One of the hallmarks of Chaucer’s writing is its unreliable narrators, the delight it takes in placing the reader at the mercy of its own poor readers. Much of its humor comes from this — the dreamer in the The Book of the Duchess groggily misreading Ovid or failing to read between the lines of the Black Knight’s tale, for instance. In that dream, the story is only able to continue so long as the dreamer fails to connect the dots and deduce that the lover is dead: it’s upon realizing this that the dreamer wakes up and the story ends.
I wonder: if the comedic is located in a kind of reflexive deflation — in the staging of fantasy such that it appears, absurdly, as fantasy — is there a sense in which the fictional is located in the refusal to check one’s own facts — in misreading? I suspect that even for the most realist and scrupulously-researched fiction, at some point you have to refuse to know better, or act as though you don’t.
This is also, of course, one way of talking about ideology. One may recall China Mièville’s sci-fi neo-noir The City and the City, in which the denizens of two geographically overlapping nations collectively participate in sustaining their respective imagined communities by simply learning to “unsee” each other. The gimmick doesn’t really hold your interest for very long, though — in part, I suspect, because the novel is so humorless. I wonder if fiction can have anything to say about ideology if it isn’t funny.
And I think what I mean by “funny” here is something like: a story which, if it didn’t prompt laughter, would only appear schizophrenic: the pieces wouldn’t fit together; it would be ruined because it fails to provide a world for its own pretensions, which is exactly what made it funny in the first place. Can a joke be funny if it can’t be ruined?
If China Mièville were a better writer, perhaps The City and the City would have been a comedic novel, rather than merely a gimmicky one. I think “3:30,” a tiny little story in Parker Young’s recent collection Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, gets it better. Here’s how it begins:
Walking the city grid at 3:30pm with all the other unemployed people. We pretend not to notice each other. It’s a deal we struck when we got tired of explaining. (162)
Ideology yields to exhaustion. An epistemic downward spiral: we’re too tired to explain; we know nothing. As the narrator’s grandmother believed, people all have the ability to receive premonitions, but “avoid them because they’re mostly unbearable,” avoiding the truth so well that they don’t even know they’re avoiding it anymore.
But they’re still, on some level, always pretending. The unconscious always knows better, or whatever. Fantasy pretends not to. It interprets without consideration, after a certain point, of questions like how do you know? “This is why I’ve failed so far in my career to write essays,” the narrator explains, “I never provide the appropriate details.”
Pretending becomes humorous when it is contradicted: when the pretender appears in a world which neglects to provide those details. The narrator imagines, at the drug store, that a “ne’er-do-well” could, hypothetically, put poison on the tops of the deodorant containers, killing clueless shoppers without anyone knowing the cause. “I ask to speak to the manager.” The world fails to supply the details that would make the scenario at all plausible. “Get lost,” they’re told.
I look at him with a look that says, you just blew a fucking million-dollar idea. It’s a look I learned from television, where it appears with a surprising and almost sinister regularity.
The story has now become a situation. It’s become sitcom, a genre whose characters are “selfish and deranged, delicious micromenaces to normalcy and etiquette who nonetheless enter each episode with their worlds in tact.” Those words are Lauren Jackson’s, who calls attention in particular to the whiteness of such characters — in Seinfeld, in Friends — and to the ways in which Black characters appear in these television shows as “agents of public decency,” as avatars of a world that fails to supply the details. I think, too, of the blank stare of the Latinx diner waitress at the beginning of Listen Up Philip.
Here, though, the world that fails to supply the appropriate details that would sustain our fantasies is one in which everyone is just unemployed and broke. Flailing for a job. Trying, and failing, to gesture towards something like a “normal” — employed — life.
Our narrator proceeds to sprinkle sugar on the deodorants, to make the case for the job they’ve proposed that only they can fill, that is, to be the one who checks the tops of the deodorants for poison. They’re kicked out, screaming, because now they’ve remembered that they’d actually needed to buy deodorant, and now can’t. “Fortunately, everyone outside pretends not to notice.”