Style and Emotion in Comic Novels and Short Stories

Agnes Marszalek

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350054608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature and film to explore the emotional aspects of humorous narrative comprehension. It investigates how the linguistic features of comic novels and short stories (by, for example, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller and Nick Hornby) can shape readers' experience of comedy, considering the ways in which moods, characters and the plot is used to trigger blends of positive and negative emotion. The book offers an approach to such features of comedy as dark humour, cringe humour and comic suspense, emphasising the relationship between humorous language and mental states which are typically considered serious. Agnes Marszalek's focus on the non-humorous side of experiencing comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a narrative world, this book moves towards addressing the complexity of the experience of humour in narrative texts, providing implications not only for the linguistics of humour, but also for those approaches to discourse comprehension which explore the affective side of engaging with texts.

1

Introduction

Comic novels and short stories are designed to evoke a range of affective responses. While many of these responses are primarily related to the creation of humour, some can be linked, more generally, to entertaining the reader. Much of comedy’s potential to entertain is encoded in the stylistic layer of the writing, meaning that it is the language of the text which guides us to react in certain ways. A comic narrative, therefore, can be seen as a kind of linguistic manipulation which relies on specific stylistic devices that direct our emotional experience in order to entertain us.

This book explores how the language of comic novels and short stories can shape our emotional reactions in the process of reading. The focus here is on a particular aspect of the experience of written comic narratives – one which stems from texts’ ability to encourage their readers to use the words on the page to create narrative worlds, which are imaginary spaces built partly from the linguistic elements present in the text and partly from the readers’ own knowledge and cognitive mechanisms (e.g. Ryan 1980; Emmott 1997; Werth 1999). When I discuss the experience of narrative comedy, I am therefore referring to the experience of being in an alternative universe which comes into existence in the process of reading (e.g. Gerrig 1993). This universe is occupied by people, locations, objects and events – features which can evoke emotional reactions that are dependent, partly, on the ways in which these elements are linguistically represented in the text. Textual worlds are linguistically constructed: they are composed from stylistic building blocks which shape the reader’s emotional experience of being in those worlds.

Although I concentrate specifically on the language of comic novels and short stories, this is not strictly a study on the creation of humour in written narratives (cf. Attardo 2001; Ermida 2008). I do, of course, discuss humour throughout, and – as expected in a stylistic account of humorous discourse (see Simpson 2006) – outline the humorous incongruities which underlie the various amusing passages I analyse. However, rather than investigating the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms involved in the creation of verbal humour (as it is done by, for example, Raskin 1985 and Attardo and Raskin 1991), I approach humour not in and of itself, but as a vehicle for the construction of the wider narrative world of the comic text. Individual instances of humour present in texts will be seen as components of such worlds, and consequently as building blocks of narrative comedy. It is comedy, not humour, which is of primary importance here, and for that reason this book draws from a range of disciplines which are well-equipped to deal with describing the structural characteristics of a long, complex comic narrative like a novel or a short story. The definition of narrative comedy adopted here is, therefore, based on research in literary, film and television studies (Frye 1957; Neale and Krutnik 1990), and it centres around three main features of comic narratives which distinguish them from those which are non-comic:

1.a prevailing comic mood,

2.a cast of comic characters, and

3.a series of comic events followed by a comic resolution.

In the chapters that follow, each of these components will be discussed from a predominantly stylistic perspective, but with references to studies of literary and film/television comedy. While the text analysis is linguistic, the overall approach adopted here is interdisciplinary.

One way to approach narrative humour is to view it not in isolation, but as part of the larger linguistic context in which it occurs – shaped and influenced by the narrative world to which it belongs. It is the construction of this world which will affect our experience of humour in the narrative. While much of our engagement with comedy does rely on the emotion of amusement evoked as a response to the humorous elements in the text, comic narratives are also designed to trigger a range of other affective reactions which are unrelated to humour, but which stem, more generally, from our involvement with the narrative world. This kind of emotional involvement with text-based characters, events and other features is associated with what psychologists refer to as our immersion in the world of the text which can result from the impression of being transported there in the course of reading (e.g. Green and Brock 2000; Green 2010, see also Miall 2007; Oatley 2011). A comic narrative may be designed to make us laugh, but it also encourages us to immerse ourselves in its world. This can involve forming feelings about the characters who inhabit it and about the events which happen to them.

Many of these feelings, in fact, can seem very far removed from the pleasurable emotional reactions typically associated with humour. While many stylistic world-building elements found in comic narratives are used for a humorous effect, some allow humour to coexist with other, sometimes painful or uncomfortable responses to narrative worlds. Rather than approaching comedy as a homogenous genre whose main purpose it is to amuse, it may be better to view it as a mode (see King 2002, 2011) that can be blended with other modes to evoke emotional reactions more complex than straightforward amusement. One of the novels which inform this study, Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, is a narrative which frequently uses humour in combination with elements that are distinctly non-humorous, as illustrated by the following passage:

Example 1

Jamie was kneeling on the stairs with a washing-up bowl of soapy water, sponging his father’s blood from the carpet.

That was the problem with books and films. When the big stuff happened there was orchestral music and everyone knew where to get a tourniquet and there was never an ice-cream van going by outside. Then the big stuff happened in real life and your knees hurt and the J-cloth was disintegrating in your hands and it was obvious there was going to be some kind of permanent stain.

(Haddon 2007: 293)

This extract is constructed around a tension between features which are humorous and those that are distinctly non-humorous. While it is partly the contrast between the serious ‘big stuff’ such as a family member’s grievous injury, and the trivial, prosaic reality of ice-cream vans and J-cloths which informs the humour here, it would be a mistake to treat the passage as entirely humorous – after all, it concerns a tragic event in someone’s life. The event and the person may be fictional and confined to the narrative world of the text, but it is a world in which we are immersed in the process of reading, and consequently, a world in which we may be emotionally involved. Our feelings for the character and our appraisal of the seriousness of the situation in which he finds himself, for example, are likely to affect our experience of reading the extract above, influencing our impression of humour not only in the short passage, but also in the whole novel. It is this mix of positive and negative emotion evoked in the process of reading which, for some readers, may contribute to the enjoyment of engaging with comic texts, as seen in this extract from one reader’s review of A Spot of Bother written for the online reading community Goodreads1:

[…] tender, sweet and heartbreaking. it’s also hilariously funny. haddon does heartbreaking and funny with such grace, simplicity, and verbal virtuosity, it’s wonderful.

Behind what the reader refers to as ‘verbal virtuosity’ are particular stylistic choices which allow the writer to ‘do heartbreaking and funny’, that is, to evoke seemingly contradictory blends of emotion. While not every narrative comedy deals with heartbreak in the way that Haddon’s novel does, many do rely on our immersion in the narrative world to trigger certain responses which contribute to our experience of these worlds.

1.1. Experiencing humorous worlds

Much of the humour which appears in comic novels and short stories tends to be very context-dependent. A passage which makes us laugh in the course of reading a humorous novel, for example, may not be equally amusing when taken out of that linguistic context and presented to someone unfamiliar with the text. This familiarity is important, as comic narratives rely on their readers to accumulate certain knowledge about the narrative worlds which they present to us, and then encourage us to draw on that knowledge to identify and comprehend instances of humour. Unlike simple puns or canned jokes, which can be effective regardless of the linguistic context in which we encounter them, the humorous elements found in more complex narratives may not even be recognized as amusing by those receivers who lack the essential background knowledge of the wider text. That is because while the comprehension of puns and jokes often depends on our general knowledge of the real world, our understanding of the humour in narratives will often rely on our familiarity with the particular narrative world of the text (see Emmott 1997: 35 for text-specific knowledge).

Since it is the knowledge of the textual world which can influence whether we find a particular line amusing or not while reading a comic narrative, the stylistic construction of that world will, to some extent, determine the reader’s experience of narrative humour. One explanation for why narrative humour can lose its amusing potential when taken out of its immediate context is that we depend on certain stylistic cues present in the wider text to assure us that what we read is intended as humorous and laughter is an appropriate response to what we see. The reason why many instances of humour in narratives are so bound to their context is that, in order to fully appreciate them, we need to encounter them as part of a textual world which, based on the cues present in the text, we perceive as generally humorous. In my previous work, I suggested that the narrative worlds of many comic novels and films are constructed as humorous worlds (Marszalek 2013, 2016a, b). Designed with the use of a range of cues which signal the humorous quality of the world, humorous worlds elicit an overall impression of humour in the reader – an impression which can enhance the humorous potential of the individual elements that appear in the world. The amusing quality of such elements is context-dependent, meaning that it is the wider context which helps to ‘unlock’ the humour in them for the receiver.

In the process of reading, we encounter numerous stylistic ‘cues’: those elements of the linguistic layer of the text which signal (and perhaps elicit) emotional responses. In comic narratives, these cues can shape our emotional responses to the three experiential components of the humorous worlds which the texts encourage us to inhabit:

1.the moods evoked by being in the world,

2.our feelings for text-based characters, and

3.our reactions to narrative plot events.

While many of these cues will be designed to evoke amusement and therefore create our impression of the world as a humorous one, a large proportion of them will signal responses which are associated not with humour, but rather with our emotional engagement with the narrative world more generally.

1.2. Distance and immersion: Stabilizing and destabilizing comedy

Our experience of comic novels and short stories is guided by two disparate forces: distance and immersion. While distancing the reader from the characters and events described is associated with humour creation, reducing that distance and encouraging us to immerse ourselves in the textual world can disrupt the experience of humour. In order to cue humorous distance and non-humorous immersion, comic narratives rely on two types of stylistic feature which either stabilize or destabilize our experience of comedy:

Stabilizing cues

Stylistic features of comic narratives which signal amusement and stabilize our experience of comedy. They distance us from the narrative world to encourage a detached, playful, sometimes mocking attitude towards the world.

Destabilizing cues

Stylistic features of comic narratives which signal non-humorous emotions that destabilize our experience of comedy. They lead us to immerse ourselves in the narrative world and form feelings and attachments for its entities.

Stabilizing cues can be understood as those elements of the linguistic layer of the text which can be expected to evoke amusement, and which, through frequent use, contribute to our perception of the narrative world as one which is generally humorous. The close link between humour and amusement is a notion that underlies much of the psychological research on the emotional aspects of humour, where the term amusement (and the synonymous mirth, hilarity, cheerfulness or merriment) is used to describe the positive emotion closely related to joy, elicited by a perception that a situation is funny (Martin 2007: 8). Its experiential qualities are associated with feelings of pleasure – amusement is, as Martin suggests, that ‘unique feeling of well-being’ familiar to all of us (2007: 8). Like other emotions, amusement can be said to be elicited by our cognitive appraisal of an encountered stimulus (e.g. Arnold 1961; Frijda 1986 and 2007). In order to evoke amusement, therefore, verbal stimuli such as humorous texts need to contain linguistic elements which are evaluat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Narrative worlds, literary emotion and humorous discourse
• 3 Experiencing modes and moods
• 4 Engaging with characters
• 5 Reacting to story structures
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright