Somehow I can't shake the feeling that there is no "21st century literature." Not that people aren't writing literature; they are, to be sure. But there doesn't seem to be a philosophical core to it all: no "movement" or "tendency." It could be that it just seems that way because we're so close to it. Perhaps every era of literature feels like a lot of garbled nonsense until critics manage to categorize and label it all with the benefit of hindsight. But still, looking back, it's hard to imagine that people living and reading at the time of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola, Ibsen, and the rest didn't know that there was something called "Realism" and that it was working as a central philosophy for much of what was being written. And of course, looking back on the critics writing at that time, they were aware of this too.
But these days, there is no such unifying theme. There are the die-hards still plugging away at something called the "postmodern novel"-the John Barth/Thomas Pynchon-style encyclopedic tome. Then there are writers going back to older forms of the novel and rediscovering and reworking them. There's no end of people writing books, but it would be hard to step back from it all and say, "Ah yes, what a very 21st-century set of novels." Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does lead to certain conclusions. For instance, it's hard now to say what's "in style" or out of it at any given moment. All genres and techniques are simultaneously in vogue and out when there is no unifying theme. But it is fair to say that the old-fashioned "comic novel," is something you don't see too often. This essay is about the comic novel and why it ought to return.
First of all, it's a vague term that has to be defined. A comic novel isn't necessarily satire, although it can be, just as satire isn't necessarily comic. Probably the oldest form of humor in literature would be satire. Even if you look simply at "the novel," even "the English novel," you still see satire as the first and most dominant form of humor. Mocking human foibles, figures of authority, different political parties, and so forth, has always been a part of human literature, dating back even to one or two papyri in Ancient Egypt! But the modern English comic novel isn't strictly satire, even if it contains elements of it. What's more, there's a third category of books which contain comic situations and characters but which aren't meant primarily to be works of humor. So when I say "the comic novel," what I really mean is "a novel which makes us laugh." That's a fairly ambitious subject, so let me say at once that I won't be covering all of them, and that I'll mostly be focusing on the British comic novel.
One of the earliest forms of the English comic novel, and of "the novel" itself, in fact, is the picaresque novel. Imported from Spain, this genre originated in such works as The Swindler and the more obscure Lazarillo de Tormes. The picaresque novel follows a single character, usually of lower-class origin, across and throughout the whole spectrum of society. For obvious reasons, the genre lent itself to both satire and serious social criticism-first because of the role of the protagonist as nomad and outsider, and second because of its ability to paint a panoramic portrait of every level of society. The genre influenced Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders, as well as later novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett.
Another major influence would be the lost city/utopian satire. In this mode of writing, the author would subtly critique his or her own society by depicting a superior and more just imaginary realm: a trick which allowed the author to pretend that he or she was writing a simple and straightforward fantasy. This dates back, of course, to Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which is an excellent example of a book which is satirical without being particularly comic.
The potential for humor in the lost city genre was realized by Swift in Gulliver's Travels, to be sure. But after that, the utopian satire, and its modern offspring, the dystopian satire (what does that tell you about the state of optimism in today's world?), became tools of serious critical comment, not of comic fiction. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that William Morris' News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward are comic novels. So I would say that the most important early influence on English comic fiction was the picaresque novel. In the eighteenth century, the examples abound. I already mentioned Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, both of whom wrote bawdy, satirical novels which followed single protagonists through adventures and misadventures in every level of English life. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a little harder to classify. It's certainly a comic novel with picaresque elements, but in many ways it's a unique event in literary history. Some have even said it's a sort of eighteenth-century post-modern novel-way ahead of its time, in other words. But leaving it and some other strange works aside, the picaresque comic satire was probably the most popular eighteenth century novel form, at least in England. There were other forms, to be sure. The chief non-comic novelist of the age, Samuel Richardson, was busy writing unspeakably long epistolary novels like Clarissa. There was also the phenomenon of the "sentimental novel." But these have not worn half as well with the passage of time as, say, Fielding's books. Novels which make people laugh have a huge amount of staying power.
