havingbeenbreathedout:henryclervals:#this is both hilarious #and #I think #getting at something
havingbeenbreathedout: henryclervals: #this is both hilarious #and #I think #getting at something important I can’t articulate right now #like:#‘ever since the war girls are wild for a chap with a private income and his own feet’ #that is LEGITIMATELY how it is possible to have a story where a useless man like Bertie is a hot commodity #there’s a whole way of life in those books #(which continued to exist in the books long after it had ceased to exist in real life) #which is like the fun side of nihilism #I don’t really know anything about literature after like 1830 #but the 1790s were a social apocalypse in slow motion #not unlike WWI for some people #and that’s probably why 13 out of 14 plays staged in Paris during the 1790s was a comedy #literature #to think about (via @oulfis) @greywash and I were literally JUST talking about this (this subject, not this post, which I hadn’t seen yet) as we drove home yesterday from our fire-related exile. Wodehouse’s whole deal makes perfect sense to me as a response to WWI (c.f. the famous opening lines of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits…” or Phryne Fisher’s quip “I haven’t taken anything seriously since 1918″). Unless you were, for example, Maynard Keynes, who shrewdly suspected that worse was yet to come, it often seemed in 1918 that the worst had happened, so what did you have to lose? Kick up whatever heels remained to you. The fact that the Wodehouse books went on so long, past the time when the zeitgeist had changed from “The cataclysm has happened” to “Oh shit, the cataclysm is about to happen again” and then on to “The cataclysm is happening” and “Another cataclysm on top of the second cataclysm,” produces some odd tonal effects. Like, we were talking about Roderick Spode, who is a caricature of the British fascist Oswald Mosley, but the things that are caricatured about him, are like… he’s petty and ineffectual, he wears stupid little shorts, etc. To the extent that the truly dangerous and offensive aspects of Fascism are addressed, the critique is blink-and-you-miss-it. When Spode harps on about “the British knee,” for example, okay, that’s nationalism and British chauvinism, but it’s a version of nationalism that’s mostly silly and undignified rather than monstrous or dangerous. It’s like a critique of Trump that talked about his orange skin and small hands but not his suppression of the press or his anti-Muslim ban or his policy of child separation or his casual advocacy of sexual assault or etc. By contrast Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, also a comedy which also pokes fun at the petty and ridiculous shit about Hitler, simultaneously engages with and critiques the violent antisemitism of the Nazi movement. None of this is to drag Wodehouse. But the span of his career really points up how the social tone changed between 1918 and 1938*. *(As greywash pointed out, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Wodehouse started writing slightly before WWI, but I still think it’s apropos.) this is not a very deep reply, for all its wordiness. and i try not to add unnecessary replies to posts, but i remember @oulfis discussing those 14 french plays with my boyfriend and I fear i am about to make a very narrow-minded point i can’t back up with sources:we are always sluts for escapism. (okay that is not an especially controversial point it is no surprise)but stories like J&W provide the simplest, most delicious kind of escapism. They are the Hershey’s Kisses of fiction–there is much to be desired but damn if you can’t pop ‘em one after the other, they melt real nice on the tongue, and nine times out of ten there are always more of them, ready to provide their own special comfort. I remember thinking this when I was reading a collection of Wodehouse short stories, long ago–i had just gotten an ancient kindle, second hand, from a friend, and I was looking for free things to read. There was a collection of Wodehouse shorts and they were all just like that. They melted in your mouth, sweet and pleasant and then done. I think the J&W stories had a little more staying power–they did at least for me–but there’s a kind of detached sweetness to those short stories. Halfway through the collection I hit a story that made me feel a little concerned and I knew, okay, this is probably going to work out alright, based on precedent. Which is not a universal virtue, but I am biased because 1. that’s how Wodehouse rolls and 2. that was a time in my life where I really needed things to work out alright, fite me.but @havingbeenbreathedout mentioned The Great Dictator as a contrast, and her point is a good one: there is space for mocking the sheer absurdity of a position, but there is perhaps more significance when that absurdity is a sidenote to the inherent viciousness of it. Wodehouse, as much as I love his work, feels very rich-person detached from my life*. That is delightfully escapist, and Bertie Wooster is interesting to me in part because, bless him, he is so useless as an Independent Adult Human. I am more appreciative of, say, Pratchett; specifically, how the Watch books brush Notorious Former Poor Sam Vimes against Lady Sybil; it provides the escapism of marrying someone you care for while also marrying rich, but doesn’t gloss over the change and slight resentment of those changes and the assumptions that go with it.**I’m not sure I have a meaningful point here. I just find the subject interesting–who can offer a fictional escape from the horror, and the fact that the escape, even if it happens in real life, is always fictional; the intersection of popcorn reading with what we think of as substance, and also “sometimes I think I died there as well” “pip pip Jeeves” is goddam hilarious in a grim way that is not unique to my generation and the next but is a factor in our sense of humor. And if my memory of Gods and Monster is correct (and it’s depiction of James Whale is correct, and thereby of at least a few of the soldiers) the same sense of humor existed in WWI: laugh or shatter, and you haven’t the time to break.*I am born and raised in the US; I grew up poor and went to a “good college”–after community college–full of people who did not grow up poor, and I am now pretty poor again; my partner is doing better but we are not financially tied so that really just means that i spend less of my parent’s money on groceries.**disclaimer: I have not read Snuff. I have a lot of trouble with Things Being Over and I started it but I’m not ready to cope with it being the last Watch book. -- source link