Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  This episode contains many of the elements that our theorists of the comic would have us look for. Don Quixote’s monomania, his determination to see romantic adventures in mundane happenstance, is comic in its rigidity, and admirable in its ingenuity. At first he seems to see the windmills through a cloud, so that sails of wood and canvas take on the appearance of giant human arms; he charges forward despite the shouted warnings of his clear-sighted squire. Then, rebuffed by a whack one sail gives him, and perhaps his vision clarified by his physical closeness to these supposed giants, he reconstructs his delusion upon a new, and invulnerable, ground: his enemy the magician Freston has turned real giants into apparent windmills. All of Sancho’s realism is overthrown by sublimely arrogant assertions: “Thou art but little acquainted with Adventures” and “There is nothing so subject to the Inconstancy of Fortune as War.” Like some modern statesmen, Don Quixote has constructed from much real information and one wildly false premise an impregnable castle of self-justification; awkward realities are made to argue against themselves, and to reconfirm the malice of the enemy and the nobility of the unreal quest.

  His dream does not shatter under reality because the author and Sancho Panza protect him; the author by conferring upon this lean old man a magical stubborn toughness, and Sancho Panza—with a loving and wondering fidelity that is one of the book’s masterstrokes—by always rushing forward and picking up the pieces. Don Quixote suffers no ill effects from this adventure; it is Rocinante, his horse, who limps, his shoulder half dislocated by their fall. It is the horse, who cannot reason or go mad but who can suffer, who absorbs and mutely carries off this adventure’s residue of pain.

  Even this early in the great novel, Cervantes seems indifferent to his stated objective—of burlesquing the pseudo-medieval adventures of Tasso and Ariosto. A cruder author would have hurt his hero severely, or had him spin delusions less plausibly, or accompanied him with a mocking and sardonic squire. Our laughter would have been quicker and sharper, but thinner, and quickly automatic. Satire, as an attack upon an idea or set of ideas, quickly bores us, since the author, manipulating his puppets, makes the same statement over and over. Here, with Cervantes—himself as often battered and disappointed as his hero—our laughter is deepened by a certain ambiguous poetry in the narrative; the windmills are not merely mistaken for giants but somehow are giants. The wind, springing up opportunely to turn their giant arms, seems to join the fun; and the knight’s unshakable dignity in some sense argues for his delusions, and gives him that air of triumph which is, we noted above, an ancient tributary of laughter.

  Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and Rabelais voice the burst of generosity that came over the European spirit in the Renaissance; their exuberant realism yielded, in the so-called Age of Reason, to a less trustful humanism that seeks truth through rational precepts and intellectual controversy. Voltaire wrote Candide with a speed that belies its polish and compression, as a kind of pamphleteering attack upon Leibniz and other philosophers who held that evil and suffering are necessary presences in a world in which man can exercise free choice. The uproarious succession of disasters which the author visits upon Candide, his optimistic mentor Dr. Pangloss, and Candide’s beloved Cunégonde are not in fact a fair argument against Leibniz’s subtle doctrine; they are an underhanded but compelling appeal to our emotional common sense: in the same way, in the same century, Dr. Johnson was to refute Berkeley’s subtle subjectivism by kicking a stone and saying, “Thus I refute Berkeley.” External facts remain our touchstones for metaphysical truth. Two disastrous earthquakes, in Lima in 1746 and in Lisbon in 1755, deeply impressed Voltaire; they seemed to him a puncture in the deist argument that all is for the best or, as Alexander Pope expressed it, “Whatever is, is right.” Here is how Candide and Dr. Pangloss experience the famous Lisbon earthquake:

  When they had recovered a little of their strength, they set off towards Lisbon, hoping they had just enough money in their pockets to avoid starvation after escaping the storm.

  Scarcely had they reached the town, and were still mourning their benefactor’s death, when they felt the earth tremble beneath them. The sea boiled up in the harbour and broke the ships which lay at anchor. Whirlwinds of flame and ashes covered the streets and squares. Houses came crashing down. Roofs toppled to their foundations, and the foundations crumbled. Thirty thousand men, women and children were crushed to death under the ruins.

  The sailor chuckled:

  “There’ll be something worth picking up here,” he remarked with an oath.

  “What can be the ‘sufficient reason’ for this phenomenon?” said Pangloss.

  “The Day of Judgement has come,” cried Candide.

  The sailor rushed straight into the midst of the debris and risked his life searching for money. Having found some, he ran off with it to get drunk; and after sleeping off the effects of the wine, he bought the favours of the first girl of easy virtue he met amongst the ruined houses with the dead and dying all around. Pangloss pulled him by the sleeve and said:

  “This will never do, my friend; you are not obeying the universal rule of Reason; you have misjudged the occasion.”

  “Bloody hell,” replied the other. “I am a sailor and was born in Batavia. I have had to trample on the crucifix four times in various trips I’ve been to Japan. I’m not the man for your Universal Reason!”

  Candide had been wounded by splinters of flying masonry and lay helpless in the road, covered with rubble.

  “For Heaven’s sake,” he cried to Pangloss, “fetch me some wine and oil! I am dying.”

  “This earthquake is nothing new,” replied Pangloss; “the town of Lima in America experienced the same shocks last year. The same causes produce the same effects. There is certainly a vein of sulphur running under the earth from Lima to Lisbon.”

  “Nothing is more likely,” said Candide. “But oil and wine, for pity’s sake!”

  “Likely!” exclaimed the philosopher. “I maintain it’s proved!”

  Candide lost consciousness, and Pangloss brought him a little water from a fountain close by.

  The following day, while creeping amongst the ruins, they found something to eat and recruited their strength. They then set to work with the rest to relieve those inhabitants who had escaped death. Some of the citizens whom they had helped gave them as good a dinner as could be managed after such a disaster. The meal was certainly a sad affair, and the guests wept as they ate; but Pangloss consoled them with the assurance that could not be otherwise:

  “For all this,” said he, “is a manifestation of the rightness of things, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could not be anywhere else. For it is impossible for things not to be where they are, because everything is for the best.”

  Dr. Pangloss, like Don Quixote, irrepressibly applies the theorems of his idée fixe to the incongruous material of life. There is no mistaking the satiric edge, and the author performs his comedy on the edge of pain. Yet we are anesthetized, as it were, and allowed therefore to laugh, by the flitting quickness and neatness of the narrative style. We are told, as if the statistic had been gathered in an instant, that “Thirty thousand men, women and children were crushed to death.” The three characters with toylike promptness react in character: the pious and innocent Candide exclaims that the Day of Judgment is near, Dr. Pangloss poses himself a philosophical riddle amid the toppling ruins, and the sailor, cheerfully heartless, seizes the opportunity for theft and lechery. Such stylization preserves the earthquake as an item in an abstract argument and heightens our sense of play. In a sentence, we are told Candide is injured and half buried, but are not asked to dwell upon his condition—Rocinante’s limp is more sensuously present. The central figure remains Dr. Pangloss, whose musing in such circumstances approaches heroic detachment and whose lack of pity for Candide is partially redeemed by his equal lack of self-pity. Pangloss’s preposterous conclusion of a vein of sulfur running halfway around the world, defended with the stoutness of a Quixote
, makes us laugh; and if we look deep into our laughter we detect there:

  1.) a sense of superiority to the scientific speculations of the eighteenth century;

  2.) a certain pleasure in the image, gaudy and simple as a child’s yellow crayon stroke;

  3.) applause at the good doctor’s unfailing intellectual curiosity;

  4.) a kind of hysteria at the frightful fact of calamity and heavenly indifference that Voltaire sets before us;

  5.) a confession of pleasurable warmth, which the farcical tempo of the narrative has created in us, and which disposes us to laugh in any case.

  Laughter, as we know from its social instances, is infectious and carries a curious momentum; an image, mixed of such incongruities as a man’s demand for the oil and wine of the last rites mixed with another man’s meditations upon sulfur, trips the trigger of laughter and, recurring (as it does when Pangloss insists, “I maintain it’s proved!”), trips it again, harder. Here we touch upon the mystery, in presentation of the comic, of timing; in personal presentation, of timing and facial expression. A wrong twist of the face, betraying overeagerness, like an excessive adjective in a sentence, will with mysterious thoroughness defuse a joke and stifle a laugh. The moment of blank bewilderment that Freud describes is somehow sullied. There must be a headlong, clean, economical something, a swift and careless music perhaps descended from the rhythm of ticklings in infancy; no purer example of this comic music exists than Candide. Indeed, its example leads us to wonder if any efficient display of energy—an elegant mathematical proof, a well-made young woman briskly walking by—doesn’t dispose us to jubilation, to a smile or laugh that is a salute, a shout of greeting to our comrade in life, the élan vital.

  For all the ruthlessness of its events and the cynical slant of its moral, Candide is a crystalline and joyous book, whereas Huckleberry Finn, beneath its surface of idyll and slapstick, holds a deep sadness. A bottomless sadness, I would say; for the two European masterworks I have read from both rest upon a faith, an assumption, that, whether or not God is in His heaven and all is right with the world, the significant world is human. Humanity is the measure; humanity crowds even the arid plains of central Spain with its commerce, its conversation, its misplaced confidence. In our American novel we find a world where man is at the margin, a vaguely glimpsed and problematical intruder, no bigger than a cluster of sparks in the immense dark tranquillity of a wilderness.

  In looking through Huckleberry Finn for a passage to read, I finally settled upon not one of the many comic incidents and dialogues, which seem a bit coarse and trumped up, but upon a descriptive passage that is not comic at all and perhaps not even humorous. But it seemed the worthiest companion to the classic passages I have quoted. Huckleberry Finn, a twelve-year-old boy, and Jim, a runaway slave, are floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. The boy tells the story, and here describes how their days on the river pass:

  And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by-and-by lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat, coughing along up stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on a raft; you’d see the ax flash, and come down—you don’t hear nothing; you see that ax go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk!—it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:

  “No, spirits wouldn’t say, ‘dern the dern fog.’ ”

  Soon as it was night, out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle, we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck’s folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn’t go much on clothes, nohow.

  Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window—and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

  Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her pow-wow shut off and leave the river still again; and by-and-by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn’t hear nothing for you couldn’t tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

  I have let this passage run long because, for one thing, I am an American and it is American; for another, it makes its effect by spaciousness. The accumulation of homely yet precise details—the k’chunk! of the swung ax that takes time to travel across the width of water—conveys the river to us with the sensual leisureliness so rigorously excluded in Candide. The fact that such a beautiful and vivid evocation is expressed by a boy, in a boy’s vocabulary, is in itself humorous, though in this passage at least without any flavor of tour de force. How strangely expressive are impressionist phrases like “the lonesomeness of the river” and “a whole world of sparks.” The lazy breadth of the day gives way to night, and to the comic speculation, by our two heroes as they drift downstream in naked ignorance, that the stars were laid by the moon as a frog lays its spawn of eggs. And from the image of the stars we move to the kindred “world of sparks [belched] up out of her chimbleys” and the sense of human sparks and noises lost in this great dark silence.

  Only the fact that this immensity seems benign prevents the underlying sadness from drowning us. In Mark Twain, the comic insulation, the shell of safety that lets us laugh, is always very thin, a mere patina of nostalgia. In his boys’ books, dreadful things happen—children get lost in a deep cave with a murderous Indian, a boy discovers the body of his dead father in a house floating in a flooded river. Real violence always threatens, in a thinly civilized landscape that offers no assurances and no consolation beyond its impervious grandeur and “lonesomeness.” Comedy in Twain ceases to be a literary form, or a rhetorical manner that excludes certain resonances of reality, and has become an attitude, a perky, crusty, sharp-eyed verbal approach to things. The improvisation thrust upon America by the unprecedented challenges of the raw land becomes in Twain’s style a willingness to tackle anything, any facet of this river scene—the dead fish as well as the singing birds, the tin pans beating in the fog as well as the eternal stars strewn overhead. This indiscriminate poetry will fall upon ears accustomed to more rounded and selective descrip
tion with the puzzling unexpectedness of a joke; but the joke is in the voice and not in the material. The material is often frightening. We recover, in the stars that may be the moon’s frog eggs, the awesome scale of those windmills that may be giants; contrariwise, awe is quite missing from Pangloss’s chattery pseudo-rational speculation that Lima and Lisbon are connected by an underground strip of sulfur.