nineteenth-century theorists, Meredith and Bergson for instance, frequently did (Bergson, “Laughter”). Furthermore, satire may be seen as subservient to humor, the latter being conceived of as a humanizing and aestheticizing perspective, which might keep satire from becoming mere invective and give it aesthetic form; or satire may appear as an intellectual literary form running counter to the emotionally synthesizing effect of humor, while maintaining, nevertheless, the ability to include humor by blunting its own denunciatory edge. Finally, satire may be eliminated altogether as a literary category, a possibility that Horace had prophetically suggested and that Hegel in fact had proposed, because its critical stance allegedly is too aggressively subjective or too directly related to reality and because its supposedly one-dimensional didacticism runs counter to the growing complexity of literary forms