A previously unknown treatise by St. Thomas Aquinas on comic stories, De fabula comica, was unearthed recently by workmen conducting repairs to a sewer pipe underneath the Cluny-La Sorbonne metro station. Through contacts in the French National Archives I have managed to get my hands on a copy of the treatise and have translated an excerpt from the second part here:
DFC, II, q. 23: Whether Americans can write funny novels?
Objection 1: It would seem that Americans cannot write funny novels. For there is a novel entitled Stoner by the American author John Williams belonging to the “campus novel” sub-genre. As practiced by British authors Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and David Lodge, the campus novel is notable for biting satire and general drollery. Stoner, however, an exemplary American campus novel, is “achingly sad” (Alys Denby).1 Therefore Americans cannot write funny novels.
Objection 2: Further, only a people that does not take itself seriously can write funny novels. But America, in contradistinction to Britain and its population of “gentleman amateurs” (Denby) is a land of self-serious “strivers” who believe that success in business is reducible to a discoverable recipe and who have laboriously codified shambolic, unwritten British law in their Constitution, a document of almost unimaginable self-seriousness. Therefore Americans cannot write funny novels.
Objection 3: Further, Denby says that American authors overcompensate for their country’s “piddling 250 years” of history by striving to infuse the present moment with epic meaning; Gatsby strains for tragedy while Updike aspires to make his Rabbit an Everyman. “English novels, by contrast, have been inherently comic from the start.” After Fielding and Sterne launched the novel with jokes and laughter, “the Yanks took what was light and made it weighty.” Therefore Americans cannot write funny novels.
On the contrary, Girard says (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, page 125), “All novelistic works have a tendency to the comic,” that is, all works that are not of a romantic bent have a tendency to view human nature under a comic aspect. There exist American authors who are not of a romantic bent and whose works “have a tendency to the comic.” Therefore Americans can write funny novels.
I answer that, As the Jewish proverb says, “Man thinks, God laughs.” Why does God laugh? Mostly because (as Kundera says) “man is never what he thinks he is.”2 Now the laughter of God is the type [“ratio”] of human laughter. Novelistic works that are not of a romantic bent portray man as self-deceiving. It is in this portrayal of characters who see themselves as other than they are that the funny quality of such works resides.
“The humorous story is American,” says Mark Twain, “the comic story is English, the witty story is French.”3 And Kundera says that each European nation has “a separate experience” of a common destiny. Nevertheless, despite real differences among countries and cultures, the tendency of man to think he is something other than what he truly is is universal and does not pertain exclusively to any one of them; similarly, the capacity for portraying man as taking himself for other than he is does not depend on an author’s belonging to this or that nation, as it concerns primarily not traits associated with a certain national character but (as Girard says) the novelist’s relationship both to the tradition of the novel, which is supra-national, and to his own desire.
Reply to Objection 1: It is true that Stoner is “a plangent, devastating story” (Denby) and that Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is not funny. But these are not the only examples of the American campus novel. Richard Russo’s Straight Man, for instance, is a funny American campus novel; so is Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.
Reply to Objection 2: To paraphrase Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: “The novelist who reveals triangular desire cannot be a self-serious striver but he must have been one.”4
Reply to Objection 3: Two of the greatest American epics, Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are also funny novels.
https://spectator.com/article/why-americans-cant-write-funny-novels/?edition=us
“Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe,” in The Art of the Novel.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250-h/3250-h.htm
The actual sentence: “The novelist who reveals triangular desire cannot be a snob but he must have been one” (p. 220).
I saw that headline the other day about Americans and funny novels and wondered just how few American novels the author had read. As if 'Stoner' is the only American novel. This refutation is a delight.
Obviously she's ignorant of American novels. Has she heard of Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger? The list is actually quite long.