Exposures: Humour and Vulnerability in some Contemporary British Novels

Abstract

Some of the most hilarious novels of the last decades begin in gravitas or generate moments of high punctum. This article investigates the ways in which, in contemporary texts, a specific use of humour reverses the logics of comic relief to generate an intensification of pathos or, at least, poignancy. By taking examples from Amis, Barnes, Winterson, Coe and Lodge, it addresses the paradoxical obliteration of distance that humour may generate, as it becomes the instrument of the pathetic in moments of exposure. Besides, at some elementary level, even when used as a distancing, protective strategy, humour is by definition an index of vulnerability for character, narrator and author alike, in so far as it indirectly—metaleptically, in the rhetorical meaning of the term—exposes some hitherto hidden frailty. One step further, it allows for the emergence of alterity since, by putting some distance between the subject and the other, it gets the latter to appear as other, thereby preventing any attempt at identification and totalisation. In all such instances, and as opposed to satire, humour does not work against but along with positive affects. Seen in this light, humour is a powerful expression and operator of vulnerability in so far as it never manages to hide the wound from which it emerges.

Keywords

• Martin Amis
• Julian Barnes
• Jonathan Coe
• Jeanette Winterson
• alterity
• affects