{"id":1201,"date":"2014-03-24T21:27:18","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T02:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1201"},"modified":"2014-03-30T20:54:29","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T01:54:29","slug":"the-other-hanoverians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/the-other-hanoverians\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other Hanoverians"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thomas_Rowlandson-The_Devonshire-e1395713779118\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Simon Dickie\u2019s Cruelty and Laughter<\/i><\/h3>\n

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ALSO AVAILABLE IN\u00a0NOVEL\u00a0<\/em>(FORTHCOMING)<\/h5>\n

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Chances are that you are going to enjoy Simon Dickie\u2019s Cruelty & Laughter <\/i>quite a bit more than you were meant to, or, perhaps, that you are going to find yourself wanting to like it more than you do. Or both. Liking it to the proper degree, at any rate\u2014and in just the manner that it demands to be liked\u2014is going to prove difficult. Dickie\u2019s subject is eighteenth-century England\u2019s sense of humor\u2014its comic literature, for a start, the books you have probably read (Tom Jones<\/i>, Roderick Random<\/i>), alongside a great many others that you almost certainly haven\u2019t (the downmarket imitators of Fielding, Smollett\u2019s pedestrian rivals, the scores of clowning Adventures <\/i>published at midcentury), and also the jokes that its people cracked even when they weren\u2019t reading and the capers they cut on the streets. One of recent cultural history\u2019s niftier stunts has been to get the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to trade places\u2014to get Victorian England to swap its received image with its Georgian predecessor, like two schoolkids each hungry for the other\u2019s lunch. It has become possible, indeed, to forget that we once associated the nineteenth century with primness and moral fervor, so often have we been reminded that it was actually full of crossdressers and sadomasochists and ten-year-olds who drank gin. Eighteenth-century studies, in the meantime, having first developed a reputation for pissing boozily into any corner, has since retrieved for its students what we might call the other Hanoverians: polite, sentimental, Richardsonian, proto-evangelical\u2014Victorian, in a word, if that word hadn\u2019t come to mean \u201csecretly pornographic.\u201d But perhaps these revisions have by now gone as far as they were ever going to go. For Dickie\u2019s is part of a recent group of books\u2014the list includes Jessica Warner\u2019s history of Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason <\/i>(2002) and Vic Gatrell\u2019s City of Laughter <\/i>(2006)\u2014that mean to reinstate older perceptions by resurrecting the hard-living eighteenth century, an Enlightenment bibulous and syphilitic, less an Age of Johnson than an age of johnson. Cruelty and Laughter <\/i>is the kind of book you can consult if you want to learn the many nicknames for noses devised by eighteenth-century men and women, always eager to draw attention to a drinking companion\u2019s peculiarities\u2014to turn their fellows into animate caricatures: Saddle Nose, Razor Nose, Ruby Nose, &c. It <\/i>is an almanac of boisterousness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The next thing you need to know about Simon Dickie, then, is that he is daring you to find any of this even the least bit amusing. His list of topics is easily named: a chapter each on joke books; on humor directed against the misshapen and the halt; on humor directed against the poor; on the compulsive malice of Henry Fielding\u2019s humor, which pretends to a benevolence that it cannot put into practice; on rape jokes and the insistent smirking that overran even court transcripts of sexual assault trials; and on the vogue in England in the 1750s for cut-rate picaresque fiction. What really distinguishes Dickie\u2019s work, though, more than its chosen subjects, is the unrelieved contempt with which he treats them. As early as the second page, he calls his materials \u201cabhorrent,\u201d and the rhetorical pelting never lets up from there; the jokes he discusses are variously \u201cawful,\u201d \u201cvicious,\u201d and \u201cghastly.\u201d \u201cAppalling\u201d is one of his favorite words, as is \u201cnasty.\u201d Dickie\u2019s stance might best be described as a pseudo-Marxist moralism, which finally doesn’t amount to much more than the unedifying insight that rich people in the eighteenth century were unkind. I could put the point in a somewhat fancier way: There are few literary critics now writing who identify more closely with the social historians. Dickie more than once refers to himself as a “historian” and keeps naming the “social historian” as his implied reader. But he is entirely stuck between his literary training and his historian-envy. He despises the archive he has made his own and so cannot even be bothered to pose any of the interesting literary questions about it. The loathing he feels towards his bibliography terminates in an intellectual weariness or indifference towards that writing\u2019s inevitable intricacies. Dickie has obligingly read a great many noncanonical novels that you are never going to get to, but working through Cruelty and Laughter<\/i>, <\/i>you won\u2019t learn much about them except that first, they existed, and second, you probably won\u2019t like them. The literary historian longs to ask: Did laughter really only <\/i>come at the expense of the lowest and most vulnerable? Is there really nothing <\/i>to be said in defense of the carnival and people\u2019s laughter? What about satire or hilarity directed against the great? Does knowing about the culture of cruel laughter change our views on those forms? Was there no affirmative laughter or Shandeism\u2014rehabilitating laughter, that is, or laughter that defied misery\u2014and if there really wasn\u2019t, how did Laurence Sterne manage to convince himself that there was? Even if we agree to discuss malign laughter exclusively, then what do we make of its uneasy compound of delight and disgust\u2014its high-spirited repugnance or mood-lifting hate? Does such laughter develop unwitting investments in the baseness and abnormality that it seems to scorn? How exactly do we know what in such laughter is contempt and what celebration?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Alternately, we could take Dickie\u2019s commitment to social history at face value and thereby allow a second round of questions to emerge. When we think about European fiction in the several generations before the major innovations of the 1740s, the books that spring to mind are mostly comic: Rabelais, the Spanish picaresque, Cervantes, Swift. If we conclude that this was not just some belated canonization effect\u2014and Dickie gives us good reasons to think that it wasn\u2019t, by suggesting that literary historians if anything downplay the preponderance of comic literature in earlier periods\u2014then the question poses itself: Why was comic fiction once so widely read? What is the relationship between laughter and the formation of the nation-state? Or between laughter and colonization? Or between laughter and early capitalism? Will major social upheavals tend to produce the human anomalies or mock-epic incongruities\u2014the mushroom and mimic men\u2014on which comic fiction thrives? But Dickie shies away from these questions, too. He is not, finally, trained as a historian and will not, as a discourse-minded English professor, allow himself the kind of sophisticated speculation from multiple evidence streams that is the hallmark of good social history. So instead he compiles endless lists of verbal bullying: Eighteenth-century writers made fun of deaf people; they made fun of blind people; they made fun of the crippled, amputees, the pock-marked, and on and on and on. The book is a forceful exercise in anti-patrician counter-repugnance, but one begins to suspect that this is all it is.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 The matter is perhaps more curious than that. Dickie\u2019s single most consequential argument is that the historians of sympathy, sentiment, and moral sense theory have tricked us all into according too much centrality to those topics\u2014that a bourgeois culture of compassion and decency was very long in coming. One does not have to disagree with Dickie on this score to want to point out that Dickie is not, in fact, writing against<\/i> sympathy. Quite the contrary: He is writing against the historians and critics of sympathy and sentimentalism, but those concepts\u2014and the cultural formations they name\u2014remain entirely uninspected. One expects, indeed, that it has to be that way. For Dickie is himself a sympathetic writer\u2014a practitioner of benevolence and striker of sentimental stands\u2014more perhaps than he is either literary critic or social historian, striving to put back in place a set of mid-nineteenth-century judgments against the vulgarities of the dram shop and the pleasure garden. He objects to jokes as \u201cdesympathizing.\u201d \u201cOne wonders how anyone could have laughed.\u201d He says things like: I don\u2019t want to sound too Victorian, but Horace Walpole really was kind of an asshole.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Of course, such judgments are not alien to social history. One can still hear in that last sentiment the ricochet of E. P. Thompson\u2019s writing\u2014the working-class historian\u2019s animosity towards \u201cthe creatures of Walpole\u2019s \u2026circle\u201d (that\u2019s Walpole p\u00e8re in Thompson\u2019s case), or his disbelief that the English aristocracy could have ever concluded that it was justified to execute a man for stealing a fish with his face covered. At his best, Dickie not only channels the spirit of Thompson and Hobsbawm and Hill, but also devises inventive ways of cross-breeding their arguments with disability studies and so of extending the concerns of English Marxism beyond field preachers and radical mechanics and towards the ragged and the abject. Foucault closes ranks with the Communist Party Historians Group. The category of the poor laborer merges with the category of the freak. Dickie, who possesses a social historian\u2019s eye for the telling detail, takes as his subject \u201cthe anonymous, wretched victims of the consumer society so lavishly evoked by recent historians.\u201d In one eighteenth-century version of charades, party-goers would imitate various trades for their companions to guess: Are you a baker? A tailor? A weaver? Successful imitations would typically hinge on reproducing a given tradesman\u2019s characteristic deformity: his stoop, his squint, his abbreviated life.<\/p>\n

\"800px-The_gout_james_gillray\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And yet even here there are difficulties. Dickie\u2019s emphasis on disability eventually changes the character of the English Marxism he often ventriloquizes, or, if you like, blocks some of its signature arguments. The status of class in Dickie\u2019s argument is finally rather unclear, as it is, of course, in histories of humor more generally. The now orthodox position on rude laughter is Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s, which holds that low comedy is leveling and liberating\u2014a suspension of the rules, an upending of accustomed social hierarchies, a joyful reduction of the body back to it mostly widely shared functions. Mardi Gras, if you believe this account, is the one space in otherwise regulated cultures where grotesque bodies are fully welcome, the one space, that is, in which beauty doesn\u2019t move you to the front of the line, the space where half-naked fat men can dance with dwarfish women and find delighted onlookers cheering them on. This, tellingly, is an argument that Dickie doesn\u2019t even consider long enough to dispute. One question we might now ask is: What do we say back to Bakhtin once we realize that the gentry also liked a good fart joke? Such is the importance of Gatrell\u2019s City of Laughter<\/i>, which <\/i>reproduces hundreds of comic prints from the late eighteenth century and the Regency, all of them to varying degrees goatish and none of them within the budget of a saddlemaker\u2019s apprentice. This prompts the student of comedy to modify Bakhtin\u2019s case in two ways: In the eighteenth century, carnival was if anything more the property of the great than of the plebes\u2014the low laughter of the high-born\u2014and for some of them it was permanent and hence not just a holiday mood. Scurrility wasn\u2019t so much the overturning of hierarchy as its habitual and sodden mode. Gatrell is a historian, but philosophically his account presupposes a kind of untutored Nietzscheanism or even a light vitalism: He asks us to think of London\u2019s aristocratic crapulence as a culture without negation, a capacity for taking pleasure in just about anything without having to worry about who sins and who suffers. The visual arts produced a different, more joyous, less alienated city than the Londons one finds in literature, which is condemned to moralism by the simple fact of narrative sequence\u2014compelled, in other words, to care about actions and their consequences. To note the Nietzscheanism in City of Laughter<\/i>, a book so unbridled one suspects that Gatrell wrote most of it with his pants off, is at the same time to draw attention to the grindingly un-Nietzschean qualities of Dickie\u2019s work. And this is worth dwelling on because the latter has affiliated himself with disabilities studies, a field which typically positions itself as fully beyond good and evil. Or to be more precise: Disability studies is an unlikely compound of Nietzschean and anti-Nietzschean\u2014Christian and universalist\u2014arguments, but from this synthesis Dickie has stripped away the Nietzscheanism (the cruelty, the laughter), and so fashioned a wholly prayerful version of the disability project, preoccupied with fragility and the beleaguered preeminence of the meek. At the same time, then, that he is injecting a set of Foucauldian concerns into English Marxism, he is terminating the Foucauldian thread in disability studies itself: \u201cScholars have been far quicker to acknowledge the sexual freedoms of early modern libertinism than the equally important freedoms of violence and destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 And yet Dickie\u2019s very universalism keeps eating itself. His book\u2019s basic position is that eighteenth-century laughter came mostly at the expense of the poor. Gentlemen chuckled into their cuffs while watching worn-down old women shit into ditches. An instability is then introduced into his argument when he notes, as rigor demands, that the laboring classes often laughed along with their betters. Cheap joke books contained the same malicious jokes as their expensively bound counterparts. A butcher was just as likely as a baronet to mimic a cripple\u2019s limp or lead a blind man smack into some wall. And eventually Dickie pulls the plug on E. P. Thompson altogether: \u201cNo one can now overlook the nastiness of early modern plebeian life: the violence and long-held grudges, the insults and catfights in alleyways, the elaborate vengeance for unpaid debts or borrowed goods not returned.\u201d The English Marxism which had seemed to furnish Cruelty and Laughter <\/i>with its guiding ethos turns out to be one of its sadder casualties. \u201cCruelties in Common,\u201d he might have called this book, in which the beautiful soul compiles its ever-growing catalog of the eighteenth century\u2019s universal wantonness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 And yet this moral stand is probably something of an intellectual dead end. That the problems attending rude humor are not simply ethical ones, but are rather formal and rhetorical, is amply demonstrated by Dickie\u2019s own book, which itself falls into nearly all the traps that he has identified in eighteenth-century comedy. The only novel that Dickie discusses at any length is Fielding\u2019s Joseph Andrews <\/i>(1742), about which he makes two points: first, that Fielding, despite his professed intention to reform humor and elicit from his readers an un-cruel laughter, compulsively reproduces the knockabout of his own earlier stage comedies; and second, that eighteenth-century readers mostly appreciated Fielding\u2019s novel as a bit of silly fun\u2014a farce between covers\u2014and thought of Parson Adams, in particular, not as an amiably eccentric paragon, but as a comedic butt and scapegoat, just another foolish old man to be swatted on the back of the head. We can, on Dickie\u2019s behalf, extrapolate his argument into something of a method: We should be bothered whenever an attack on low comedy replicates what it critiques, and we should take bad readers as authoritative in this regard and so remain vigilant against an amoral audience\u2019s ability to laugh for the wrong reasons. Any \u201cinstability of tone,\u201d Dickie often insinuates, is just an unforgivable moral foot-dragging, a reluctance to condemn. I am only demonstrating my fidelity to Dickie\u2019s project, therefore, if I now point out that Cruelty and Laughter <\/i>extensively reproduces eighteenth-century jest-books in the process of attacking them, and that the book\u2019s jacket promises that its collection of rape jokes and pranks perpetrated upon the sick will be \u201cwildly enjoyable\u201d\u2014\u201centertaining,\u201d the back cover calls the book, a work of \u201cverve\u201d and \u201cjoy.\u201d Dickie himself pauses to explain what eighteenth-century people called it when a person soiled himself: \u201cbuttered eggs in the breeches,\u201d they said. He also, in that Fielding chapter, tells us to be on our guard against elite figures who unconvincingly perform their solidarity with the eighteenth-century poor. One can learn a lot from Cruelty and Laughter <\/i>and still wish that it weren\u2019t so haplessly self-hoisting. If you are convinced of Dickie\u2019s argument, then the only consequent way of showing this will be not to read his book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 On Simon Dickie\u2019s Cruelty and Laughter   ALSO AVAILABLE IN\u00a0NOVEL\u00a0(FORTHCOMING)   Chances are that you are going to enjoy Simon Dickie\u2019s Cruelty & Laughter quite a bit more than you were meant to, or, perhaps, that you are going … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4026],"tags":[23067,23085,24241,24240,23082],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-fiction","tag-comedy","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-henry-fielding","tag-humor","tag-theory-of-the-novel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1233,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}