Greif is relentlessly sober and earnest about writers who eschewed sobriety and earnestness. He acknowledges “mockery” and “irony,” but I don’t know whether he ever acknowledges the importance of this fact about most of his chosen fiction writers: that they think “man” is, all things considered, a pretty ludicrous figure. For instance, he acknowledges that in Pynchon’s V Benny Profane is a schlemihl because he “cannot get along with objects. Objects are always slipping from his hands, hitting him in the face, failing to work. Alarm clocks won’t ring on time, spades will turn, electronics won’t run.” This is all true, but it’s important to note that this affliction puts Benny in the same general class as … Sideshow Bob when he steps on the rakes. One of Pynchon’s constant themes is that technology makes schlemiels of us all, even as we try to convince ourselves that we are becoming more and more masterful because of all the clever machines we can make and buy.
In O'Connor’s work, and in Bellow's—and even Ellison’s, in a bitterer vein—comedy constitutes a chief form of critique of the hubris of man. Auden once commented that “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws"—the laws that govern rakes, and alarm clocks, and my neighbor, whose bondage to those laws I laugh at until I am forced by events to acknowledge that the same laws also afflict me. As Auden puts it, "No one … can claim immunity from the comic exposure"—this is a point relentlessly emphasized in the stories of O'Connor (where people usually respond to such exposure with rage), in the novels of Bellow (where the response is usually exasperation), and in the novels of Pynchon (where it is usually befuddlement). We seem never to learn what we need to learn from this exposure, from this relentless evidence that we are not the captains of our fate or masters of our destiny, but subject to the same dreary old physical forces that dogs and plants and stones must contend with. The nature of man, these writers tell us, is to be comically unable to accept constraints upon Being, comically insistent that we can somehow take charge of our lives and our worlds. There is of course a tragic side to this insistence as well.
Man in Crisis | Books and Culture. My review of Mark Greif’s new book. I have more, and more critical, comments about the book here.