C. J. Ganter, University of Würzburg, Germany
This paper investigates the most notable literary strategies the Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty employs in order to create humorous effects in his short fiction. Highlighting relevant stylistic devices and thematic concerns, I intend to point out why the label “stoic humor,”[1] which has been suggested in this context, is an apt phrase to describe the idiosyncrasies of MacLaverty’s black humor.
Comedy and humor are not among the stylistic features one would readily associate with Bernard MacLaverty’s works. Cal, for instance, his most famous book (which was also successfully filmed), is a haunting study of a nineteen-year-old Catholic in the midst of the Northern Irish Troubles and his desperate attempt to break away from this violent background—an attempt doomed to failure. On the surface, his writing seems a brilliant example of Seamus Deane’s hyperbolical dictum: “If there is anything more depressing than Ulster fact it must be Ulster fiction.”[2] MacLaverty’s oeuvre has been called pessimistic in tone and in the outlook on life it displays, and, in consequence, it has frequently been said to convey a sense of utter bleakness.[3] From a biographer’s angle, this bleakness must be interpreted as a reflection of the traumatic experience the writer and his family went through in the Belfast of the 1970s. MacLaverty himself attributes the bleakness in his writing to a life overshadowed by outbursts of sectarian violence, which eventually made him opt for Scottish exile: “It would be difficult to come out of a place like Northern Ireland … and to find nothing but heart-warming comedy. So in a way the bleakness is reflected in your work.”[4] The skeptical, at times almost fatalistic impression we get from his books obviously stems from MacLaverty’s conviction that it is the writer’s task “to reflect with integrity and truth what he sees.”[5] Well aware of his skeptical inclination, he quotes one of his favorite authors to support his artistic approach: “Flannery O’Connor says that she strongly defends the right of the artist to select a negative aspect of the world to portray and I agree.”[6]
With the exception of his children’s books, we hardly come across any light-hearted humor in Bernard MacLaverty’s writing. Humorous aspects do not figure largely in his three novels—Lamb (1980), Cal (1983), and Grace Notes (1997)—which all, at least in parts, comment on the horrors of the Northern Irish Troubles. Despite the obvious dominance of bleakness, however, MacLaverty’s work is also marked by an indisputable tendency toward comedy. In his four collections of short stories we encounter a writer who selects a whole variety of different shades from the wide spectrum of humor. In a review of MacLaverty’s first collection, Secrets and Other Stories (1977), a critic noted that “irrepressible humor is an important quality of even the grimmest stories MacLaverty has to tell,”[7] a tendency which has continued in his three other volumes: A Time to Dance (1982), The Great Profundo (1987), and Walking the Dog (1994).[8] Indeed, it is chiefly in the short prose form that MacLaverty accomplishes the fruitful synthesis of bleakness and comedy. The result of this synthesis is black humor—humor “as bleak and raw as the landscape”[9]; “cruel humor,”[10] which in some cases takes the shape of stinging satire.
In varying degrees, MacLaverty presents himself as a master of irony. Amazing powers of observation and the effective use of both obvious and subtle irony are among MacLaverty’s chief assets. Appropriately, his literary investigations have been described as a quest for “ironies of circumstance or standpoint.”[11] The use of contrast is one of MacLaverty’s favorite stylistic means to create comedy, as he indulges in the oscillation between fact and illusion. The ironic tension in “Phonefun Limited,” for example, rests solely on the discrepancy between appearance and reality. We watch two visibly aged lesbian prostitutes being transformed into lascivious beauties as they offer their sexual services on the telephone. Posing as sexy Samantha, Agnes has little difficulty in convincing her male caller that she has “very long legs,” yet her own close analysis reveals something different: “She lifted her legs off the pouffe and looked at them disapprovingly. She had too many varicose veins. She’d had them out twice” (ATTD 92). In several stories we come across the leitmotif of a bygone acquaintance whom the protagonist idealizes as the one perfect match irrevocably lost forever. In “Umberto Verdi, Chimney Sweep,” Nan’s phantasmagorias of an adventurous life with a past suitor, the gentle and polite Sudanese Dr. Kamel, form a sharp contrast to the humdrum life in which the dissatisfied housewife finds herself with her children and her boorish husband John. When looking up a chimney sweep in the local phone book, she immediately responds to the romantic sound of an Italian name. Involuntarily, Nan projects the image of her Prince Charming to this unknown name. Not surprisingly, however, the physical appearance of the real Umberto Verdi radically denies the picture of her hoped-for Latin lover: “He was small and fat, fifty if he was a day, with trousers which came up to the middle of his chest. His face was black with soot and he raised his cap to her revealing a clean, pink, bald head” (Secrets 64). One cannot fail to see the irony in the incongruence of Nan’s nostalgic reveries, her wishful thinking, and the sobering reality which brings her jaunt in the land of make-believe to an abrupt end.
Auto-reflexive irony is at the core of the metafictional playfulness in the italicized interchapters of Walking the Dog. A postmodern persiflage of yarn-spinning, that is, of the ancient Irish tradition of oral storytelling, these vignettes focus on “your man”[12]—both a kind of Irish Everyman figure and a bored man of letters who goes through the trials and tribulations of suffering from writers’ block. In “On the Art of the Short Story,” which is merely two sentences long, MacLaverty wittily pokes fun at short story theory: “This is a story with a trick beginning. Your man put down his pen and considered the possibility that if he left this as the only sentence then his story would also have a trick ending” (WTD 1). Sharing features such as the punch line and the male point of view with the “typical” Irish joke,[13] MacLaverty’s “your man” stories illustrate the continuity between the humor of oral traditions from Celtic Ireland and the wit of the twentieth-century Anglo-Irish short story.[14]
In some of MacLaverty’s brilliantly observed stories of initiation, comedy is based on the naiveté of a child’s view. With sensitivity and understanding, the writer analyzes the humor implied in the self-consciousness and insecurity of childhood. One striking example is the story “More than just the Disease.” Due to his lack of experience, Neil Fry, the young protagonist, steers himself toward the most embarrassing situations. Time and again the boy-hero tries to avoid joining his friend Michael for a swim so as to keep his psoriasis a secret. For months he has been plagued by the condition: “Every morning he hoped that it would have miraculously disappeared overnight but it was still there crawling all over his chest and shoulders” (GP 42). When challenged once more by Michael’s sister Anne to come swimming, Neil remembers his mother’s favorite excuse that always seems to work: “The fact is, I’ve got my period” (GP 46). Eventually, an eccentric mentor enters the scene and helps Neil to overcome his inhibitions, so the story ends in an optimistic mood.
As we can see, Bernard MacLaverty’s black humor is constituted of a stylistic mélange that combines optimism and joy with melancholy and fatalism. This amalgam of bleakness and comedy informs many of MacLaverty’s slice-of-life-portraits, and it makes his comic tales part of the satiric tradition in Anglo-Irish writing, which includes giants such as Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien, all famous for their masterly use of black humor. No matter how stinging Bernard MacLaverty’s satires are, there is not much room for outspoken cynicism in his black humor. Even his most macabre modes of presentation include tinges of sympathy with the characters depicted. An obvious example is the story ‘‘The Drapery Man.” In it, the first-person narrator gives a frank account of his relationship with the famous painter Jordan Fitzgerald. Despite his blindness, the homosexual artist, who left his native Ireland for Portugal, keeps on producing pictures by giving precise orders to his English assistant: “I think that Jordan took me on because I would do what I was told—to the letter—exactly. Engineering Drawing is that kind of science. Even then Jordan must have had intimations of his coming blindness. He said a philistine was what he wanted. If I was artistic it would interfere with the translation of his vision on to canvas” (GP 34). Keeping impartial, MacLaverty shows the rituals of upsetting and fighting in which the two men engage themselves. Both are tragic figures in their own ways, but the writer never makes them lose their dignity: “We ceased to be lovers many years ago but I still feel a sense of responsibility to him. I can’t leave him, particularly now that he is blind” (GP 37). Portraying a blind painter who fools the outside world with paintings engineered by his “drapery man” (GP 28), MacLaverty’s satire questions the fundamental principles of art and aesthetics—authenticity and originality.
Irish Catholicism, especially the cliché-ridden image of families with hordes of children, is among MacLaverty’s favorite targets of ridicule. The most obvious example can be found in “The Bull with the Hard Hat,” which echoes David Lodge’s novel The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). The short story is a satire on Irish Catholics’ unreflected submission to papal directives and its disastrous consequences. The dejected protagonist bears the uncomfortably ambiguous name Dick. Dick and his wife Margaret always lose their bets in the “Vatican Roulette”: due to their confining themselves to natural methods of family planning, their family is growing steadily: “It wasn’t his fault. He had put the thing fairly and squarely to Margaret and she point blank refused to take the Pill or any other precaution. ‘On your own head be it,’ was his attitude now ... and sure enough six months later she was pregnant again. Her answer was always the same—‘But it’s a sin, it’s there in black and white, the Pope says so.’” (Secrets 116–17).[15] The ironic coincidence lies in Margaret expecting their ninth child while Dick’s professional record as an artificial cow inseminator is dramatically on the decline: “If his job was as good as his home record ... or vice versa everything would be all right, but now more than ever with a ninth child on the way he couldn’t afford to lose his job” (Secrets 117). Dick’s only means of escape from gloomy reality are his daydreams, which take the shape of “Walter Mitty fantasies”[16] in which he conceives of a carefree life with the attractive secretary Carmel: “With Carmel it would have been so different. They could have had two nice children and she would be there crisp and clean for him when he came home, the house immaculate, the toys tidied away. Instead he knew Margaret would be lying on the sofa, her feet up in the air because of her veins—it was like this when he would come home. The floor, from the doorway in, would be covered with treacherous trucks and wheeled things, dolls without limbs, pieces of jig-saws” (Secrets 119). In a sympathetic way MacLaverty caricatures a henpecked husband whose fantasies are governed by traditional sexist role schemes.
“Language, Truth and Lockjaw,” undoubtedly MacLaverty’s funniest story, is another satire that highlights his gift of turning serious matters into provocations of laughter. The story, which includes a wide range of sitcom elements, deals with an English philosophy don, who is a pessimistic hypochondriac, appropriately named Norman Noyes. Reluctantly, Norman has agreed to a short holiday trip that his wife has suggested. Before long the bad-tempered lecturer is shocked to find out that the stately home next to his rented family apartment is lived in by a group of mentally handicapped persons, “a mixture of mongols and cretins and God knows what” (ATTD 162). His “interesting neighbours” tend to stand “for hours in the rain, immobile as sentries, watching the house,” and at night Norman hears “hooting laughter and yelps and howls which previously he had only associated with a zoo” (ATTD 160). The metamorphosis of “the old Mansion House” (ATTD 160) into a holiday home for the handicapped clearly parodies the big house motif in Anglo-Irish literature.[17] After nine years of marriage Norman Noyes and his caring wife Patricia find themselves alienated from each other and barred from real communication, which shows when they make the effort to talk things over. During his stay Norman attempts to revise his paper on the categorical distinction between pleasure and pain suggested in Gilbert Ryle’s analytical philosophy. When making love to his wife late at night, Norman is painfully made aware of how close both sensations really are, as his sexual fulfillment is followed by an embarrassing and painful lockjaw. Deprived of his basic articulatory tools, Norman is on the verge of desperation, but, luckily, Patricia succeeds in making his jaws work again. Bernard MacLaverty’s highly humorous story poses serious questions. Essentially, “Language, Truth and Lockjaw” is a satire on the postmodern debate on the conceptuality of truth and the referential inadequacy of language.[18] In striking contrast to his professor, an unpredictable “wooly existentialist” (ATTD 165), Norman Noyes is pictured as a follower of the language philosophy in British empiricism. In pain, however, he comes to realize that truth is not to be approached via academic gobbledygook. By juxtaposing an eccentric caste of philosophers (commonly taken to be representatives of an intellectual elite) and linguistically restricted handicapped people (commonly taken to be representatives of human abnormality), MacLaverty ironically questions the primacy of language postulated by twentieth-century positivism and reminds us of the disastrous shortcomings in the anthropological quest for criteria of human ‘normality’.
Repeatedly, the black humor in Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories has been characterized as stoic. The writer himself concedes the importance of this aspect: “There is stoicism and humor in most of the writing.”[19] As I have attempted to show, in a number of short stories the writer ridicules the ordinary plight of ordinary people, but he never indulges in their failure. With sympathy and an eye for detail, MacLaverty succeeds in detecting humorous aspects even in the most profound dejection of his marginalized characters, who bear their fate with stoic patience. Regardless of many a bitter defeat, his “stoic outsiders”[20]—most of them Irish characters—unwaveringly face the adversities of an existence that bears scant reason for hope. This aspect of composure, commonly associated with stoic ethics, accounts for the label stoic humor as a characterization of MacLaverty’s comic strategies: in varying shades of black humor the writer portrays characters who display a stoic attitude in the face of misery and pain. The overwhelming impression of bleakness we get from MacLaverty’s works, particularly from his novels, is palpably counter-balanced by the manifold manifestations of comedy to be found in his short fiction. As a result, MacLaverty’s general view “is more balanced, less misanthropic, and finally more convincing”[21] than that of most contemporary Irish short story writers. With stoic humor MacLaverty compensates for the bleakness deriving from his Northern Irish biography, thus achieving a kind of sublimation of his own personal traumata. Laconically, MacLaverty states that “wit is the one thing that keeps people in Northern Ireland sane.”[22] In his comic short stories the “pop-up patron saint of stoics”[23] gives us abundant proof of this.
NOTES
[1]
Tom Adair, “An Inward Explorer,” Honest
Ulsterman 85 (1988): 73.
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[2]
Seamus Deane, “The Poverty of Archetypal Patterns,” Education Times, 15 Aug 1974: 12.
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[3]
See Adair 73; Jack Beatty, “Catholic Guilt and Irish Troubles,” Book World. The Washington Post, 21 Aug
1983: 3; Anatole Broyard, “Domesticated Violence,” The New York Times, 20 Aug 1983: 12; Paul Campbell, “In the
Beginning Was the Written Word. Paul Campbell Interviews Bernard MacLaverty,” Linen Hall Review 1.4 (Winter 1984/85):
5; Peter Kemp, “British Fiction of the 1980s,” New Writing, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke (London:
Heinemann, 1992) 216–28; David Lodge, “Depressive Realism: An Irish Story,” The Sunday Times, 16 Jan 1983: 43.
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[4]
C. J. Ganter, “Bernard MacLaverty in Interview,” Anglistik 7.2 (Sept 1996): 17.
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[5]
Ganter 10.
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[6]
Campbell 5.
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[7]
Dean Flower, “Fiction Chronicle,” Hudson
Review 38.2 (1985): 301.
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[8]
Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text following the
respective abbreviation ATTD, Secrets, GP, or WTD.
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[9]
Nicholas Shakespeare, “Fiction,” The
Times, 29 April 1982: 10.
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[10]
Arnold Saxton, “An Introduction to the Stories of Bernard MacLaverty,” Journal of the Short Story in English 8
(1987): 117.
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[11]
Patricia Craig, “No Tricks or Treats,” Times
Literary Supplement 4419, 11 Dec 1987: 1375.
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[12]
“Your man” is a common phrase in the spoken English of Northern Ireland,
usually referring to a character previously alluded to in the conversation. See
Loreto Todd, Words Apart. A Dictionary of
Northern Ireland English (Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1990) 172.
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[13]
See Don L. F. Nilsen, Humor in Irish
Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996) 1–3.
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[14]
In his epoch-making book The Irish Comic
Tradition (London: Souvenir Press, 1991; first published 1962), the first
comprehensive diachronic study on Irish humor, Vivian Mercier pointed out that
subgenres such as the satire or the grotesque can already be found in Old Irish
literature.
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[15]
The papal interdiction on the use of artificial means of contraception that Margaret
mentions obviously refers to the hitherto controversial encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). For the influence
this document had on the sexual practice of Irish couples, see Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1995) 266–67.
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[16]
Robert Hogan, “Old Boys, Young Bucks, And New Women: The Contemporary Irish
Short Story,” The Irish Short Story. A
Critical History, ed. James F. Kilroy (Boston: Twayne, 1984) 194.
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[17]
See Jacqueline Genet, ed., The Big House
in Ireland: Reality and Representation (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon, 1991);
Otto Rauchbauer, ed., Ancestral Voices:
The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature (1992; rpt. Dublin: Lilliput Press,
1996).
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[18]
The very title of the story is a pun on A. J. Ayer’s positivist treatise Language, Truth and Logic (1936). See The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol.
III, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Norton, 1991) 1070. An introduction to the
postmodern debate on the issue is given by pragmatist Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989) 3–22, who—ironically—deals with Gilbert
Ryle’s position in passing.
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[19]
Campbell 5.
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[20]
A. J. Spencer, “The Dispossessed,” Book
World. The Washington Post, 23 July 1995: 7.
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[21]
Hogan 194.
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[22]
Gregory McNamee, “Capturing the Whirlwind: An Interview with Northern Irish
Writer Bernard MacLaverty,” The
Bloomsbury Review 9 (1985): 15.
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[23]
Anon, “Orange Turns Towards Green,” The
Independent, 23 July 1994: 27.
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