The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction by Glen Cavaliero (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 925 eloquent tribute to Scottish folk-song, not as the artless expression of some primitive innocence but as a modern form of giedd. University of Ottawa Andrew Taylor The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction. By Glen Cavaliero. Basingstoke : Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 2000. xi + 255 pp. ?42.50. The advantage of the The Alchemy of Laughter is its freedom to range over a wide field of English fictional comedy, reminding us of the familiar (especially of the comic greats, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, whose work understandably receives the largest proportion of Glen Cavaliero's attention) and of the less remembered (such as Peacock, 'Saki', Oliphant, and the elder Powys broth? ers), and alerting us to the comic pleasures to be found in those now obscure originals who have escaped our attention, or who rarely feature in books written for an academic readership. The book was written, says Cavaliero, 'simply for the pleasure of it' (p. ix), and certainly his reading for it, and the act of writing it, will have been keenly pleasurable. The disadvantage of the book is that it has nothing to say. What is crippling about studies that span is their tendency to deal with all readers as beginners. 'The medium of Tristram Shandy is the narrator's consciousness: time is internalised, events are described not as they chronologically occur but as they surface in Tristram's mind' (p. 64). Yes, so it is, and so they are. 'Whereas the marriage of Jane to Bingley is between two fundamentally complaisant people who match each other, that between Elizabeth and Darcy is between two who complement each other' (p. 47). Absolutely. Admirers of Thomas Hardy will probably be admirers of Walter Scott; those of Jane Austen, of Henry James. And those who enjoy Trollope are likely to appreciate the work of Evelyn Waugh, even though the two writers differ drastically in several ways' (p. 109). Good to get that one sorted out. Not that Cavaliero confines himself to bland statements of the obvious. There is controversy here. Can it really be asserted, forexample, that the 'world' of Three Men in a Boat is 'classless' (p. 11)? Can we really consent to view 'the eighteenth-century Enlightenment' and 'nineteenth-century Romanticism' as encouragements to people on the path to the 'twentieth-century convictions as to the human right to spiritual autonomy and the importance ofachieving personal fulfilment' (p. 241)? Is it all, then, thateasy? There is also absurdity. Mansfield Park, while 'not formally a comedy', is 'none the less comedic in its import': its ironies, 'with their exposure of human self-deception, are all directed towards what is essentially a religious vision, one of a truth that can be apprehended behind appearances and which reconciles the opposites which irony connects and displays in its effortsto control them' (p. 92). Comedic, then, like OedipusRex and KingLear? A wider frame of discussion, surely,is called forhere, and for Tristram Shandy, too: 'By qualifying the distinction between author and reader, it subverts the monolithic status of the artefact as object' (p. 63). Indeed, Cavaliero further cripplingly burdens himself by a decision not only to present comedy as participating in the rebellion against 'the monolith's restrictive pressures' (p. 3), but also to saddle that metaphor with the 'alchemy' of his title: 'this monolithic prima materia is embodied in four principal human concerns' (these four are, apparently, the past, the present, the future, and timelessness) 'much as that of the mediaeval alchemists was madeup of the elements of water, fire,earthandair' (p. 3). Meanwhile, why is Evelyn Waugh confined, largely, to fivepages towards the end? How can 'only two' of Forster's novels 'in any sense be described as comedies' (p. 119)? Where 926 Reviews are Goldsmith, Somerset Maugham, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch? Where is Chaucer? University of Northumbria at Newcastle Allan Ingram The Writer and Religion. Ed. by William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco. (International Writers Center Series) Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. 2000. xiii+157 pp. $I9-95This volume has a more international scope than many books that might appear under the title 'The Writer and Religion'. It...

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