Wanted: More Comic Novels

Salman Rushdie at a literary event. (Photo: Anukul0508 via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

All of Salman Rushdie’s novels have something in common: an irreverent way of depicting the world and those in it. Look at the very start of The Satanic Verses: as the two protagonists tumble out of an exploding plane without a parachute and fall towards the English Channel, one of them starts to sing “mera joota hai Japani”. This, we’re told, is in deference to “the uprushing host-nation”.

Rushdie’s puckish disposition has often also surfaced during interviews and talks. It’s heartening that the family statement issued by his son Zafar after the horrific assault mentioned that “his usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact”.

On the other hand, so much fiction nowadays is marked by solipsistic seriousness. Novels classified as comic are seen as mere entertainments; they belong on a separate shelf on which work by P.G. Wodehouse occupies pride of place.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with light-hearted work designed to make people laugh – it takes considerable skill to pull it off. It’s a pity, though, that the comic mode is seen as a separate form. Martin Amis feels that this is because of the “intellectual glamour of gloom”, the notion that “sullen pessimism is a mark of high seriousness”.

For Aristotle, comedy was born of revelry. By highlighting contradictions, it displayed follies for the audience to learn from. As essayist William Hazlitt put it, “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”

Hasya rasa was an integral part of ancient Sanskrit treatises on art, too. A recent anthology by A.N.D. Haksar provides examples from the 13th-century Sukta Muktavali and the 14th-century Sarngadhara Paddhati, among others.

A comic novel isn’t necessarily one that sets out to be funny above all else. As critic James Wood has written, “comedy is the angle at which most of us see the world, the way that our very light is filtered”. The comic mode can take many forms. In the English language, think of Sterne’s encompassing digressions, Austen’s irony, Dickens’ drollery, and Joyce’s puns and parodies.

Much of this is on display in the pages of Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern novel. James Wood again: “If all of modern fiction comes out of the knight’s cape, then one reason might be that Cervantes’s novel contains all major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic, the trivial to the splendid.”

Such approaches are baked into the writing style: it’s not about sprinkling a few jokes here and a few asides there. Look at Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The style is the substance.

From India, there’s the gentle irony of R.K. Narayan, the urbane satire of Upamanyu Chatterjee, the bittersweet nostalgia of Ardashir Vakil and the whimsicality of I. Allan Sealy, among others. Recent work by Diksha Basu and Aravind Jayan takes this forward for a new generation.

The very outlook of such writers is welcomingly aslant. For the tormented narrator of Edward St Aubyn’s At Last, irony is an addiction, “that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning”.

It’s impossible to think of the work of mid-century Jewish-American authors without its distinctive brand of humour. Philip Roth felt that “the highest purpose of laughter” was “to bury wickedness in ridicule”. (When asked if Portnoy’s Complaint was influenced by 1960s stand-up comics, he replied that he was actually influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka.)

In Jeremy Dauber’s opinion, the work of Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick is probably “the closest American Jewish literature has gotten to a comedy of high wit”. They blend high and low, secular and religious, “to portray individuals who are all too often—to put it mildly—losers”.

More recently, George Saunders, also known for his lightness of touch, has said that for him, the serious and the comic are the same. “Being funny is about as deep and truthful as I can be,” he feels. “The world is comic. It’s not always funny but it is always comic…there is always a shortfall between what we think of ourselves and what we are.”

The comic mode, then, is a way of uncovering hypocrisies, finding meaning in the absurd, and staring into the abyss. It’s a form of defiance, a refusal to be cowed down in the face of the world’s intolerance. As Rushdie said in 2018: “I like black comedy, particularly in dark times. The blacker the comedy, the more truthful it gets.” We need more such works of laughter and remembering.