Ludic Literature: Serious Play in the
20th and 21st Centuries
Session Organizers:
Alison James and Kelly Austin
Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures
The University of
Chicago, Wieboldt 205
1115 East 58th
Street
Chicago, IL 60637
asj@uchicago.edu , austink@uchicago.edu
“There are no jokes in this book”: Mark Haddon, Poodlecide, and the
Risky Humor of Disability
Mark Haddon has claimed that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time began from the image of a poodle impaled by a garden fork—a funny image, but only if described from a specific perspective, that of his book’s 15-year-old autistic narrator. Winner of multiple awards, both for “kiddie lit” and “serious” literature, Haddon’s bestseller demonstrably appeals to diverse readers. And the novel’s popularity derives in part from its playful form and peculiar humor, relying on its straight-man narrator’s insistent rejection of jokes. “I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them,” Christopher says, yet the text is filled with funny situations and comments, including jokes about Christopher’s peculiarities and failures of understanding.
Daring even to include a smiley face on the second and penultimate pages of his novel, Haddon risks trivializing autism and stereotyping his disabled protagonist. Facing these aesthetic and ethical questions, this paper argues that Curious Incident succeeds as a humane and innovative work of fiction. Taking a reader-oriented approach informed by disability studies, we can see the novel’s edgy humor as part of the serious play that engages disparate readers in the process of decoding the world from Christopher’s atypical perspective, which navigates messy, hyper-stimulating, and irrational situations by focusing on a series of game-like puzzles, science questions, and problems of logic. At once puzzle-like and defamiliarizing, Christopher’s narrative lures readers into his world, in which the “normal” humans can seem as strange and comical as those Alice encounters in her Wonderland journeys.
Sheryl Stevenson
The University of Akron
ssteve3@uakron.edu
Composition of Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan
The issue of
composition in Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan
articulates itself, in part, in terms of what it figures as both the outmoded
and updated Latinate roots of “com.” From the outset the very composition
of the poem depends upon the simultaneity and disparity of the positions of
several linguistic and cultural communities (at least English-, Spanish-, and
Quechua-speaking communities, and too, at least bi-, and tri-lingual
communities sometimes rooted, sometimes exiled, and sometimes rooted in
exile). For to approach “com” as a possible suggestion of togetherness or
withness in this particular writing endeavor demands simultaneously that the
poet fragment composition—in the beginning—linguistically, spatially,
culturally, and geographically. Through an analysis of the contributions
of conventions (both conventions of irony and irony of conventions arising from
a composed and juxtaposed context in this poetic sequence), this essay
endeavors to explore where forms and languages become simultaneous sites of
vital celebration and mourning at the limits, postures and positions of their
meeting.
Kelly Austin
The University of Chicago
Wit is so rare because in order for it to exist two seemingly opposite conditions must be held in conjunction; as Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes in Poetic Closure “…wit occurs when expectations are simultaneously surprised and fulfilled.” In large part, this difficulty is what draws poets to play with the paradelle, a poetic form that, according to some of its theorists, seems to guarantee the creation of wit. Invented by poet Billy Collins as a hoax-form (as Collins states, a paradelle is “parody + villanelle”), the paradelle permits and even demands play at the ends of stanzas and the end of the poem—precisely those places in a poem where punchlines, or their equivalents, are required. While it is tempting to see such play as the embodiment of wit’s appropriate incongruity, my presentation will show that the paradelle is much less a form for creating wit and much more a form for creating a weak imitation of wit.
Taking the stance that in art there is no such thing as simple literary play, that literary play is always also a matter of production and/or training, this presentation will suggest that the paradelle—this newly emergent form of play—while an inventive hoax, prompts mostly poor play, encouraging the creation of weak poetic products and lesser poetic training, training only in the creation of some semblance of wit but not wit itself. That is, this presentation will suggest
that the paradelle is trivial and frivolous precisely if paradoxically for not being funny enough.
Illinois Wesleyan University
Pataphysics and
Parody
In an essay on Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959), the critic Roland Barthes persuasively argues that the comic and the serious in this novel, placed on equal footing, grasp and escape each other in turn. My paper suggests that this same elusive double movement characterizes the philosophy of a group to which Queneau belonged, the Collège de ’Pataphysique. Established in 1948 and inspired by Alfred Jarry’s enigmatic definition of “Pataphysics” as “the science of imaginary solutions,” the Collège unites artists and writers in self-conscious social ceremonies. Counting among its members such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Boris Vian, Michel Leiris, and Jacques Prévert, the Collège was the first publisher of Ionesco’s absurdist plays and of the rule-governed writings of the Oulipo (one of its “sub-committees”). The Collège as a group has nevertheless attracted scant attention from scholars—in part because it functioned as a secret society between 1975 and 2000 (recently re-emerging into the public eye), but principally because the group’s energetic activity of “learned and useless research” plunges outsiders into confusion. Yet this perplexity itself points the way, I believe, to the heart of the Pataphysicians’ aesthetic and ethical enterprise. An analysis of some pataphysical writings will allow us to understand the group’s playful, parodic approach to sociability, scholarship, and artistic production not as an expression of nihilism, as it is generally construed, but as a creative exploration of the conditions and limits of language and knowledge.
Alison James
The University of Chicago