by M. O. Grenby
My point is not that violent excess of this kind is not horrendous, but that in this instance we can smile because a mouse is expendable. Okay, we might argue that no creature is expendable, but, relatively speaking, we can say that little Softdown occupies a place somewhere near ‘the dead bodies of six other boys’ in the story of Giant Snap-em-up or Watts’ troop of ants. The dead body and the body in pieces are recurring features of children’s stories and fantasies, and it is quite possible to find humour in the body in pieces, as many cartoons – say those by Tex Avery – will suggest. This is especially the case when the dead or dismembered body is not the body of a human, as in the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘The Goose Girl’.
The fairy tales we know may be somewhat less bloody than what we see in the death of Softdown, but they nonetheless take delight in burned bodies, pecked-out eyes, sliced-off toes, lopped-off heads, and gruel made with the body of a small boy. In the story by the Brothers Grimm known in English as ‘The Juniper (or Almond) Tree’, a step-mother slams a trunk lid down on her young step-son’s head, sending it flying off among the apples in the trunk. The effect is comic rather than tragic, and accordingly the young boy returns hale and hearty at the end of the most familiar versions. There are examples galore, but the point is that humour is often broad and focused on that which is potentially subversive, unacceptable, against the grain, less than decorous and difficult to miss. It functions in the way carnival functions: either as a safety valve for the rambunctious or as a reminder that convention is artificial and always susceptible to change.
We can see the potentially subversive aspect of humour most clearly in its scatological and violent manifestations, its obsession with the body and all its discernible parts. This is a kind of humour that relates back to Gargantua and his prodigious capacity for taking in and releasing out. We can see such humour in something as melodic as one of Edward Lear’s limericks:
There was a young person of Janina,
Whose uncle was always fanning her;
When he fanned off her head, she smiled sweetly, and said,
‘You propitious old person of Janina.’9
Here’s a ‘head’s off’ rhyme that concerns the body detachable. Lear noted that writing for children should be ‘incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense’, and by ‘sheer nonsense’ I suspect he meant such obvious body humour as huge noses, hair big enough for birds to build nests in, prodigious feats of eating, large animals and the like.10 But he also means large linguistic turns: Gromboolian plains, Quangle Wangles, Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, runcible spoons and a borascible person of Bangor. In Lear, language itself provides broad humour. Sometime the bigness is uncontainable, as in Gromboolian, and sometimes its bigness moves in the direction of language’s capacity for innuendo. The young person of Janina, remember, smiles sweetly at her ‘uncle’ even as he fans off her head; she slyly refers to him as ‘propitious’. Why is a person who fans off another person’s head propitious? ‘Propitious’ suggests something positive, downright favourable and sweet. According to the young woman, her uncle is pleasing; she appreciates his fanning. His fanning is, she implies, a propitiation, an offering. The pleasure she receives from this fanning is profane.
The illustration Lear provides for this limerick communicates its own humour, some of which is obvious and some subtle. The obvious humour here is the detached head of the young person, her smile and her gesture of pleasure. But the uncle’s clothes and fan are also noteworthy. The large fan (it takes two hands to manipulate it), pantaloons, pointed slippers and headpiece might remind us of a person from the east rather than the west, despite the fact that Janina is a city in Greece. In other words, Lear’s limerick with its illustration just might reflect the coloniser’s association of the ‘other’ with pleasure of a bodily kind. Lear’s work participates in a familiar orientalism. The humour here is a way of managing something, most likely fear of the other and fear of sexuality. We have masculine images associated with the young woman (her hair with its topknot and feather, looking like an ink bottle and quill pen), and feminine images associated with the male (the fan and distinctive dress). The colonial implications suggest a fear of women, sexuality and the foreign.
We might think of Lear’s menagerie and his eccentric characters as grotesques. The grotesque is funny when it reaches beyond pathos and fear. And the humourous grotesque is more often than not reflected in caricature. Many of the characters in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855) are caricatures, their grotesque appearance manifesting itself both in literary onomastics (the study of proper names) and in illustrations that owe something to the Punch and Judy tradition. We have Gruffanuff, Glumboso, Doctor Pildrafto, Baron Sleibootz, the princes Bulbo and Giglio, King Padella and King Valoroso. The names work in various ways, some of which carry earthy suggestions, and some of which direct our attention to the gallery of grotesques Thackeray delivers in his drawings. In The Rose and the Ring, we have a character turned into a door-knocker, an example of the human turned into object that we can see in many books for children – some of William Steig’s books, for example. The grotesque appears in both dismembering and transforming into object; it is also a feature of bigness. Children’s literature offers many examples of the grotesque associated with bigness, from the impossibly large Alice who fills a house to Raymond Briggs’ Tin-Pot Generals and Iron Ladies to the various grotesqueries Harry Potter meets.
But I mean bigness in an expansive sense. We have big humour when we have grotesque moments such as the one in George MacDonald’s The Light Princess (1864) when the Princess Makemnoit arouses one of the White Snakes of Darkness. Into a tub of water, Makemnoit tosses what appears to be a piece of dried seaweed, along with some powder. Then she grasps a ‘huge bunch of a hundred rusty keys’. She sits down and begins to ‘oil’ each key. As she eagerly oils, behind her from the tub of water, rise ‘the head and half the body of a huge grey snake’:
It grew out of the tub, waving itself backwards and forwards with a slow horizontal motion, till it reached the princess, when it laid its head upon her shoulder, and gave a low hiss in her ear. She started – but with joy; and seeing the head resting on her shoulder, drew it towards her and kissed it. Then she drew it all out of the tub, and wound it round her body.11
With the snake coiled round her body, Makemnoit marches off to the cellar muttering to herself: ‘This is worth living for!’ We might recall that John Ruskin fretted over an earlier passage in the story in which talk of uplift, fall and elevation struck him as too suggestive of a certain kind of bodily pleasure not to be spoken of in front of children.12 His silence on the passage before us may just indicate that MacDonald here rendered him speechless. And MacDonald does not finish here; less than a page later we read of the snake moving its head back and forth ‘with a slow oscillating motion’, until it suddenly darts to the roof and clings to it ‘with its mouth’. The snake hangs there, ‘like a huge leech, sucking at the stone’, for seven days and seven nights. The snake’s capacity for sucking is prodigious, perhaps even sublime. The seven days and nights are either a parodic touch or an indication of something creative (or procreative) going on.13
The humour here might have some connection with the humour we are supposed to find in the cavorting of seventeen-year-old Sandra Francy in Melvin Burgess’ Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001). The humour in this book, in carnivalesque manner, derives from the connection of the human animal with the non-human animal. Sandra finds herself transformed into a dog and Burgess tries to have fun with the freely expressive animal body. Sandra at one point plops herself down in the middle of the street and proceeds to lick her genitals. Late in the book, in a rather improbable scene, Sandra, in her dog form, awkwardly and laboriously dresses herself and applies lipstick in order to communicate to her family that, despite appearances to the contrary, she really is her parents’ loving daughter. Clearly, the comedy in this book serves to remind us of just how important the body is to the human conditio
n. What is less clear is how we are to take carnival in this book. Laughter is big when it is King, and in Lady: My Life as a Bitch, laughter is King.
I refer here to a central passage in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In this novel, a young innocent woman, Lucy Westenra, apparently dies after a strange wasting away. Only one person in the novel, Dr Van Helsing, understands just exactly what has happened to Lucy – that she is, in fact, not truly dead, but more accurately ‘undead’, a vampire. At Lucy’s funeral, Van Helsing begins to laugh, and he laughs loudly and uncontrollably. His friend, Dr Seward, is outraged at such behaviour, and asks for an explanation for the offensive outburst. In reply, Van Helsing launches into a long speech concerning what he calls ‘King Laugh’. He goes on for a page or two before he comes directly to the point in his final short sentence. He laughs, he says, ‘Because I know’.14
The humour that King Laugh produces is neither the humour of carnival, nor the playful humour we associate with children. What I mean to say is that the humour prompting King Laugh may serve both official and unofficial ends. In either case, it is brash and its brashness at least pretends to subversion. A book such as Henrik Drescher’s Pat the Beastie: A Pull-and-Poke Book (1993) has fun with Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny: A Touch-and-Feel Book (1940), but I’m not sure that pulling and poking are any more fun or funny than touching and feeling. But we are supposed to find Pat the Beastie parodic; it challenges our sense of decorum. Lots of books for children present themselves as indecorous; they wish to appeal to the pirate instinct in the child-reader. Kerry Mallan notes that ‘humorous literature’ invites the young reader ‘to view people and their actions in ways which tend to reveal discrepancies between expectations and reality’. She goes on to say that children will find in humorous literature ‘the accepted order frequently turned upside down’, and consequently ‘humorous literature can be seen as quite subversive, demanding critical readers who do not passively accept what they read’.15 I would like to believe this. I suspect, however, that ostensibly subversive humour serves to satisfy the urge to question and resist. How can anyone resist Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1992) or Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants (1997) or Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes (1982)? These ostensibly outrageous works just may serve to satisfy the rebellious spirit rather than activate it.
The point is that much humour for children is exaggerated, fantasy writ large, a reminder of the monstrous and the freakish. The freakish serves, as Susan Stewart asserts, to normalise the person reading about or looking at the freak, ‘as much as it marks the freak as an aberration’. The freak is, she adds, ‘tied to the cultural other’, and she might have added to the psychic other as well.16 The freak is, arguably, precisely the character the reader wishes to be. The freak is the reader’s fantasy, in both a positive and a negative sense. The freak is often, although not always, freakish because of scale, especially large scale. When the giant or monster fascinates, it does so because it beckons from the territory of what Jacques Lacan calls ‘the Real’. The Real is that which beckons us and frightens us; it both gives us identity and subverts identity. The Real is sublime in that it both attracts and repels.
While we are in Lacanian territory, I note that Lacan, unlike Freud, suggests that human cognition ‘aims at not knowing certain things’. Robert Pfaller expands on this:
A large number of thought experiments in literature and film, therefore, deal not with the principles of an unfamiliar world . . . that enriches our previous knowledge, but with our present world in a recognizably distorted, parodic way: That is why the preamble ‘How would it be if . . .’ is simply a charming disguise for the statement: ‘That is how it is here and now.’17
I might return to Sandra Francy for a moment to scamper across this Lacanian territory. Lady: My Life as a Bitch ends with Sandra, in the form of a dog, facing rejection from her family. She cowers in her second-floor bedroom, both accepting of what she is (a young person with the desire to act outside convention) and unable to be the person she might truly wish to be (human and yet with the freedom of the bitch). Out of the window she can hear the two dogs (former humans) Fella and Mitch, encouraging her to jump and run with them. She goes to the window and it is open a crack, just enough for her to nudge her canine nose under the opening and raise it high enough so that she can pass through it. And she does. The book ends with her posterior disappearing out the window. What are we to make of this? Inside we have the human family; outside we have the dogs and the hunt and the animal delight in a life lived for the moment. Inside we have the law of the father; outside we have, perhaps, jouissance of some kind. But what kind? Outside the window what waits for Sandra is the Real, a world of swirling and running and energetic chaos. Outside the window she may defecate wherever she likes, but she will also lose her memory and her capability to rationalise. She may have fun, but she will not understand why she is having fun. In other words, outside the window is a world akin to death from a human point of view. In her freakish state, Sandra can have what she desires – jouissance – but at what price? This is the world as it is: we can have what we want, but at what price?
Burgess is clever enough not to follow Sandra out of the window. He leaves us at the sill, silly with wonder, and inside the symbolic arena where language must substitute for what Sandra appears to have. And where reason occupies the front row. Humour reminds us of the appeal of imaginative exuberance, but as nonsense and fantasy it contains its exuberance in a rational structure. We do not so much learn anything from the story of Sandra Francy, as recognise in this story the world as it is – a dog’s life. Faced with this view of the world, we can only laugh, like Van Helsing.
We have, however, another kind of humour: gentle humour. Gentle humour allows us to laugh at a Bear of very little brain or find amusement in the frolic of a little boy and a Snowman. Just look at Raymond Briggs’ The Man (1992). Here’s the story of a little person who speaks in bold letters, sometimes in upper-case bold letters, and who threatens to burn down a house. The interaction between the boy and the little man in Briggs’ book gives us a humorous treatment of familiar themes: tolerance, manners and stock assumptions. This humour deals mainly with the private rather than the public. The small man represents interior space; he is the common person. In The Man, as always, Briggs concerns himself with familiar things made recognisable. Humour has a deeply humanistic function. And the small size of characters such as the Man or Winnie-the-Pooh remind us that the body need not be large to have large desires or hopes or ambitions. The body need not always be large or frenetic in expending its energy.
We find gentle humour in work by the likes of Dorothy Kilner, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. Take, for example, Edgeworth’s story ‘The Most Unfortunate Day of My Life’. Young Robert can never stick to one task; he is continuously changing his mind and leaving off one thing to take up another. Of course, his business creates minor havoc. He leaves feathers and string on the carpet in the drawing room, and when ‘two remarkably neat, nice elderly ladies’ come to visit, their feet are entangled in the string and their dresses are covered in bits of feathers. Edgeworth treats Robert’s difficulties with good humour rather than blunt disapproval. Edgeworth’s stories of Rosamond, the best known of which is ‘The Purple Jar’ (1796), turn on conversations, often the conversations between Rosamond and her mother. What good is, after all, a book without conversations? The conversations in Edgeworth’s stories point forward to the conversations we have between ‘adult’ characters such as the Duchess or the Mad Hatter and Alice. They turn on particular reasoning, and the humour derives from the twists and turns of this reasoning as young Rosamond tries to come to decisions on whether to plant this seed or that, to choose this plum or that, or to choose a purple jar instead of a pair of shoes.
A different kind of gentle humour relates to what we have already seen as brash humour. Note, for example, the fun in Sir Roger L’Estrange’s 1692 translation of Aesop. Much of
the fun of L’Estrange’s translation derives from language, as we might expect, but situations too have their humour. My favourite of the fables is the short one entitled ‘Apples and Horse-Turds’: