NEIL SCHMITZ
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humorist's task was to make funny the feeling of that supplementarity,
the feeling of separation from , of being inside something added to the
real thing, this hard feeling for Thereal McCoy, and he did so by
defacing the supplement, by wronging the written word. When we see
through Portnoy's slanted eyes Mary Jane Reed move her lips as she
reads the movie page in the newspaper, move her lips so expressively
that Portnoy can read her silent voicing of the titles, which he does
with contempt, we know the realm to which she belongs-to
essence,
presence, eidos, ousia,
and also we know his place. He is inside the
knowledge of writing, the knowledge of misery, watching the
other.
Mary Jane's slow patient vocalization of the word as she reads,
mouthing it, is Huckspeech reduced to its purest form. Undoubtedly
Huck wrote his manuscript this way, speaking aloud the words he
painstakingly inscribed:
considerble, nonnamous, sivilize.
To understand how the original wrong appears in American
humor, one must first recognize the severe limitation of the style, its
restricted place in American literature. Most of the so-called Black
humorists of the late fifties and sixties (Terry Southern, James Purdy,
Joseph Heller) do not, properly speaking, belong to the tradition. Nor
do Robert Benchley and James Thurber, who are essayists, sketch
writers, though I realize it may seem reckless not to call these humorists
humorists, but my point, after all , is not expu lsion . Simply put,
hypothetically put, American humor textually describes an
agon
between a native speaker (or a peripheral writer) and a literary writer,
and through that struggle, always graphically present because the text
is wronged, such humor (as attitude, as act) proposes two distinct
worlds of value and desire. The forms this
agon
at first takes in the
nineteenth century are small and economical: anecdote, aphorism,
doggerel, the topical letter, and yet the energy contained is consider–
able, so urgent as always to make the relative form susceptible. In the
Southwestern sketch, for example, the literary interlocutor who frames
the sketch often regards the native speaker from an astonished distance.
Augustus B. Longstreet, it might be said, broods over his rednecks in
Georgia Scenes
(1835) the way Claude Levi-Strauss broods over the
Nambikwara. In other sketches, notably "The Big Bear of Arkansas,"
the tall tale the speaker tells draws the interlocutor into its ruse so that
ultimately it is not the anecdote that constitutes the tale, but an
ambivalence about what is said. In George Washington Harris's
Sut
Lovingood's Yarns
(1867), where the authorial presence is scarce, the
violence of Sut's speech is clamorous , crowded, consonantal-an
anticipation of the hard line, the malevolent idiom that informs the
