I figure I've been doing a lot of fun, in-depth textual analysis on this old blog, so I feel the need to meet my sweeping comparison quota of a huge theme. As you can probably tell by my post, this topic would be the role of humor in the books we've read so far. In fact, I'll be tackling this very same issue in my research paper, so I'd like to outline my conception of comedy in each novel we've been through in this class. In doing this, one sees trends of how each author's use of humor discusses what it means to write an African-American novel.
Native Son is a bold, calculated, dreary, observant, powerful analysis of the predetermined paths white supremacy enforces upon black people in every aspect of life. In its pointed protest however, Wright's progenitor of protest fiction is rendered basically humorless. This exposure of soul-crushing racism, impossible racial dilemmas, and inevitable failure really has no room for it, as Wright's own stance on what a novel written by a black person should be involves pointing straight at the blatant injustice that African-Americans face from white society every single day. As a consequence, the novel is an experimental exercise to highlight the things black people are simply forced out of, and leaves some character nuance beyond simple archetypes and individual thought (especially for Bigger Thomas) in the dust.
As a near direct response to the exceedingly dry, shocking template of protest in Native Son, Invisible Man is concerned with what it means to be black, but also focuses on the diversity of black existence, in that not every black person must be funneled into the white-supremacy meat-grinder of oppression like Bigger Thomas. Ellison bestows his characters with plenty of comedic moments and very different backgrounds to exemplify his goal of diversification, and in doing that says that there is a way to use irony and humor to deflect racist forces and eventually overcome them. Laughter is also a symbol of power in the novel, which is occasionally sinister in the case of the Brotherhood, but goes along with the use of humor as an element of agency. Indeed, the comedic profile of Invisible Man with its bizarre scenarios and Narrator's treatment of them creates a more optimistic outlook than Wright's, without forgetting the overlying plight of invisibility and racism as he experiences it.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, unlike the previous two novels, does not outwardly pursue an idea of black existence and elaborate upon it in its pages. Wright had the predestiny that white power structures enforce on the African-American community, Ellison had the undue transference of racial identities on to black people, while Hurston in essence writes an entertaining homage to her background and the characters that inhabited it. The melding of formal English and dialectic turns-of-phrase, along with the vibrant members of the black community she depicts, allude to humor and comedy as a language in itself. One criticism of her novel, besides the absence of racial themes and injustice, is the possible minstrelsy of her more comedy-driven characters, as if they're being held up for a white audience to laugh at the expense of. To me at least, the book is meant to be entertaining, and these black characters that show up in Janie's journey are used to further expose the overlooked sense of humor the black communities have.
In this class, a conversation of humor would not be complete without mention of White Boy Shuffle. As I touched on in my previous post, the book is an extremely intricate satire of modern black life, and though it is absolutely hilarious, it still asks huge questions of the audience, in how funny can this content be with such hopeless depiction of black life. The book is ostensibly about comedy from the African-American perspective, and how exaggerating the landscape has readers walking the line between laughter and sadness of the characters' realities. I'm still bummed out from Beatty's ending to the novel, where after all the comedy of Gunnar's narrative is lost in complete surrender to racism.
So how do y'all like my generalizations? I'm kind of using this post to organize my thoughts before undertaking the comparison of humor in the literary criticism world as well. Hopefully some of my ideas come across in some quick summary like this.
P.S. Seriously though, there's an almost linear progression to how much each book is about comedic material. From 0 to like 99% in just 4 books.
What I find the most interesting is that all of these novels manage to get their point across, be their own sort of protest novel, despite a lack or excess of humor. I think that White Boy Shuffle's ability to portray it's greater point, while keeping the reader hooked with endless oneliners is a great way to show that African American literature can be both enjoyable to read and also stimulating towards social issues.
ReplyDeleteYou summarized the upward trend of humorous content in the novels we've read in class nicely. I felt the lack of humor in Native Son made it very powerful, but the humor in the later novels made me connect with the characters better. Looking back at Native Son, I can see that Wright intends for Bigger to represent the perception of the black race, any other black man in the same situation would react the same way Bigger does. But in later novels, with Janie and Gunnar, I get to know each character as a person, and that makes them just as powerful.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your generalizations. But one difference that I found interesting was the type of humor in The White Boy shuffle compared to the type of humor in Invisible Man. In The White Boy shuffle the humor seemed more focused at the reader rather than having meaning directly to the characters themselves. Conversely The laughter in Invisible Man was more focus on the power dynamic, such as the laughter after the "mugging." It shows really well how an author can use a simple think like humor to show many different things.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree on your distinctions. Ellison's humor is mostly at the expense of his characters, which displays a power dynamic between the often hapless inhabitants of Invisible Man to the observing reader. The White Boy Shuffle is much more about humor itself, and how far readers are willing to laugh at Beatty's very dark sense of it. However, I'd say humor isn't quite "simple" like you said, it's one of the more unusual and complicated things about human existence. But I do understand your use of simple in the vein of it being a general concept of sorts.
DeleteYour comments on the "evolution" of ironic or satirical humor over the course of these novels does reflect a general tendency in African American Literature over the last 70 years or so. As with any generalization, there are exceptions, but the primary mode for African American fiction now is absurdist or satirical humor, often interspersed among plots that are deadly serious in their subject matter. The "angry" protest novel, epitomized by Wright, has given way to a more playful and subversive kind of comedic writing: think of Ishmael Reed from History as Fiction last year. Beatty's novels all fit this category, as do the works of Kiese Laymon, Mat Johnson, Percival Everett, and others (not to mention the importance of stand-up comedy and sketch TV, from Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle).
ReplyDeleteuh thanks dude!
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ReplyDelete