MORRIS DICKSTEIN
191
Contradicting this pessimism, however, which sees individual
life as manipulated and controlled from without, is the high degree
of artistic power and license that goes into achieving this effect. If the
sense of impotence and fatality in these novels expresses one side of
the sensibility of the sixties, their creative exuberance and originality
points
to
another: something crucial to the radicalism of the period,
the belief that old molds can be broken and recast, a sense that reality
can be reshaped by the creative will. In their inventiveness and plastic–
ity these books are the fictional equivalent of utopian thinking. This
is why we must distinguish between verbal black humorists, such as
Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, and even Philip Roth, whose
basic unit is the sick joke or the stand-up monologue, and what I
would call "structural" black humorists, such as Heller, Pynchon,
and Vonnegut. The former take apart the well-made novel and sub–
stitute nothing but the absurdist joke, the formless tirade, the cry in
the dark; the latter tend toward overarticulated forms, insanely com–
prehensive plots (the paradox that is more than verbal, that .seems
inherent in the nature of things). Both kinds of black humorists are
making an intense assertion of self-the former directly, the latter in
vast structures of self-projection-in the face of the prevailing forces
of depersonalization and external control.
All black humor involves the unseemly, the forbidden, the
exotic, or the bizarre. C€line shatters the class-bound complacencies
of accepted literary language with argot and street-slang, bringing
the novel away from high-cultural norms and closer to living speech.
His fulminations express the native cynicism of the common man,
especially the marginal man of the lower middle class, who knows in
his gut that all ideals are a crock of shit. He speaks for the prickly,
impossible individual with all his prejudices intact, whom mass
society and monopoly capitalism are always threatening to grind
under, but who somehow manages
to
look out for Number One.
Black humor always plays Falstaff to the conventional novel's Hotspur
or Prince Hal. Whether it stresses the nether functions of the body,
as in Henry Miller, or simply the nether side of all sentimentalities
and idealizations, as in Nathanael West, or even the perverse, as with
. Nabokov's
Lolita,
or
Portnoy's Complaint,
black humor is always
affronting taboos, giving offense, recalling people
to
their gut func–
tions and gut reactions. (That such cynicism conceals its own senti-
