Between word and meaning: Wit, modernism, and perverse narrative

Between Word and Meaning: Wit, Modernism, and Perverse Narrative focuses on wit in the works of forgotten or understudied comic authors of the modernist period. In these texts, wit occurs in the isolated witty moment or comment, but also provides a model for the entire narrative that undercuts oedipal, heteronormative expectations. The mechanics of wit delay, subvert, or queer knowledge and meaning. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the Jeeves stories of PG Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker's witty short stories, and Anita Loos' satirical novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes each deploy comic wit in ways that either multiply or interrupt meaning, leaving the reader in the position of deciphering, not merely reading the text. Recognition of how language is deployed in masterful, yet non-concrete ways in these works reveals a previously neglected narrative aesthetic: one that is funny, popular, avant-garde, and perverse.;The 18th century concept of wit as a faculty or ability is rewritten by these authors as a means of countering expectations, creating an aesthetic based in incongruity, fracture, and unreproductive excess. The proliferating Ernests of Wilde and the multiple sterile, bitingly self-conscious relationships in Parker's stories all shape their narratives into forms that cannot fully resolve according to expected patterns, but work through wit to create a new range of narrative forms that are perversely modern. The homosocial bond between Bertie and Jeeves is both presented and concealed through wit, ultimately queering the idea of narrative progress as the reader is distracted by frivolous plots that always return the reader to a queer domestic space. Anita Loos' narrator is a promiscuous wit, one whose inability to master her own narrative places the reader in the position of the wit, making us yet another of the people that Lorelei Lee uses in her attempts to become "an educated girl." Each of these authors uses wit to transform knowledge, but also to form a new kind of narrative wherein meaning is ultimately subjective or unknowable.