1983 > The Modern Language Review, Warwick, 1983, October. — P. 883–884.

Discovering the Comic. By GEORGE MCFADDEN. Princeton, New Jersey, and Guild- ford: Princeton University Press. 1982. x + 268 pp. £13.40.
New works on 'the comic' are greatly needed. The problem, old as it is, has many unresolved aspects, and even the foundations of the comic must be investigated more precisely than has been done hitherto.
Professor McFadden treats the comic quality 'not as a means of defining a genre but as offering a specific value feeling in widely different works of literary art' (p. 4). Postulating that discovery' is more important than 'interpretation', he discloses something of his methodology; and it is not by chance that he ignores New Critics' works on the problem. As to his own platform, Professor McFadden declares himself to be a follower of the phenomenological aesthetics of Edmund Husserl and Roman Ingarden.
One can trace in the study under review two aspects: (1) literary historical and (2) theoretical. Some theoretical questions are discussed in the introduction, Chapters i and 2, and the conclusions; other chapters (I would call them essays) are devoted to different concepts of the comic in literary history. The history of world aesthetics is divided by the author into two vast periods: the first ('classic'), from Plato to the end of the eighteenth century, and the second ('romantic'), from the Great French Revolution until now. This periodization may be called too conventional and even arbitrary, but it helps the scholar to describe the views of some prominent theorists, including Schiller, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Cornford, Frye, and Barthes.
The most successful essays are those on Bergson, Freud, and Nietzsche. Analys- ing Bergson's work, 'Le Rire', Professor McFadden accents the indirect links between laughter and social life in Bergsonian theory. He characterizes common features and differences in Bergson's and Freud's theories of humour (it is interes- ting to note that the Polish scholar B. Dziemidok classifies both of them as 'theories of crossing motives'). Freud's contradiction in interpretation of the phenomenon of 'smiles through tears' is commented on in Chapter 6 with some originality. The observations on the genetic relations between some of Nietzsche's ideas and Schiller's theory are of real value.
The book is full of convincing literary illustrations to the problem under discus- sion. The author is more inclined to the empirical description of literary facts than to the philosophical aesthetics. The circle of literary examples is wide, from Aris- tophanes to Kafka and modern authors. Chapter 9 contains a fairly profound analysis of Donald Barthelme's 'text', 'Snow White', which was written after Barthes's ideas; I daresay that this analysis is more important than the discussion of Barthes's ideas themselves. The most interesting part of the 'Conclusions' is devoted to discovering the comic quality in Henry James's novella, 'The Pupil'.
Sometimes Professor McFadden's essayistic manner contradicts his historical approach. It is surprising, for example, to find grouped together the three names of Mauron, Cornford, and Frye in Chapter 7. It is difficult to understand why the original ideas of the modern Canadian scholar are put in the same period and class as Cornford's work (published in 1914) and Mauron's views, which are not fundamentally original. To say that 'structuralism had been recognized by Husserl from 1900' is to make nonsense of the term, for structuralism as a scientific trend did not yet exist in 1900.
The theoretical aspect of the book is especially open to criticism. To begin with one curious statement, 'Our model is the principle we have stated' (p. 25): in formal logic 'a model' can not be 'a principle' but can be based upon principles. On the same page Professor McFadden proclaims that he will not attempt to catalogue various modes and techniques of comic writing and that his model is not the Mendeleev table. Of course, a model in literary criticism or aesthetics cannot reach the Mendeleev system's precision, but it must try as far as possible to equal such a level of systematic thinking. This principal postulate determines some weak moments of Professor McFadden's approach to the problem: he avoids any systematization and does not even attempt to describe the main parameters of the comic.
Speaking briefly of the 'inadequacy' of the formalist approach (pp. 24-25), the author makes one doubt his knowledge of the work of formalists, and of Russian formalists in particular. Perhaps this a priori negation of the formalist approach determines his underestimation of Todorov's and some other structuralists' contri- butions to the theory of genres.
As to the theory of genres itself, Professor McFadden is of the opinion that 'true genre' is determined by 'dominant generic quality'. It is a pity that he does not try to define this dominant quality either in general or in any particular case: hence some weak points in his genre-definitions. He states, for example, that parody is 'not a genre in itself but a reflective way of playing with genres' (p. 180); if the author knew the formalist approach to the theory of parody (for example, Y. Tynyanov's essay) it would be easier for him to distinguish between parody (as genre) and parodying (as device).
The diffusion of theoretical positions results in some cases of concrete indistinct- ness. I think many scholars would disagree with the definitions of Cervantes's Don Quixote or Kafka's Amerika as 'comic novels' and of Hanno Buddenbrook as a 'comic figure'. Parson Adams may be called Don Quixote's homologue but by no means Sancho Panza's, as is said on page 43. Some phrases about The Cherry Orchard as a comedy prove that the author has taken Chekhov's genre-definition literally and has not comprehended the real generic nature of this drama.
The selected bibliography (pp. 255-62) will of course be very useful for students and critics. Lacunae in selective bibliographies are not usually mentioned in reviews, but still it is a pity that this bibliography fails to mention works by the well- known Russian scholars Mikhail Bakhtin (I mean his book on Rabelais) and Vladimir Propp (his posthumously published book is devoted to the problems of the comic). Despite these criticisms and reservations, Professor McFadden's book as a whole is a valuable work. Its historical part has some merits, its theoretical part may be usefully provocative.