The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading
Description
Contains Bibliography, Index
$50.00
ISBN 0-8020-2737-7
DDC 809'.917
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.
Review
In a world preoccupied with doubt, disorder, and indeterminacy, where
the laws of thermodynamics seem the only certainties, O’Neill sees a
deconstructive “black humor” as the inevitably dominant literary
mode. Imposing order on existential chaos (with a hint, one hopes, of
the quixotic nature of the undertaking), he divides his study into three
parts: the contextual, in which the subject is discussed in relation to
contemporary intellectual ideas; the theoretical (and we all know what
that means); and the practical, in which 12 illustrative texts are duly
analyzed. O’Neill makes further divisions here into satire, irony, and
parody, neatly providing four specimens of each. Since this is an
exercise in comparative literature, texts in English, French, and German
are included; the authors discussed are Beckett, Camus, Céline, Grass,
Handke, Heller, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, and
Sartre.
If, as O’Neill maintains, “narrative always borders on parody,”
so does literary criticism, and in seriously providing an elaborate
taxonomy of entropic comedy, O’Neill is clearly walking a tightrope
over an absurd abyss. Though he warns in a chapter title against the
importance of being earnest, he tends to be fairly earnest himself; for
example, his complicated diagrams and equations in Part 2—designed, he
says, “to clarify”—cry out for deconstructing parody. One does not
expect humorous writing in such a study, but an approach that allowed
for the expression of witty paradox within the argument would have
helped immensely. Significantly the texts that come across most
effectively in Part 3 are those in which language is most freshly and
dexterously employed; O’Neill’s nonevaluative subdivisions seem
secondary. The Comedy of Entropy contains some interesting insights,
breaks some new ground, and is necessary reading for anyone interested
in literary genres, but I wish it were a little lighter in tone.