Published Book by Thomas Benz

February 1, 2017

The case for tragicomedy in literary fiction

A favorite contemporary writer of mine whose work is entertainingly shot through with humor is Jacob Appel.  He is as consistently funny as he is prolific, having had scores of stories published, some of which are collected in “The Magic Laundry,” “Scouting for the Reaper” and Einstein’s Beach House.” He also has two excellent novels “The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up,” and “The Biology of Luck.”  The wild premises of his plots offer ripe fields of irony.  My intent here is not to review these excellent books but briefly examine Appel’s tone, especially as it relates to the delicate balancing act of the tragic and comic aspects of experience.

The titles alone offer a glimpse into his both his sense of irony with definite hints of Magic Realism. The latter is a form of extreme exaggeration which can often be used to humorous ends but first let me focus on the former.  In “The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up” all hell breaks loose when the main character refuses to stand for the national anthem at a baseball game, owing to a recent political outrage.  All hell breaks loose when the incident is made public, such that the character is hounded by the press and forced into a fugitive status.

This is a good example of the sort of fanciful premise that some readers might not find legitimate. Doesn’t it lack the gravitas of literary fiction that should properly be about serious and even tragic issues, life and death struggles in war, romance, and commerce? Doesn’t it have to be like that to sustain the requisite conflict? Are we expected to accept such a situation as plausible?

Well, the last question is easy since Kaepernick, the San Francisco quarterback, last year did just what Appel’s character did—what seems a bit outlandish at first actually comes to pass on a fairly regular basis. As in this instance, actual events sometimes lend an almost prophetic element to the author’s conceit. To the other questions, my answer would be a resounding ‘no.’   This is not to denigrate unalloyed tragedy in the least. “Moby Dick,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Great Gatsby” all richly deserve their place in the pantheon of literature. But I would argue that if we exclude the milder conflicts in our experience, the ones which are a bit silly and almost hard to believe, we’re missing a lot of what our lives are comprised of.

On the issue of plausibility, it goes without saying that a reader must be able to believe that the events and dialogue and settings in a book.  Yet, plausibility must not eclipse originality and to some extent the two concepts are in opposition.  The word ‘novel’ suggests the pursuit of the unusual, so as to escape the mundane and the ordinary. The tragi-comic writer is likely more prone to push plausibility to the edge because exaggeration can heighten the effect, can occasionally make us laugh out loud, even in the midst of some overriding sadness.  And while he or she must do so convincingly,  even with the higher bar he or she has set for such persuasion,  there should not be a critical penalty. If the effect should delight as well as a steady stream of the more standard emotions, such efforts should not automatically be relegated to a lesser category of fiction.

In my next post, I’ll try to be more specific about how beautifully Appel and several other writers manage to be both funny and sad, even at the same time.