Postmodern laughter: The use of the comic in the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Ishmael Reed

Comic technique is used as a narrative strategy by postmodern authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Ishmael Reed, to portray and critique contemporary American social contradictions. The comic is defined here as the sudden perception of incongruity that is emotionally distanced from the perceiving Subject, creating tension within the Subject by that perception and expressed through laughter. The postmodern is defined, in accordance with Jean-Francois Lyotard, as a radical skepticism toward foundational meta-narratives, and by Fredric Jameson's notion of the postmodern as the cultural expression of late capitalism. Connections between postmodern fiction and the comic are considered through the latter's various modes and genres, from what Jameson calls "the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life" (Jameson PU 105).; The analysis of comic modes and genres shows how these have affinities with the postmodern emphasis on the fortuitous, the contingent, and the accidental, stressing ongoing process and variation rather than linearity and teleology. Comic fictions also reject the depth model of characterization in favor of types. The comic genre of Menippean satire, whose methods are congruent with much postmodern fiction, introduces Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "carnival," which questions classical distinctions in favor of those associated with the grotesque. These distinctions are also considered in analyses of parody and farce; the former mode, consistent with postmodern practice, demonstrates the obscuring of the high/low cultural distinction, while the latter's emphasis on the irrational broadly reproduces those features of postmodern culture described by Jameson and others. Finally, irony, perhaps the quintessential comic mode, shows the most significant similarity between the comic and postmodernism. In the largest view, the comic mode's commitment to anti-foundational critique and its refusal of closure may best account for its considerable presence in American postmodern fiction, as exemplified by the work of Vonnegut, Barthelme, and Reed.