Left at the gate

February 14, 2013
Left at the gate

Having dispatched D. R. Dudley’s book on Cynicism, I’m rambling my way through Goncharov’s Oblomov.  (Say that three times rapidly: rambling through Goncharov’s Oblomov.) It’s on a list I found on the Manchester Guardian website.  (Now to be found here.)

          I was skating the net, looking for “comic novels,” because I’m sick and tired of woe. I’m always sick and tired of woe; I never think tragedy describes the way the world works. (Nor does “winning through,” which is why I refuse to read memoirs. If you think you’ve won through: first, if you have to write about it, you’re wrong, you haven’t; second, if you have to write about it, for God’s sake, keep the manuscript to yourself.) 

          You have to look for comic novels, because they’re hard to find. Who has the guts and the skill to write them, to write about life without going all brave or maudlin?  But here, on the Guardian's list of 1000 novels you ought to have read, was at least a small sublist of (maybe 150) comic novels. Many, like Saki’s very, very clever The Unsufferable Bassington, I’d never heard of. I had heard of Oblomov, whose protagonist is the prototype of “the superfluous man,” but I’d never really looked for it.

          I have it now on Kindle. It’s not – it can’t be – the best translation available.  But it’s good enough I can see the comedy.  The Guardian warns that comic novels aren’t always that funny. And they aren’t; but they do always take woe, even tragedy, lightly, with salt. I don’t know how else you survive. You’ve got to be brave and win through, I guess.

          I know I’m going on about this. But why does anyone want to be brave? Better a live dog than a dead lion, as the saying goes; better Milton Berle than Pat Tilley. And win through to what? Does your life change because you’ve come to the decision that you don’t have to forgive your parents? One of comedy’s gifts: it reminds us that life doesn’t change. It just goes on and on, one damn – and crazy! unpredictable, never to be resolved – thing after another. You grow up, you don’t forgive your parents, then you die.

Of course, I could be wrong. Surely I am. It’s the brave and the serious, the ones that win through, that are held up as examples to be followed.  But that, I suspect, is because it’s the kind of people that read memoirs that want to tell us how to live our lives.

W