The Irresponsible Self

"Although I have a feeling he would hate that book. I’ve never seen him review a book about pirates in an adventure with anybody… Yes. And one of the things Wood talks about is the way that laughter is used in a way that says a lot about the author. So that Evelyn Waugh uses laughter in an often contemptuous way, while authors like Shakespeare , Dostoyevsky or Chekov use it in a more philanthropic kind of way… And this gets close to what I’m interested in, because what Wood’s also talking about is a fundamental historical shift. With the exception of Shakespeare, who I guess is a big exception, comedy had usually been a judgemental, derisory sort of affair. But what Wood puts his finger on in the late nineteenth century is the emergence of what he calls the comedy of forgiveness, as opposed to the comedy of correction and the satiric mode. Before this shift the comic mode had its roots in a quasi religious idea of correcting people’s faults and passing judgement on them. The books which I’ve chosen do not really stand back in judgement on Bertie Wooster or Mr Pooter or whomever it might be. It would just be incredibly boring if that was all that happened. Too easy, over too quickly. Rather it’s that the person who has all these manifest flaws is still a person who commands our sympathy and identification and recognition. And that this is really a creation of the novel, a secular creation which Wood puts like this: ‘if religious comedy is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who don’t.’ Well Wood has written on Wodehouse. I think in the TLS, and I don’t know why it’s not in that volume. A marvellous piece on Wodehouse. I don’t know. It has something to do with the connection with the way I think of these novels now and the way I used to think of these novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, like science fiction or the Lord of the Ring s or something, where there’s this kind of – a fantastic space opened up within the ordinary, where people are made of mirth instead of flesh and bone. It’s that magical thinking, that magical thinking that everybody is allowed to indulge in for that short space of time in which the novel is allowed to persist, in spite of the pressures and the problems of reality. I mean in all these novels there’s a kind of background pressure of anxiety which is always just left there in the shadows. Just a little bit. And is always about to fatally puncture the pretentions of the characters but never quite does."