Humor and Irony in British Literature

The comic novel is a rattling English kind of fiction and does non always settles down in some other national literatures well. Certainly the English novel tradition is remarkable for the number of comic novels among its classics from the work of Fielding, and Sterne and Smollett in the eighteenth century, through Jane Austen and Dickens in the 19th to Evelyn Waugh, Arnold Bennett and David Lodge in the twentieth.Even novelists whose primary intention is not to write funny novels such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster keep scenes in their fiction which muddle us laugh aloud. In this work we will define on the example of literary texts of British literature the notion of humor and irony both of which be based on the comic element.Comedy in fiction would appear to have two primary sources, though they are intimately connected billet (which entails character a situation that is comic for one character wouldnt necessarily be so for another) and style.Both dependent upon timing, that is to say, the order in which the words, and the information they carry, are arranged. The principle can be illustrated by a single sentence from Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall. At the beginning of the novel, the shy, unassuming hero, Paul Pennyfeather, an Oxford undergraduate, is divested of his trousers by a party of drunken aristocratic hearties, and with monstrous injustice is sent down from the University for indecent behavior.The first chapter concludes God damn and blast them all to hell, and Paul Pennyfeather meanly to himself as he drove to the station, and then he felt rather ashamed, because he rarely swore. (Waugh, 1929) We laugh at this because of the delayed appearance of the word meekly what appears, as the sentence begins, to be a long-overdue explosion of righteous anger by the dupeized hero turns out to be no such liaison but a further exemplification of his timidity and passiveness.Lucky Jim of Kingsley Amis exhibits all properties of comic fi ction in a highly polished form. As a impermanent assistant lecturer at a province university, Jim Dixon is totally dependent for the continuance of his employment on his absent-minded professors patronage, which itself requires that Jim should demonstrate his professional competency by publishing a scholarly article. Jim despises both his professor and the rituals of academic scholarship, but cannot afford to say so.His resentment is therefore interiorized, sometimes in fantasies of military unit to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he dis cozyd why, without being French himself, hed given his sons French names (Amis) and at the other times, as here, in satirical mental expositionary upon the behavior, discourses and institutional codes which oppress him. The style of Lucky Jim is wide-eyed of little surprises, qualifications and reversals which satirically deconstruct cliches. Jims powerlessness is physically epitomized by his being a passenger in Welchs car, and a helpless victim of his appalling driving.The banal and apparently superfluous sentence Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a puckish April (Amis) in event proves to have a function. Looking from the same window moments later, Jim is startled to find a mans face staring in his from about nine inches away Surprise is combined with conformity to Welchs incompetence. The face, which filled with alarm as he gazed, belonged to the driver of a van which Welch had take to pass on a sharp bend between two stone walls. (Amis) A slow motion effect is created by the leisurely precision of the language about nine inches away, filled with alarm, had elected to pass contrasting comically with the speed with which the imminent collision approaches. The reader is not told immediately what is happening, but made to infer it, re-enacting the characters surprise and alarm. Another stylistic device based on humorou s effect it creates is irony. jeering consists in saying the opposite of what you mean or inviting an interpretation different from the surface meaning of your words. Unlike other figures of speech metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche etc. irony is not distinguished from literal statement by any peculiarity of verbal form. An wry statement is recognized as such in the act of interpretation. When, for example, the authorial narrator of Pride and Prejudice says It is a truth universally ack instantaneouslyledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune, must be in want of a wife, (Austen, Chapter I) the reader, alerted by the false logic of the proposition about single men with fortunes, interprets the universal generalization as an ironic comment on a particular social group obsessed with matchmaking.The same rule applies to action in narrative. When the reader is made aware of a disparity between the facts of a situation and the characters understanding of it, an effect c alled dramatic irony is generated. (Lodge, 179) Arnold Bennett in his The Old Wives Tale employs two different methods to put his characters behavior in an ironic perspective. Sophia, the beautiful passionate but inexperienced daughter of a draper in the Potteries, is sufficiently dazzled by Gerald Scales, a handsome commercial traveler who has hereditary a small fortune, to elope with him.The embrace described in the passage below is their first in the privacy of their London lodgings. Her face, view so close that he could see the almost imperceptible down on those fruit-like cheeks, was astonishingly beautiful and he could feel the secret loyalty of her soul ascending to him. She was very slightly taller than her lover but somehow she hung from him, her body curved backwards, and her bosom pressed against his, so that instead of looking up at her gaze he looked down at it. He preferred that perfectly proportioned though he was, his stature was a delicate point with him.(Bennett, 278) What should be a moment of sexy rapture and emotional unity is revealed as the physical conjunction of two people whose thoughts are running on quite different tacks. Gerald in fact intends to seduce Sophia, though in the event he lacks the self-assurance to carry out his plan. Even in this embrace he is at first nervous and tentative, perceiving that her ardour was exceeding his. (Bennett, 278) But as the intimate contact continues he becomes more confident and masterful His fears slipped away he began to be very fulfil with himself (Bennett, 278).There is probably a sexual pun hidden in His spirits rose by the uplift of his senses, for Bennett frequently hinted in this fashion at things he dared not describe explicitly. Gerald sexual arousal has nothing to do with love, or even lust. It is a function of his vanity and self-esteem. Something in him had forced her to lay her reservation on the altar of his desire. Like the secret loyalty of her soul ascending to him (Benn ett, 279) earlier, this florid metaphor mocks the complacent thought it expresses.The use of the word altar carries an extra ironic charge since at this point Gerald has no intention of leading Sophia to the altar of marriage. Up to this point, Bennett keeps to Geralds point of view, and uses the kind of language tolerate to that perspective, thus implying an ironic assessment of Geralds character. So he kissed her yet more ardently, and with the slightest touch of a victors condescension and her burning retort more than restored the self-confidence which he had been losing. (Bennett, 279) The description of his timidity, vanity and complacency so very different from what he ought to be feeling in this situation is comme il faut to condemn him in readers eyes. In the next paragraph Bennett uses the convention of the omniscient intrusive author to switch to Sophias point of view, and to comment explicitly on her misconceptions, adding to the layers of irony in the scene. Sophias words are more creditable than Geralds, but her words, Ive got no on but you now , are partly calculated to endear him to her.This merely reveals her naivety, however. She fancied in her ignorance that the expression of this sentiment would please him. She was not aware that a man is normally rather chilled by it, because it proves to him that the other is thinking about his responsibilities and not about his privileges. He smiled vaguely. (Bennett, 279) As the burning Sophia utters this sentiment in a melting voice, Gerald is chilled by the proctor of his responsibilities.He responds with non-committal smile, which the infatuated Sophia finds charming, but which, the narrator assures us, was an index of his unreliability and a portent of disillusionment to come A less innocent girl than Sophia might have divined from that adorable half-feminine smile that she could do anything with Gerald except rely on him. But Sophia had to learn. (Bennett, 279) The reader is supplied with kn owledge that helps to feel pity for Sophia and contempt for Gerald. This type of irony leaves us with little work of inference or interpretation to do on the contrary, we are the passive recipients of the authors wisdom.To conclude it is necessary to note the briny difference between humor and irony. These two devices while both based on comic element apply different approaches to their endeavorive. Irony the funny object is hidden beyond the mask of seriousness, and the negative, derisive attitude to the object is expressed. The different is humor, where the serious thing is hidden beyond the mask of ridiculous and the attitude to the object of derision is predominantly positive. Works Cited List Amis, Kinsley. Lucky Jim. London Gollancz, 1954.Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Reissue edition, Bantam Classics, 1983. Bennett, Arnold. The Old Wives Tale. New York Hodder & Stoughton, 1909. Carens, James F. , The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle and London, University of majuscu le Press, 1966. Lodge, David & Wood, Nigel Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader. Harlow Pearson, 2000 Nilsen, Don L. F. Humor in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. A Reference Guide, 1998. Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. London Chapman & Hall, 1928.