British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
'Something mechanical encrusted on the living': Laughter, Conservatism and the 'Anti-Modernist' Novel
Dr Sophie Blanch
Laughter and mockery, polite or otherwise, ruptures the seemingly placid narrative surface of the 'anti-modernist' novel in this period. Among many others examples, there is comic potential to be found in Rose Macaulay's caustic social satires, in the genre-bending parody of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, as well as in the anxious mockery of Rosamond Lehmann's unlaughing female protagonists. As such, humour remains a critical, and critically under-examined, mode of discharging gender anxiety and fragile constructions of class and cultural hierarchy in the inter-war years. Regardless of its desire to provoke laughter in its reader, the 'anti-modernist' – or culturally marginal novel - can often be described as 'ludic' in its use of game-playing, or joke-telling, as a central motif or structuring device.
As well as functioning as a form of proto-modernist interruption, I want in the course of this paper to suggest that this strategic use of laughter is indicative of its modernity even as it works to decry it, by subtly re-encoding prevailing modernist (and anti-modernist) theories of laughter and social meaning. I am interested here in tracing 'anti-modernist', or conservative laughter as a form of social exclusion and exclusivity; this is a preoccupation of the 'anti-modernist' novel that draws its author into dialogue with two key theorists of laughter and its social significance, George Meredith and Henri Bergson. Despite being positioned on either side of the modernist century, their respective theoretical studies, 'An Essay on Comedy' (1877) and 'Laughter' (1900), provide composite explorations of the social significance of laughter, and its ability to both police and punish those on the margins of a rapidly evolving social world. I will therefore read these two critical interventions as providing a conservative framework for the concerns of a generation of women novelists caught between the possibilities of social progress and an uncomfortable meeting with modernity.
Sophie Blanch is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Sussex. Her postdoctoral monograph project explores the relationship between wit, women and writing in the period 1905-39. Sophie read for an MA and PhD in English at the University of Warwick; her doctoral thesis, awarded in 2005, is entitled 'Around 1929: The International Psychoanalytic Congress and Modernism's Flight from Femininity'. In June 2007, Sophie organised an international conference at the University of Sussex on the theme, 'Joking Apart: Gender, Literature & Modernity, 1850-Present'. She is currently editing a book of collected essays under the same title. Sophie will take up her new post as a Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey in August 2008.