Tuesday, December 14, 2010

holiday card drafts: from shutterfly.com

which do y'all think we should order?


Cheery Blossoms Christmas Card
Make a statement with personalized Christmas cards at Shutterfly.
View the entire collection of cards.



Dazzle And Sparkle Holiday Card
Shop hundreds of holiday photo cards at Shutterfly.
View the entire collection of cards.



Peace + Joy Christmas Card
Make a statement with personalized Christmas cards at Shutterfly.
View the entire collection of cards.



Pretty Little Ornaments Christmas Card
View the entire collection of cards.



Partridge Pear Tree Holiday Card
Turn your photo into this year's holiday party invitations.
View the entire collection of cards.



Believe In Magic Religious Christmas Card
View the entire collection of cards.

Monday, May 17, 2010

To Tickle or To Skewer? or Poking Fun versus Driving Home the Point: Merits of Humor as a Didactic Strategy



Desi Bradley
Professor Steven Wexler
English 638
May 17, 2010
To Tickle or To Skewer? or
  Poking Fun versus Driving Home the Point:  Merits of Humor as a Didactic Strategy

The inspiration for this work derives from the now-hackneyed Horatian maxim that literature should strive to “delight and instruct”.  Noting that Upton Sinclair’s intended didactic subject in The Jungle—namely the perils of capitalism versus the merits of socialism—failed to garner the sort of class-consciousness that Sinclair perhaps hoped to elicit, this work begs the question of whether the tone of the novel had something to do with the diversion in response.  To wit: if Sinclair's efforts with The Jungle fell on deaf ears, maybe it was because the novel was so graphic and horrifying.  Maybe, as a collective, the American public simply resists casting itself as responsible in any way, for the exploitation of an entire class of working immigrants.  
As a tangent, it's also possible that the didactic lessons on Socialism were too indirect for the mass public to see its own role, as consumers, in perpetuating the cycle of capital's exploitation of labor.  In other words, Joe the Plumber doesn't really see himself as having a role at all in The Jungle.  This being the case, however, this work focuses on the role of Sinclair's tone in the novel—which, of course, begs the question of whether or not a different tone might be more effective. A lighter tone, perhaps.  Maybe even a humorous one?  One might conjecture that to shed light on the issues of wage slavery in a humorous tone it might be necessary to be somewhat opaque as opposed to outright didacticism.
In line with this thinking, then, this work examines Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas through a Marxist lens.  Robbins’s novel falls under the rubric of popular culture, with potential to reach a mass public.  It's certainly written in a playful tone, but not without complex theoretical discourse.  And the notion of work—cheating at work, lack of work, the need to work (or not,) compensation for work, and satisfaction with work, or lack thereof—plays a huge role in the theme of the narrative. 
In their book Tom Robbins: a Critical Companion, the only published criticism of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Catherine Hoyser and Lorena Stookey recognize that it “seems appropriate to consider Frog Pajamas’ vision of the contemporary working world in the light of Marx’s insights,” (154) and indeed, they do pay lip service to such a reading with a cursory overview of the topics I explore in detail with this paper.  These include the diminishing power and numbers of the American middle class, the widening gap between the super-rich and the poor, the value of work and workers’ alienation from the products of their labor, and workers’ (dis)satisfaction with labor itself.
Working with a substantial body of foundational political criticism, including Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser, while integrating these political ideas with contemporary research into the effect of humor on communication, comprehension, emotion and learning, this work joins in an ongoing conversation, and contributes to the discourse surrounding the intersection of these two ideas.  The theoretical conversation that links humor with political critique extends back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his analysis of Rabelais and His World, in which Bakhtin explicates Rabelais’s use of scatological humor as a device to explore sociopolitical topics inherent in the ritual of carnivale.  However, theoretical work addressing the use of humor as a didactic strategy in literature is thin, and two of the major contributions to the conversation in this paper are not journal articles or book chapters, but doctoral dissertations.  Furthermore, those dissertations have a gap of almost 30 years between them. In 1976, Helen Marie Whall-Seligman completed her doctoral dissertation exploring the use of humor as a didactic device in Tudor drama, and it wasnt until 2003 that Sandra Eileen Van Pelt published her dissertation, which examines the use of scatological humor in Juvenalian satirists Taylor and Swift.  Van Pelts work is more closely aligned with Bakhtins analysis and also this analysis of Tom Robbins work.  However, the academy has largely ignored a vast corpus of satirical work, particularly that produced in the postmodern epoch.  The work done so far in this area both opens a space and points to the need for further research into the intersection of humor with political didacticism in literature.
Louis Althusser’s Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses provides one of the most significant foundational premises for an argument supporting the use of humor as a strategic device to communicate a subversive message to its reading public.  Building on the notion of political hegemony as put forth in Antonio Gramsci’s manifesto, Althusser’s discussion of hegemony begins to illustrate its recursive, almost tautological quality.  To illustrate, Althusser explains that men’s interpretations of their conditions “take literally the thesis which they presuppose, and on which they depend, i.e. that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world in an ideology is the conditions of the existence of men, i.e. their real world” (694).  In other words, what Althusser is describing is the invisibility of a naturalized ideology, which is instituted at maintained, according to Althusser, by the state apparatuses such as school, churches, and government.  Ideologies are so instilled and maintained that the citizen who is educated—or “indoctrinated,” as Althusser would say—within that ideology is unaware of its ideological quality and, rather, takes the ideology for granted as “the way things are”.  For Gramsci and Althusser the discourse surrounding hegemony and ideologies are firmly entrenched in Karl Marx’s capitalist critique, wherein they are necessary to reconcile the alienated labor pool with the conditions of their existence (Althusser 695).
The notion of political hegemony and the ideological state apparatuses collides with the notion of humor as a dissident strategy where humor theory asserts that one of the most prominent forms of humor and humor response occurs when the joke violates a social norm, prohibition, or taboo.  Recognition of the transgression, combined with an appreciation or affinity for the worldview that transgresses whatever social norm or taboo that is violated, produces the humor response, that the humor response—or appreciation of the joke—provides a bridge that enables for the serious entertainment of subversive ideas.  Two studies in the field of humor theory lend credence and support to the thesis that humor serves as such a bridge.  Christophe Harbsmeier’s exploration of Chinese ancient texts, "Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects" argues that Confucius utilized often self-deprecating humor as a political strategy for diffusing hostilities, and obscuring his own uncertainties.  In 2002, Ronald A. Berk’s "Does Humor in Course Tests Reduce Anxiety and Improve Performance?" suggests that the experience of humor is likely to reduce anxiety and enable students to reduce focus on themselves and appropriate behavior. 
Humor itself is enjoyable or cathartic in the sense that it permits the participant to transgress or violate social taboo under the rubric of a sense of “fun” or “falseness” much like the ritual of carnivale as elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin, and, as I suggested earlier, Bakhtin’s work with Rabelais’s novels is foundational in this respect.  “Laughter,” for Bakhtin, is “linked with the bodily lower stratum…[it] degrades and materializes”.  However, degradation as Bakhtin employs the term should not be misconstrued as a diminutizing or dismissive term.  Degradation, in Bakhtin’s analysis means “coming down to earth, the contact with earth…in order to bring forth something more and better” (688).  In the case of Rabelais’s work, this means laughter that is concerned with base bodily functions—with defecation, sex, and birth.  For Robbins, in Frog Pajamas, this degradation through humor also locates itself in base bodily functions such as urination, defication, sex, and rectal cancer.  Following in the tradition of scatological humor Robbins connects the rubric of elimination with that of procreation—in fact one of the earliest sexual innuendos made in the novel is the suggestion that when the main character urinates she will be reminded of her new love-interest, as they have both eaten asparagus and will therefore have matching urinary odor. Furthermore, Robbins infuses this scatological romp with a dose of class-consciousness by conflating the reproductive functions of the lower body with the rhetoric of capitol.  Gwen doesn’t long to bear children, Robbins writes, but rather longs to “swell with a pregnancy of moola” (83).
In the world of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, late monolopoly American capitalism takes center stage.  Althusser’s state apparatuses are seen as operating in full force, indoctrinating the culture with an ideology that privileges the work ethic in and of itself as its own end.  Value is measured in dollars. Even religion is being supplanted by capital: which is not to say that “faith” is supplanted.  Faith, rather, is diverted—for many.  Gwen herself has displaced faith from religion into the commodities market, as have many of her colleagues.  After the market crashes in the novel’s opening pages, Gwen reflects that “the market’s been chugging along on faith alone…and [when the market crashed] that faith was badly strained” (42).  Significantly, not everyone has displaced their faith into financial markets—but that is a significant source of tension in the novel.  Those who still exercise a religious faith (Belford Dunn, for example) serve as comic dupes in the novel.  And those who signify wisdom or transcendence place their faith in an entirely different, mystical and mysterious sphere.  Larry Diamond, who serves as the voice of the Fool, signifying enlightenment, states the conflation of faith with finance quite simply when he asks, sardonically, “did you really expect that a culture that believes the Second Coming is right around the corner could have the long-range vision or long-term will to sustain a superpower economy?” (122).  Clearly, Larry Diamond does not.  What’s more, it is apparent that, to Larry Diamond, the wherewithal to sustain a superpower economy is neither here nor there—it’s a diversion from what is truly important. 
The important players in Frog Pajamas include the novel’s protagonist, Gwendolyn Mati—a struggling commodities broker, Belford Dunn—her boyfriend, Q-Jo Huffington—Gwen’s best friend and the local mystic/tarot reader, Larry Diamond—a new love interest, guru, and former commodities broker, the “Rich Boys,”—a gang of independently wealthy hoodlems, the growing class of Seattleite homeless/destitute, and Dr. Yamaguchi—who seems to have discovered a cure for colon cancer and is giving it away for free.  Each character represents a different ideology within the matrix of late capitalism, and also a different status with regard to the alienation of labor.
Gwen has a less-than-middle-class background: her father a bongo-drummer with a penchant for hallucinogenic drugs, her mother a poet and suicide in the fashion of her idol, Sylvia Plath.  She suffers anxiety over her Filipina heritage, her second-rate university degree, her tenuous middle class status, her mediocre job performance, etc. etc.  She is characterized mainly by way of her narcissism and ambition.
Gwen’s boyfriend and best friend each serve as a sort of foil to Gwen’s ambition.  Belford exemplifies the sort of arbitrary quality that is associated with financial success in the contemporary climate of late monopoly capitalism.  That he has earned his substantial nest egg as a real estate agent by virtue of naïve, boyish charm and serendipitous connections is an irony not lost on readers fresh out of the 2009 collapse of the American real estate bubble.  Gwen suffers extreme envy of Belford, whom she perceives as having achieved the American Dream “without ever dreaming it” (35).  And while she claims no attraction to Belford, and consistently reveals his foolishness, naiveté, and simple-mindedness, she has been dating him for 3 years at the novel’s opening, and frequently considers settling on a marriage of convenience for the financial security he provides. Although Belford is a foil to Gwen’s ambition, he is treated as a dupe in the novel—often missing the fact the he is the butt of the joke, and firmly entrenched in a born-again Christian ideology that illustrates Althusser’s concept of indoctrination by way of the state apparatus.
Q-Jo Huffington, on the other hand, serves as a foil representing an enlightened point of view.  Q-Jo is the only main character in Frog Pajamas who is not alienated from the form and product of her labor.  In fact, Q-Jo is firmly grounded in her work, reaping emotional and spiritual rewards as well as a modest stipend for her tarot readings and for serving as a one woman audience for lonely citizen’s vacation memorabilia.  Q-Jo has insight into Gwen’s character that (apparently) exceeds her own, as afforded by the unique second person narration Robbin’s uses.  She serves as a spirital guide and emotional ground for Gwen.  
Larry Diamond, as alluded to already, serves as the voice of enlightenment of this narrative.  A former super-star as a commodities broker, Diamond is alienated from the worker of the brokerage and disillusioned with the (vast amounts) of money it earned him.  In Diamond’s own words “no matter how sweet the scores, they never added up to anything.”  Aware that his point is ambiguous, Larry sighs, “I suppose you don’t [know what I mean]” (162).  The way Larry Diamond sees things, the possibility that the stock market may not recover from the crash is a good thing, the end of the “Big Lie”. 
So far, Robbins commentary seems fairly obvious and straightforward—greed is bad, religion a bit foolish but harmlessly so, and the real happiness is found by engaging with one’s work in a spiritually rewarding way, free from greed.  And once seen in this light, the rest of the narrative does fall into place in a similarly straightforward way.  Perhaps this is the reason that Hoyser and Stookey devote a mere 2 pages of their 160-page volume to a Marxist reading of Frog Pajamas.   However, the message is not completely uncomplicated.  For example, Larry Diamond is the one character suffering from fatal colon cancer.  And, contrary to what one might expect, given Robbins’s mystic agenda, Diamond doesn’t embrace the end of his life and the promise of the hereafter.  Clearly, enlightenment doesn’t solve everything.
Furthermore, what is more interesting about the didactic message in Frog Pajamas isn’t so much the message itself, but the method of delivery.  In his essay "Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case of Passive Revolution during Mussolinis Ascendance to Power 1919-1925" Efharis Mascha examines the critical role that humor played in the establishment of what he refers to as a counter-hegemony during Mussolinis rise to power.  According to Mascha, the subtle uses of satire increase inversely with the rise of censorship.  What Mascha illustrates is the efficacy of humor as opposed to explicit didacticism in communicating a counter-hegemonic message.  Mascha is careful to distinguish between anti-hegemony and counter-hegemony”—an important part given that all teaching (or indoctrination, according to Althusser) is inherently ideologically driven.  A counter-hegemony, however, is driven by socially prohibited or taboo ideology.    Humor provides a critical device that enables transmission and response to the counter-hegemonic message. 
This essay argues that Tom Robbins Frog Pajamas, taken in opposition to Upton Sinclairs The Jungle, suggests strong support for the thesis adapted from the foundational work of Mikail Bakhtin, and advanced by Mascha, Seligman, and Van Pelt, that humor provides a platform for dissenting discourse, alternative ideologies, and counter-hegemonies.

Works Cited
Robbins, Tom. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Bantam: New York.1994. Print.
Hoyser, Catherine E., and Lorena L. Stookey. "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas." Tom Robbins: a Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 139-56. Print.
Political Criticism:
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 693-702. Print.
Gramsci, Antonio. "Hegemony." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 673-74. Print.
Marx, Karl. "Labor and Capital." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 659-64. Print.
Humor Theory:
Berk, Ronald A. "Does Humor in Course Tests Reduce Anxiety and Improve Performance?" College Teaching 48.4 (2000): 151-58. JStor. Web. 7 Apr. 2010.
Harbsmeier, Christophe. "Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50.1 (1990): 131-61. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.
Political and/or Didacticism and Humor Theory Combined:
Mascha, Efharis. "Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case of Passive Revolution during Mussolinis Ascendance to Power 1919-1925." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21.1 (2008): 61-98. Academic Search Elite. Web. 14 Apr. 2010.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Rabelais and His World." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 686-92. Print.
Van Pelt, Sandra Eileen Body. "Excremental Recycling in Selected Writings of Edward Taylor and Jonathan Swift: A Structuralist Study in Scatological Humor and Didactic Accommodation." Diss. University of Mississippi, 2003. Digital Dissertations and Theses (2003). ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.
Whall-Seligman, Helen Marie. "To Instruct and Delight: Didactic Method in Five Tudor Dramas." Diss. Yale University, 1976. Digital Dissertations and Theses. ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Merits of Humor as a Didactic Strategy


Desi Bradley

Professor Steven Wexler

English 638

April 26, 2010

To Tickle or To Skewer? or

Poking Fun versus Driving Home the Point: Merits of Humor as a Didactic Strategy

 

The inspiration for this work derives from the now-hackneyed Horatian maxim that literature should strive to “delight and instruct”. Noting that Upton Sinclair’s intended didactic subject in The Jungle—namely the perils of capitalism versus the merits of socialism—failed to garner the sort of class-consciousness that Sinclair perhaps hoped to elicit, this work begs the question of whether the tone of the novel had something to do with the diversion in response. To wit: if Sinclair's efforts with The Jungle fell on deaf ears, maybe it was because the novel was so graphic and horrifying. Maybe, as a collective, the American public simply resists casting itself as responsible in any way, for the exploitation of an entire class of working immigrants.

As a tangent, it's also possible that the didactic lessons on Socialism were too indirect for the mass public to see its own role, as consumers, in perpetuating the cycle of capital's exploitation of labor. In other words, Joe the Plumber doesn't really see himself as having a role at all in The Jungle. This being the case, however, this work focuses on the role of Sinclair's tone in the novel—which, of course, begs the question of whether or not a different tone might be more effective. A lighter tone, perhaps. Maybe even a humorous one? One might conjecture that to shed light on the issues of wage slavery in a humorous tone it might be necessary to be somewhat opaque as opposed to outright didacticism.

In line with this thinking, then, this work examines Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas through a Marxist lens. Robbins’s novel falls under the rubric of popular culture, with potential to reach a mass public. It's certainly written in a playful tone, but not without complex theoretical discourse. And the notion of work—cheating at work, lack of work, the need to work (or not,) compensation for work, and satisfaction with work, or lack thereof—plays a huge role in the theme of the narrative.

In their book Tom Robbins: a Critical Companion, the only published criticism of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Catherine Hoyser and Lorena Stookey recognize that it “seems appropriate to consider Frog Pajamas’ vision of the contemporary working world in the light of Marx’s insights,” (154) and indeed, they do pay lip service to such a reading with a cursory overview of the topics I explore in detail with this paper. These include the diminishing power and numbers of the American middle class, the widening gap between the super-rich and the poor, the value of work and workers’ alienation from the products of their labor, and workers’ (dis)satisfaction with labor itself.

Working with a substantial body of foundational political criticism, including Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser, while integrating these political ideas with contemporary research into the effect of humor on communication, comprehension, emotion and learning, this work joins in an ongoing conversation, and contributes to the discourse surrounding the intersection of these two ideas. The theoretical conversation that links humor with political critique extends back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his analysis of Rabelais and His World, in which Bakhtin explicates Rabelais’s use of scatological humor as a device to explore sociopolitical topics inherent in the ritual of carnivale. However, theoretical work addressing the use of humor as a didactic strategy in literature is thin, and two of the major contributions to the conversation in this paper are not journal articles or book chapters, but doctoral dissertations. Furthermore, those dissertations have a gap of almost 30 years between them. In 1976, Helen Marie Whall-Seligman completed her doctoral dissertation exploring the use of humor as a didactic device in Tudor drama, and it wasnt until 2003 that Sandra Eileen Van Pelt published her dissertation, which examines the use of scatological humor in Juvenalian satirists Taylor and Swift. Van Pelts work is more closely aligned with Bakhtins analysis and also this analysis of Tom Robbins work. However, the academy has largely ignored a vast corpus of satirical work, particularly that produced in the postmodern epoch. The work done so far in this area both opens a space and points to the need for further research into the intersection of humor with political didacticism in literature.

Louis Althusser’s Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses provides one of the most significant foundational premises for an argument supporting the use of humor as a strategic device to communicate a subversive message to its reading public. Building on the notion of political hegemony as put forth in Antonio Gramsci’s manifesto, Althusser’s discussion of hegemony begins to illustrate its recursive, almost tautological quality. To illustrate, Althusser explains that men’s interpretations of their conditions “take literally the thesis which they presuppose, and on which they depend, i.e. that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world in an ideology is the conditions of the existence of men, i.e. their real world” (694). In other words, what Althusser is describing is the invisibility of a naturalized ideology, which is instituted at maintained, according to Althusser, by the state apparatuses such as school, churches, and government. Ideologies are so instilled and maintained that the citizen who is educated—or “indoctrinated,” as Althusser would say—within that ideology is unaware of its ideological quality and, rather, takes the ideology for granted as “the way things are”. For Gramsci and Althusser the discourse surrounding hegemony and ideologies are firmly entrenched in Karl Marx’s capitalist critique, wherein they are necessary to reconcile the alienated labor pool with the conditions of their existence (Althusser 695).

The notion of political hegemony and the ideological state apparatuses collides with the notion of humor as a dissident strategy where humor theory asserts that one of the most prominent forms of humor and humor response occurs when the joke violates a social norm, prohibition, or taboo. Recognition of the transgression, combined with an appreciation or affinity for the worldview that transgresses whatever social norm or taboo that is violated, produces the humor response, that the humor response—or appreciation of the joke—provides a bridge that enables for the serious entertainment of subversive ideas. Two studies in the field of humor theory lend credence and support to the thesis that humor serves as such a bridge. Christophe Harbsmeier’s exploration of Chinese ancient texts, "Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects" argues that Confucius utilized often self-deprecating humor as a political strategy for diffusing hostilities, and obscuring his own uncertainties. In 2002, Ronald A. Berk’s "Does Humor in Course Tests Reduce Anxiety and Improve Performance?" suggests that the experience of humor is likely to reduce anxiety and enable students to reduce focus on themselves and appropriate behavior.

Humor itself is enjoyable or cathartic in the sense that it permits the participant to transgress or violate social taboo under the rubric of a sense of “fun” or “falseness” much like the ritual of carnivale as elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin, and, as I suggested earlier, Bakhtin’s work with Rabelais’s novels is foundational in this respect. “Laughter,” for Bakhtin, is “linked with the bodily lower stratum…[it] degrades and materializes”. However, degradation as Bakhtin employs the term should not be misconstrued as a diminutizing or dismissive term. Degradation, in Bakhtin’s analysis means “coming down to earth, the contact with earth…in order to bring forth something more and better” (688). In the case of Rabelais’s work, this means laughter that is concerned with base bodily functions—with defecation, sex, and birth. For Robbins, in Frog Pajamas, this degradation through humor also locates itself in base bodily functions such as urination, defication, sex, and rectal cancer. Following in the tradition of scatological humor Robbins connects the rubric of elimination with that of procreation—in fact one of the earliest sexual innuendos made in the novel is the suggestion that when the main character urinates she will be reminded of her new love-interest, as they have both eaten asparagus and will therefore have matching urinary odor. Furthermore, Robbins infuses this scatological romp with a dose of class-consciousness by conflating the reproductive functions of the lower body with the rhetoric of capitol. Gwen doesn’t long to bear children, Robbins writes, but rather longs to “swell with a pregnancy of moola” (83).

In the world of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, late monolopoly American capitalism takes center stage. Althusser’s state apparatuses are seen as operating in full force, indoctrinating the culture with an ideology that privileges the work ethic in and of itself as its own end. Value is measured in dollars. Even religion is being supplanted by capital: which is not to say that “faith” is supplanted. Faith, rather, is diverted—for many. Gwen herself has displaced faith from religion into the commodities market, as have many of her colleagues. After the market crashes in the novel’s opening pages, Gwen reflects that “the market’s been chugging along on faith alone…and [when the market crashed] that faith was badly strained” (42). Significantly, not everyone has displaced their faith into financial markets—but that is a significant source of tension in the novel. Those who still exercise a religious faith (Belford Dunn, for example) serve as comic dupes in the novel. And those who signify wisdom or transcendence place their faith in an entirely different, mystical and mysterious sphere. Larry Diamond, who serves as the voice of the Fool, signifying enlightenment, states the conflation of faith with finance quite simply when he asks, sardonically, “did you really expect that a culture that believes the Second Coming is right around the corner could have the long-range vision or long-term will to sustain a superpower economy?” (122). Clearly, Larry Diamond does not. What’s more, it is apparent that, to Larry Diamond, the wherewithal to sustain a superpower economy is neither here nor there—it’s a diversion from what is truly important.

The important players in Frog Pajamas include the novel’s protagonist, Gwendolyn Mati—a struggling commodities broker, Belford Dunn—her boyfriend, Q-Jo Huffington—Gwen’s best friend and the local mystic/tarot reader, Larry Diamond—a new love interest, guru, and former commodities broker, the “Rich Boys,”—a gang of independently wealthy hoodlems, the growing class of Seattleite homeless/destitute, and Dr. Yamaguchi—who seems to have discovered a cure for colon cancer and is giving it away for free. Each character represents a different ideology within the matrix of late capitalism, and also a different status with regard to the alienation of labor.

Gwen has a less-than-middle-class background: her father a bongo-drummer with a penchant for hallucinogenic drugs, her mother a poet and suicide in the fashion of her idol, Sylvia Plath. She suffers anxiety over her Filipina heritage, her second-rate university degree, her tenuous middle class status, her mediocre job performance, etc. etc. She is characterized mainly by way of her narcissism and ambition.

Gwen’s boyfriend and best friend each serve as a sort of foil to Gwen’s ambition. Belford exemplifies the sort of arbitrary quality that is associated with financial success in the contemporary climate of late monopoly capitalism. That he has earned his substantial nest egg as a real estate agent by virtue of naïve, boyish charm and serendipitous connections is an irony not lost on readers fresh out of the 2009 collapse of the American real estate bubble. Gwen suffers extreme envy of Belford, whom she perceives as having achieved the American Dream “without ever dreaming it” (35). And while she claims no attraction to Belford, and consistently reveals his foolishness, naiveté, and simple-mindedness, she has been dating him for 3 years at the novel’s opening, and frequently considers settling on a marriage of convenience for the financial security he provides. Although Belford is a foil to Gwen’s ambition, he is treated as a dupe in the novel—often missing the fact the he is the butt of the joke, and firmly entrenched in a born-again Christian ideology that illustrates Althusser’s concept of indoctrination by way of the state apparatus.

Q-Jo Huffington, on the other hand, serves as a foil representing an enlightened point of view. Q-Jo is the only main character in Frog Pajamas who is not alienated from the form and product of her labor. In fact, Q-Jo is firmly grounded in her work, reaping emotional and spiritual rewards as well as a modest stipend for her tarot readings and for serving as a one woman audience for lonely citizen’s vacation memorabilia. Q-Jo has insight into Gwen’s character that (apparently) exceeds her own, as afforded by the unique second person narration Robbin’s uses. She serves as a spirital guide and emotional ground for Gwen.

Larry Diamond, as alluded to already, serves as the voice of enlightenment of this narrative. A former super-star as a commodities broker, Diamond is alienated from the worker of the brokerage and disillusioned with the (vast amounts) of money it earned him. In Diamond’s own words “no matter how sweet the scores, they never added up to anything.” Aware that his point is ambiguous, Larry sighs, “I suppose you don’t [know what I mean]” (162). The way Larry Diamond sees things, the possibility that the stock market may not recover from the crash is a good thing, the end of the “Big Lie”.

So far, Robbins commentary seems fairly obvious and straightforward—greed is bad, religion a bit foolish but harmlessly so, and the real happiness is found by engaging with one’s work in a spiritually rewarding way, free from greed. And once seen in this light, the rest of the narrative does fall into place in a similarly straightforward way. Perhaps this is the reason that Hoyser and Stookey devote a mere 2 pages of their 160-page volume to a Marxist reading of Frog Pajamas. However, the message is not completely uncomplicated. For example, Larry Diamond is the one character suffering from fatal colon cancer. And, contrary to what one might expect, given Robbins’s mystic agenda, Diamond doesn’t embrace the end of his life and the promise of the hereafter. Clearly, enlightenment doesn’t solve everything.

Furthermore, what is more interesting about the didactic message in Frog Pajamas isn’t so much the message itself, but the method of delivery. In his essay "Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case of Passive Revolution during Mussolinis Ascendance to Power 1919-1925" Efharis Mascha examines the critical role that humor played in the establishment of what he refers to as a counter-hegemony during Mussolinis rise to power. According to Mascha, the subtle uses of satire increase inversely with the rise of censorship. What Mascha illustrates is the efficacy of humor as opposed to explicit didacticism in communicating a counter-hegemonic message. Mascha is careful to distinguish between anti-hegemony and counter-hegemony”—an important part given that all teaching (or indoctrination, according to Althusser) is inherently ideologically driven. A counter-hegemony, however, is driven by socially prohibited or taboo ideology. Humor provides a critical device that enables transmission and response to the counter-hegemonic message.

This essay argues that Tom Robbins Frog Pajamas, taken in opposition to Upton Sinclairs The Jungle, suggests strong support for the thesis adapted from the foundational work of Mikail Bakhtin, and advanced by Mascha, Seligman, and Van Pelt, that humor provides a platform for dissenting discourse, alternative ideologies, and counter-hegemonies.

Works Cited

Robbins, Tom. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Bantam: New York.1994. Print.

Hoyser, Catherine E., and Lorena L. Stookey. "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas." Tom Robbins: a Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 139-56. Print.

Political Criticism:

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 693-702. Print.

Gramsci, Antonio. "Hegemony." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 673-74. Print.

Marx, Karl. "Labor and Capital." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 659-64. Print.

Humor Theory:

Berk, Ronald A. "Does Humor in Course Tests Reduce Anxiety and Improve Performance?" College Teaching 48.4 (2000): 151-58. JStor. Web. 7 Apr. 2010.

Harbsmeier, Christophe. "Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50.1 (1990): 131-61. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Political and/or Didacticism and Humor Theory Combined:

Mascha, Efharis. "Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case of Passive Revolution during Mussolinis Ascendance to Power 1919-1925." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21.1 (2008): 61-98. Academic Search Elite. Web. 14 Apr. 2010.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Rabelais and His World." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 686-92. Print.

Van Pelt, Sandra Eileen Body. "Excremental Recycling in Selected Writings of Edward Taylor and Jonathan Swift: A Structuralist Study in Scatological Humor and Didactic Accommodation." Diss. University of Mississippi, 2003. Digital Dissertations and Theses (2003). ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Whall-Seligman, Helen Marie. "To Instruct and Delight: Didactic Method in Five Tudor Dramas." Diss. Yale University, 1976. Digital Dissertations and Theses. ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

 


 

Friday, April 30, 2010

Positioning the Project: Humorous Didacticism in TR's *Frog Pajamas*

Working with a substantial body of foundational political criticism, including Marx, Gramsci, and Althusser, while integrating these political ideas with contemporary research into the effect of humor on communication, comprehension, emotion and learning, this work joins in an ongoing conversation, and contributes to the discourse surrounding the intersection of these two ideas.  The theoretical conversation that links humor with political critique extends back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his analysis of Rabalais and His World [[which contributes xyz foundational premise???.]]  However, theoretical work addressing the use of humor as a didactic strategy in literature is thin, and two of the major contributions to the conversation in this paper are not journal articles or book chapters, but doctoral dissertations.  Furthermore, those dissertations have a gap of almost 30 years between them. The work done so far in this area both opens a space and points to the need for further research into the intersection of humor with political didacticism in literature.

Tom Robbins Project: Working Bibliography

I'm recording the sources I've located and *skimmed and/or *read the abstract of and/or *partially read. I'm calling this a "working bibliography" because I'm pretty sure I won't end up citing everything on this list. It is, after all, only an 8-10 page paper. I'd use up 10 pages just annotating these! But I'd like to keep this recorded for future reference. Especially if I ever decide to expand my analysis into something broader than I'm doing for this 638 paper. I've separated the sources into three categories--political criticism, humor theory, and the intersection of the two--to make the list more coherent. Ergo:

Working Bibliography

Hoyser, Catherine E., and Lorena L. Stookey. "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas." Tom Robbins: a Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 139-56. Print.

Political Criticism:
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 693-702. Print.

Emerson, Caryl. "On the Generation That Squandered Its Philosophers (Losev, Bakhtin, and Classical Thought as Equipment for Living)." Studies in East European Thought 56.2/3 (2004): 95-117. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Gitlin, Todd. "After the Failed Faiths: Beyond Individualism, Marxism, and Multiculturalism." World Policy Journal 12.1 (1995): 61-68. JStor. Web. 5 Apr. 2010.

Gramsci, Antonio. "Hegemony." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 673-74. Print.

Marx, Karl. "Labor and Capital." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 659-64. Print.

Novak, Estelle G. ""Dynamo" School of Poets." Contemporary Literature 11.4 (1970): 526-39. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Rikowski, Glenn. "Left Alone: End Time for Marxist Educational Theory?" British Journal of Sociology of Education 17.4 (1996): 415-51. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Humor Theory:
Bell, Nancy D. "Humor Comprehension: Lessons Learned from Cross-Cultural Communication." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20.4 (2007): 367-87. Academic Search Elite. Web. 14 Apr. 2010.

Berk, Ronald A. "Does Humor in Course Tests Reduce Anxiety and Improve Performance?" College Teaching 48.4 (2000): 151-58. JStor. Web. 7 Apr. 2010.

Harbsmeier, Christophe. "Confucius Ridens: Humor in The Analects." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50.1 (1990): 131-61. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Mason, Jeffrey D. "Arthur Miller's Ironic Resurrection." Theatre Journal 5.4 (2003): 657-77. JStor. Web. 9 Apr. 2010.

Political and/or Didacticism and Humor Theory Combined:
Mascha, Efharis. "Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case of “Passive Revolution” during Mussolini’s Ascendance to Power 1919-1925." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21.1 (2008): 61-98. Academic Search Elite. Web. 14 Apr. 2010.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Rabelais and His World." Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. 2004. 686-92. Print.

Thorne, Christian. "Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature." PMLA 116.3 (2001): 531-44. JStor. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.

Van Pelt, Sandra Eileen Body. "Excremental Recycling in Selected Writings of Edward Taylor and Jonathan Swift: A Structuralist Study in Scatological Humor and Didactic Accommodation." Diss. University of Mississippi, 2003. Digital Dissertations and Theses (2003). ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Whall-Seligman, Helen Marie. "To Instruct and Delight: Didactic Method in Five Tudor Dramas." Diss. Yale University, 1976. Digital Dissertations and Theses. ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

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