Humor and Irony in British Literature

The singular novel is a really English soft of illustration and does not always settles down in other national literatures well. certainly the English novel tradition is remarkable for the number of comic novels among its classics from the proceeding of Fielding, and Sterne and Smollett in the eighteenth century, through Jane Austen and Dickens in the nineteenth to Evelyn Waugh, Arnold Bennett and David inhabit in the twentieth.Even novelists whose primary intention is not to write funny novels much(prenominal) as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster have scenes in their illustration which discover us laugh aloud. In this work we will define on the example of literary texts of British literature the notion of sense of humour and satire some(prenominal) of which atomic number 18 based on the comic portion.Comedy in fiction would appear to have two primary sources, though they are good connected situation (which entails character a situation that is comic for ad ept character wouldnt necessarily be so for another) and style.Both dependent upon timing, that is to say, the roll in which the word of honors, and the information they carry, are arranged. The principle can be illustrated by a single sentence from Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall. At the set out of the novel, the shy, unassuming hero, Paul Pennyfeather, an Oxford undergraduate, is divested of his trousers by a party of drunken gamy hearties, and with monstrous injustice is sent down from the University for indecent behavior.The low chapter concludes perfection damn and blast them all to hell, and Paul Pennyfeather meekly to himself as he drove to the station, and then he felt rather ashamed, because he ra bank 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 victimized hero turns out to be no such involvement just now a further exemplifica tion of his timidity and passiveness.Lucky Jim of Kingsley Amis exhibits all properties of comic fiction in a highly polished form. As a temporary assistant lecturer at a province university, Jim Dixon is all dependent for the continuance of his employment on his absent-minded professors patronage, which itself requires that Jim should adjoin his professional competence 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 therefrom interiorized, sometimes in fantasies of violence to tie Welch up in his direct and beat him virtually the head and shoulders with a bottle until he tell why, without being French himself, hed given his sons French label (Amis) and at the other times, as here, in satirical mental exposition upon the behavior, discourses and institutional codes which oppress him. The style of Lucky Jim is full of little surprises, qualifications and reversals which s atirically deconstruct cliches. Jims powerlessness is strong-armly epitomized by his being a passenger in Welchs car, and a helpless victim of his solemn driving.The banal and apparently superfluous sentence Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a blotto April (Amis) in fact proves to have a function. Looking from the same window moments later, Jim is startled to find a mans face arrant(a) in his from about nine inches forth Surprise is combined with obligingness to Welchs incompetence. The face, which filled with alarm as he heedd, belonged to the driver of a van which Welch had elected to pass on a sharp curve between two stone walls. (Amis) A slow motion resultant role is created by the leisurely precision of the language about nine inches away, filled with alarm, had elected to pass contrasting comically with the quicken with which the imminent collision approaches. The reader is not told immediately what is happening, but make to infer it, re-enacting the characters surprise and alarm. Another stylistic doodad based on humorous marrow it creates is irony. Irony consists in adage the opposite of what you mean or inviting an interpretation assorted from the surface importee of your words. Unlike other figures of speech metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche etc. irony is not severalize from literal statement by any peculiarity of verbal form. An teetotal 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 acknowledged, 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 proffer about single men with fortunes, interprets the universal generalization as an juiceless comment on a particular social group obsess with matchmaking.The same rule applies to action in narrative. When the reader is made witting of a disparity between the facts of a situation and the characters understanding of it, an effect called 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 splendiferous passionate but inexperienced daughter of a draper in the Potteries, is sufficiently dazzled by Gerald Scales, a handsome commercial traveler who has inherited a small-scale fortune, to elope with him.The compact described in the passage below is their first in the privacy of their capital of the United Kingdom 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 intelligence ascending to him. She was very slightly taller than her lover but somehow she hung from him, her body curved backwards, and her press 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 erotic rapture and emotional unity is revealed as the physical conjunction of two people whose thoughts are running on quite an different tacks. Gerald in fact intends to seduce Sophia, though in the lawsuit 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) just as the intimate contact continues he becomes more confident and skilled His fears slipped away he began to be very satisfied 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 amours he dared not describe explicitly. Gerald sexual arousal has nothing to do with love, or dismantle lust. It is a function of his vanity and self-esteem. Something in him had forced her to lay her reasonableness on the altar of his desire. Like the secret loyalty of her soul ascending to him (Bennett, 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 appropriate 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 response more than restored the self-confidence which he had been losing. (Bennett, 279) The explanation of his timidity, vanity and complacency so very different from what he ought to be feeling in this situation is enough to condemn him in readers eyes. In the next paragraph Bennett uses the convention of the omniscient inquisitive 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 worthy 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 feel 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 reminder 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 h alf-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 knowledge that helps to feel pity for Sophia and scorn 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 main difference between humor and irony. These two devices while both based on comic element apply different approaches to their object. 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 chaff is predominantly positive. Works Cited List Amis, Kinsley. Lucky Jim. London Gollancz, 1954.Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. reproduce edition, Bantam Classics, 1983. Bennett, Arnold. The Old Wives Tale. New York Hodder & Stoughton, 1909. Carens, James F. , The Satiric wile of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1966. Lodge, David & Wood, Nigel Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader. Harlow Pearson, 2000 Nilsen, strike L. F. Humor in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. A Reference Guide, 1998. Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. London Chapman & Hall, 1928.