We live in Grim Times. Identities have to be redefined, borders redrawn and histories repossessed. Naturally, these topics and more find their way into novels, short stories and plays. Can and should this be done with a lightness of touch? If so, should the pun play a part?
The use of double entendres in stories is hardly new. In Book Nine of Homer’s seafaring epic, when one of the Cyclops asks Odysseus for his name, the latter cunningly replies: “Outis” (Nobody). Later, when the one-eyed monster is being attacked, he calls out “Nobody is killing me!” (It’s supposed to work better in Greek.) In The Pun Also Rises, John Pollack deftly points out that Sanskrit grammarian Panini also “deconstructed sandwiched meanings” in the fourth century BCE.
Which brings us to the most famous writer of English. Victor Margolin once observed that in the art of punning, Shakespeare was “great shakes and without peer”. (It’s okay to groan.) Often, the Bard’s puns aren’t simply about showing off a facility with words or providing comic relief. He also uses them to reveal character and emotion in compressed and memorable ways.
For example, when Mercutio asks Romeo to dance at Capulet’s banquet, Romeo refuses: “You're wearing dancing shoes with nimble soles / My soul is made out of lead.” Hamlet famously refers to his new stepfather as “a little more than kin, and less than kind”. Perhaps most quoted of all are Gloucester’s lines from Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” Glorious, indeed.
Linguistic investigation by David Crystal has revealed that there are several more Shakespearean puns hiding in plain sight, and the reason we haven’t spotted them is because of changes in pronunciation from Elizabethan times. Samuel Johnson, among others, complained about such wordplay in the plays, agreeing with the dictum that puns were the lowest form of wit. To which Henry Erskine’s counter was: “it is therefore the foundation of all wit.”
As for that other bard who sang about Dublin and its residents, some of James Joyce’s best-known work is notoriously teeming with wordplay. This could more accurately be described as neologisms with a rowdy, punning spirit. Of the several in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, there’s “ringroundabout”, the act of completely surrounding something, “scribbledehobble”, a notebook, and “yogibogeybox”, the paraphernalia that a holy man carries around with him. Among those that need no clarifications are “an openear secret” and “there’s no plagues like Rome”.
For Joyce, such twisting and tangling of words was a way of viewing the world, a means of bewitching the senses by means of language, as Wittgenstein would have put it. This approach influenced many others. As Joyce acolyte Samuel Beckett wrote in Murphy: “In the beginning was the pun.” Nabokov’s Lolita, too, is choc-a-block with linguistic invention and doubling, which resonates with the very structure of the book. The raucous chorus of Salman Rushdie’s “chutneyfied” prose also owes a lot to Joyce.
More recently, wordplay is a notable feature of the novels of Ali Smith. As critic James Wood wrote in the New Yorker: “It’s not simply that she loves puns; it’s that she thinks through and with them; her narratives move forward, develop and expand, by mobilising them.” The author and her characters, Wood continues, are always picking up words and turning them upside down to see what’s happening underneath.
Thus, in Smith’s Winter, a “caravan that goes at a great pace” becomes a “carapace”. “England’s green and pleasant land” becomes “England’s green unpleasant land”. And delightfully, in There But For The, a character transforms a line from an Abba song into “I believe in Engels”.
Wood does rightly point out that in literature, puns can exist “at the expense, perhaps, of mess, despair, and sheer human intractability”. Certainly, there’s a time and place for puns, and not every piece of wordplay is going to be elegant and apt. Sometimes, the groans are justified. Yet, when adroitly wielded, they can reveal ambiguities and indicate slippages between what is meant and what is understood. Anthropologist Gary Gossen has observed that they can also subvert notions of class, ethnicity, and gender.
In his pun-filled A Modest Defence of Punning, Jonathan Swift spoke of differentiating between good and bad puns, later tartly remarking: “Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.” It’s a pity that with a current emphasis on “plain” prose and peering through Orwell’s windowpane, such linguistic antics seem to have declined. Why listen to one instrument all the time when you can hear a full sym-punny?
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