I Tatti Renaissance Library #08: Momus

The History of Laughter

I.

Momus, who appears in Hesiod and Lucian, is the ancient personification of fault-finding, reprehension, and correction. Not necessarily funny himself, he roots out absurdity and foolishness. He sees through you; he truffles for folly. Poor Coleridge, the tormented opium-addict who had much to fear from being seen through, shudders, in the Biographia Literaria, at the horror of Momus's fabled desire to put a glass window in the breast of man, so that his heart could be seen.

Momus, you might say, is the patron saint of critics; or at least of religious critics. There are many kinds of comedy, but one rough division could be made between the comedy of correction and the comedy of forgiveness. The former is a way of laughing at; the latter a way of laughing with. The comedy of correction, which would include Aristophanes, Alberti's Momus, Erasmus, Rabelais, some elements of Cervantes (though Don Quixote massively and amiably contains many comic modes), Swift, Molière, and Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, is satirical in impulse, frequently violent and farcical, keen to see through the weaknesses of mankind, and essentially pre-novelistic. Bouvard and Pécuchet, written in the heyday of the novel, is the exception that proves the rule: it is actually much less like a novel than a treatise, written to prove how stupid we all are, by a writer whose comedy is often cruel, who was obsessed with the folly of bourgeois idiocy, and who complained in a letter that he found the characters in Madame Bovary "deeply repulsive."

Flaubert was really a religious writer who had transferred his devotion to aesthetics, and the comedy of correction might be called religious comedy, to distinguish it from the more obviously secular nature of modern comedy. The ambition of transparency, the desire to put a window in the human heart, strikes one as essentially religious. Kierkegaard sounds like Momus when he exults, in Fear and Trembling, that "a man sitting in a glass case is not so constrained as is each human in his transparency before God." That transparency received its memorably terrifying formulation when Jesus -- who weeps in the Gospels but never laughs -- admonished us that to imagine adultery is to commit it; we are known, through and through. And the few references to Yahweh's laughter in the Old Testament are anything but funny. In Psalm 2, we are told that God will "laugh at" the heathen and "have them in derision"; and again in Psalm 37, the Lord will "laugh" at the wicked man, "for he seeth that his day is coming." Job, in the midst of his despair, blasphemes against God, claiming that He "will laugh at the trial of the innocent." And the beginning of that very pagan book, which shows God engaging with Satan in what is essentially a game of torture, hardly negates Job's accusation. Here God is like Jupiter, who is described in both Momus and The Praise of Folly as looking down at heaven from a watchtower. Job's God is little different from Homer's gods: "And unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods / As they saw Hephaestus limping through the hall."

Secular or modern comedy, the comedy of forgiveness, seems to me almost entirely the creation of the modern novel -- with the huge exception of Shakespeare, who is always a delicious obstruction to all theories of comedy, of tragedy, and above all, of the novel. (What created stream of consciousness, really, if not Shakespearean soliloquy?) If satire is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who do not. If correction implies transparency, then forgiveness -- at least secular forgiveness -- implies opacity, the drawing of a veil, a willingness to let obscurity go free. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth learns that laughing at is cruel (it is what her irresponsible father is always doing, not to mention the rebarbative Bingley sisters). Instead she will laugh with Darcy, which entails being laughed at by him. For Austen, getting married -- or rather, falling in love -- is the conversion of laughing-at into laughing-with, since each lover, balancing the other, laughs equally at the other, and creates a new form of laughter, a kind of equal laughter. Laughing with Darcy, and loving him, involves Elizabeth in realizing that she was wrong to judge him as harshly as she did, that she may take many years to get to know him properly, but also that, as Philip Roth has it in American Pastoral, "getting people right is not what living is all about. It's getting them wrong that is living." Her shallower, more easily satisfied sister, "merely smiles," when she marries Wickham, says Elizabeth. But, marrying Darcy, "I laugh."

Religious comedy, however slippery it might get -- and few texts, technically speaking, are as slippery as The Praise of Folly -- is fundamentally stable. There is the stability of didacticism, for one thing; both Alberti's and Erasmus's works are edifying projects, conceived as lessons as well as entertainments. It is our task to extract what they preach. There is the stability of satire -- the fixedness of typology, the certainty of recognizing broad categories of human folly (hypocrisy, misanthropy, pomposity, foolishness, clerical dereliction of duty, and so on). There is, frequently, the stability of allegory or fable, whereby a decoding of the story is implicitly promised; Alberti may well have been influenced by Aesop's tale "Zeus, Prometheus, Athena, and Momus," and his satire constantly falls back into the allegorical. But modern comedy replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability, and this is surely in direct proportion to the growth of characters' fictive inner lives. The novelistic idea that we have interiors which may only be partially disclosed to us must create a new form of comedy, based on the management of our incomprehension rather than on the victory of our knowing. This kind of comedy is found in Chekhov, Svevo, Hrabal, Henry Green, Bellow, Nabokov, Roth, Beckett, Tolstoy, Naipaul, Gogol, Hamsun, and many other modern writers. (It is interesting that most of the writers in that "secular" list are avowed unbelievers; the few believers, like Tolstoy, Gogol, and perhaps Bellow, are very unorthodox.) The trick of the unreliable narrator, manipulated so brilliantly by Svevo and Hrabal and Nabokov, can only work, can only be funny, if we think initially that we know more about a character than he knows himself -- thus we are lulled at first into the comedy of correction -- only to be taught that we finally know less about that character than we thought we knew at the outset; thus we are lulled into the comedy of forgiveness. Reliably unreliable narrators are not funny or interesting, in the end; unreliably unreliable narrators are endlessly comic, and endlessly moving. Religious comedy may delight, provoke, excite, prod, amuse, and so on, but it hardly ever moves us, because it does not intend to. Secular comedy almost always does, because it wants to.

There are no straight lines, of course, and no dead termini. Religious comedy does not just write its will to secular comedy and then expire. When Beckett very funnily mocks the pedantry of Catholicism at the end of Molloy -- "Does it really matter with which hand one asperges the podex?" "Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused suck on Friday?" "How long do we have to wait for the Antichrist?" -- he sounds like Erasmus mocking the theologians in The Praise of Folly ; Hamsun is saturated in Lutheran notions of punishment and disgrace; Kundera, who frequently invokes Diderot and Cervantes, seems much more an antique comedian than a modern one, for all the Prague sex games. But there are junctions where one sees mixtures of the old and new comedy, the pre-novelistic and novelistic: in Austen, Cervantes, and Sterne, there are the old elements of satire, correction, punitive violence, farcical shenanigans, and even allegory; and there are also glimpses of a newer, more complicated, more internal comedy. Don Quixote's finally unknowable fantasy excites our compassion as much as it prompts our mockery. Sterne's characters are not fully realized creatures with interior lives -- they are not quite novelistic, indeed, at times they seem to belong to a long, satirical poem; Sterne gives Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy their "hobby-horses," their Cervantine unitary obsessions, which makes them vivid single essences, bright blots of color. Yet Sterne's comic world breathes a very modern forgiveness, and there are moments of mingled tears and laughter that powerfully suggest a new kind of comedy.

Austen may be the most interestingly riven, the most transitional of all these writers. In her work, broadly put, there are the minor characters, who seem to belong to the theater, who are theatrically mocked and "corrected" by the author in her old eighteenth-century satiric mode; and there are the great heroines of the books, the sole possessors of interior consciousness, heroic precisely because they exercise their consciousness, who seem to belong to the newer world of the novel and not of the theater, and who are not mocked but gradually comprehended and finally forgiven. (We forgive Emma, even though we know, morally speaking, that we are not "supposed to.")

II.

M omus was written in the 1430s, by Battista Alberti (he took the name Leone only late in life). Alberti was an extraordinary figure, rightly called a "universal man" by Burckhardt. After studying law at the University of Bologna, he worked at the papal curia, the administrative headquarters of the papacy. He took holy orders, but his achievement was not clerical. In Burckhardt's depiction, Alberti was superhumanly gifted, not only brilliantly polymathic but also a fine horseman, a subtle courtier, and a superb athlete. He became the dominant figure of his age in a number of disciplines. He devised a manual for orators that was shaped, for handiness, in the form of a wheel; he wrote "On Painting," one of the earliest treatises of Renaissance aesthetics. Anthony Grafton, in his invaluable biography, claims that Alberti did not invent perspective, but gave its principles "coherent written form for the first time." Above all, Alberti became a major theorist of architecture, designing or helping to design the Malatesta Temple in Rimini and the Rucellai Palace in Florence.

There has been scholarly disagreement with Burckhardt's adulation, and Grafton's book indeed enters several qualifications. There are art historians who find Alberti's designs derivative. But there is no disagreement about the originality of Momus, written in Latin, which precedes, and so obviously portends, the work of Erasmus and Rabelais. It is the allegorical story of what happens when Momus attempts to bring the gods and human life into conflict. The plot, which takes the translators of this new edition almost eight pages to summarize in their introduction, is immensely complicated, and sometimes fruitlessly and repetitiously so. In brief, Momus has been exiled to earth, where, as in heaven, he starts stirring up trouble. He advises women to pray to the gods for anything they like, in the hope that the gods will gradually be overwhelmed by frivolous prayer-requests. This is indeed what happens. But Momus finds favor with Jupiter again, and is recalled to heaven, where he regales the gods with his stories of life on Earth. He has tried every human occupation, and has discovered that princes and senators are to be pitied, while no way of life is more desirable than the common beggar's. The beggar, after all, knows who likes him and who does not, and often has an easier time attracting audiences for his speeches than the fanciest senator.

Momus also repeats some of the disputations that he has heard among philosophers. Especially interesting are those in which the existence of the gods is challenged or denied. Momus, naturally subversive, agrees with such arguments. After all, human life is a calamity, and the gods seem only to punish the good and to reward the bad. Jupiter, hearing this, sighs that it is not easy to be a prince, and blames humans for complaining so much. Anyway, "man is the worst hardship man must endure. Man is the plague of man!" And if they like the world so little, perhaps it is time to construct a new one? Jupiter asks his fellow gods to propose various new worlds. Alberti offers an amusing scene in which the gods, protecting their own fiefdoms like union barons, resist this wholesale renovation. Juno, for instance, "who had set up as a builder thanks to the influx of votive offerings, could not bear the destruction of mankind." Momus hands Jupiter the notebooks that he kept of the philosophers' colloquia while he was on Earth, thinking that the chief god might extract advice from them. But Jupiter rashly puts them aside unread.

In the course of many other adventures, in which Jupiter himself descends to Earth in search of Plato and other wise men, only to miss Plato but be insulted by Democritus, Momus finally alienates the gods so thoroughly that he is castrated and chained to a rock in an ocean. Meanwhile, in the underworld, Charon, hearing that the world is about to be destroyed, decides that a last trip to Earth would be opportune. He takes as his companion Gelastus, an impoverished philosopher. In the course of their trek, Gelastus attempts to explain philosophy to Charon, who says he has never heard such nonsense. Charon finds Earth an awful place: "here I have found nothing apart from folly and wickedness, nothing it has not made me unhappy to see." He decides to return to Hades. At the end of the book, Jupiter comes by chance upon Momus's notebooks, and finally reads them. They are full of sane, medial advice, with which Alberti's book ends: the prince should "neither do everything nor do nothing. What he does he should not do alone, nor with everyone else." And so on.

Alberti, like Erasmus, was influenced by Lucian, the second-century Greek satirist. Unlike most ancient comedians, from whom one often struggles to raise the merest guffaw, Lucian is genuinely funny, with a marvelous lightness emulated but not always achieved by Alberti. Lucian's playlet, Zeus Trageodus, translated by Lionel Casson as "Zeus, the Opera Star," has Zeus, Momus, and others overhearing a disputation between philosophers. An Epicurean is arguing that the gods do not exist, or if they do, do not have anything to do with humans, and a Stoic is orthodoxly countering him. Opening his crisis meeting, Zeus says, "How about my reciting that famous opening I use in Homer?" To which Hermes replies: "Oh no, we had enough of that nonsense out of you earlier. If you don't mind, forget the hackneyed metrical stuff."

Alberti's book gleams intermittently with similar comic lusters. The founding concept of the narrative, Momus's plan to overwhelm the gods with frivolous prayers, is witty, and is wittily answered by Jupiter's decision to re-make the world because humans are always complaining so much about it. There are other funny moments. The comedy of the man who is happy to be a joker until he suddenly objects to being laughed at is one of those venerable gags that appears in almost all comic writing. Here Momus, having made the gods laugh, gets huffy when the gods start laughing at him. (Don Quixote is similarly touchy about Sancho Panza laughing at him.) The sparkling translation, by Sarah Knight, frequently substitutes English colloquialisms for a more formal diction ("slackers," "chubby," and "Go for it, Momus," for "Sequere Mome," which might be literally rendered as "strive, Momus," or "reach, Momus"). The long Latin sentences, with their dependent clauses and final verbs, are regularly broken into shorter, snappier English ones. The facing page's original text allows readers equipped with various levels of Latin -- thoroughly rusty or merely lightly oxidized -- to follow the great success of the translator, who has produced a version at once faithful and spirited.

Like Lucian, Alberti enjoys the controlled frisson of blasphemy that plays around, inevitably, the question of the existence of the gods. For Alberti there is the extra menace of such theological allegories appearing in the midst of an orthodox Catholic society. In such a context, what weight is carried by Momus's lament that the gods have never done anything for man, or Jupiter's sigh that he has only limited power to intervene on Earth? These are the classic questions of theodicy, slyly smothered under the garments of antiquity. It is hard to read Momus and not make connections between the failings of Olympus and the failings of a Christian heaven.

Alberti certainly intended his readers to draw contemporary conclusions from his ancient material, even if these conclusions were not necessarily theological. Most of the early editions carried the subtitle De Principe ("On the Prince"), and the book conducts a steady seminar on the trials and duties of a ruler. More interesting than the political lessons is the book's relentless pessimism. It is true that when Momus says that a beggar is happier than a prince, and so on, he is merely recycling the classical trope of inversion, namely "fool's wisdom" ( morosophos ), which Thomas More would play with in Utopia and Montaigne in his essays. That life is as fleeting as the sparrow's flight through a dining hall (Bede's famous image), and full of pain and uncertainty, is a commonplace, and one particularly loved by religious writers, since clearly the mere antechamber to heavenly happiness ought not to be too happy a place anyway. But Momus, Jupiter, and Charon all agree on the ghastliness of mankind, and there is a satirical violence of rhetoric here that goes beyond the familiar, and which makes Momus seem sometimes a premonitory text, looking forward not only to Rabelais and Erasmus, but to Swift and Beckett.

III.

Erasmus started writing The Praise of Folly, in Latin, in Thomas More's house in London in 1509. A pun on More's name suggested the title: moros is folly in Greek. More and Erasmus were friends and intellectual allies, though Erasmus always seems the more appealing figure, because he did not hold political office like More (who became lord chancellor in 1529), and because he lacked More's zealous interest in burning heretics at the stake. But both men believed that the liberal arts, especially the study of Greek and Latin, deserved renovation. The two worked together on translations of Lucian from Greek into Latin. Both thought that the church needed to cleanse itself of clerical abuses, such as indulgences, in which priests essentially sold reduced time in purgatory to their ignorant parishioners. Both thought that one could "build a path to theology," as More once put it, through the great secular authors.

Erasmus's sane via media was soon deserted on both sides, by the lustily reforming Luther on one side and the carefully conserving More on the other. During the 1520s, these bitter foes lobbed thousands of pounds of rhetorical ordnance at each other -- tracts, treatises, pamphlets, millions of words. More, the creator of Utopia -- a place, ironically enough, where people are free to follow any religion they like -- would write, in the 1530s, that if anyone translated In Praise of Folly into English, he would burn the books with his own hands, "rather than folk would take any harm of them, seeing them likely in these days to do." By "harm," More means the harm of free thought.

But this was far off when Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly . Almost five hundred years later, it marvelously justifies its canonical stature as one of the great early works of comedy. It is lively, gently witty, a delight to read from start to finish. It is immensely learned; Erasmus had just finished a vast book of over four thousand classical adages, and his prose, in the Folly, can barely crawl a line without throwing off earthworks of allusion. Homer, Horace, and Plato are the chief sponsors, but Clarence Miller's stupendous footnotes (and his fluent translation) reveal the uncanny depths of Erasmus's mastery of all the classical sources. Yet the Folly, appealingly, makes fun of erudition, too; we are in the comic realm of the pedantic digression. One drawback of the digression, as a mode of comedy, is that in order for it to "work" as a joke, it must actually be a digression, and is thus rather boring. Tristram Shandy rather labors under this paradox. But the Folly is at once digressive and succinct (it is only one hundred thirty pages long), a tremendous balancing act.

The book's narrator is Folly herself, who, as she explains, is dressed in the traditional cap and bells of the licensed court fool. She is addressing an audience, and has come to praise herself. Isn't it the case, she asks, that the most foolish people are the happiest? Children and old people are the happiest of all, because they are saved from the tedium of life that afflicts the rest of us. Folly says that she keeps many marriages going, because it is essential that husband and wife not know the truth about each other's faults. If one could look down on life, as Jupiter was said to do from his tower, who would not see "how miserable and messy childbirth is, how toilsome it is to bring children up, how defenseless they are against injuries," and so on. Who would not commit suicide? But in fact those who are most likely to commit suicide are those who have come closest to wisdom. By contrast, the foolish are happiest because they are blissfully unaware of life's hardships, and it is Folly herself who works this magic. Folly goes on to propose that consciousness itself is a curse. Who is happier than the bees? "What architect has ever produced buildings like theirs? What philosopher has ever established a comparable republic?" The nearer animals get to human consciousness -- horses, for example -- the unhappier they are, because they become sharers in the sufferings of men.

Erasmus pretty much invented the paradoxical encomium, in which the subject of the speech is also the speaker, and in which a narrator proposes her own foolishness as the best way to live. Nowadays this is called unreliable narration, a kind of smudged hermeneutics in which we learn to see what the narrator is failing to say about herself, how she is fallible in ways not known to her but obvious to us, and so on. Erasmus uses Folly's fallibility to avoid having his meanings pinned down; it is a form of literary escape, frolicsome in itself but also necessary in an age of religious censorship and retribution. Thus, if Folly is really foolish, what she proposes about life -- despite its obvious wisdom -- cannot be entirely wise. When Folly says that life is really just hardship and toil, for instance, we credit the unblinkered accuracy of the analysis. That is what life is like. Yet Folly proposes that in order to live happily one has to blinker oneself from this horror -- blinker oneself from the accuracy of Folly's own analysis. So Folly is right about the world, while offering to blind people to that analysis. Can she then be trusted? This is the paradox of "foolish wisdom." And there is a further paradox, enfolded within: if Folly has accurately seen the tedium of life, to cleave to Folly cannot finally be a way of blinding oneself to it, because Folly has just proved that she is not blind. So the games continue, purling happily along.

Erasmus makes his unreliable narration work most fruitfully for him when he reaches his true subject, the abuses of the contemporary church. Aren't those Christians, asks Folly, who "find great comfort in soothing self-delusions about fictitious pardons for their sins, measuring out the times in purgatory down to the droplets of a waterclock," aren't such people completely foolish? But aren't they very content? That is because Folly has come to their aid and made them foolish. If a philosopher were to point out how stupid all this is, how much happiness he would take away from them! Likewise the theologians, who enjoy discussing such things as "whether God could have taken on the nature of a woman, of the devil, of an ass, of a cucumber, of a piece of flint." Aren't these men quite happy, even as they "depict every detail of the infernal regions so exactly that you think they had spent several years in that commonwealth"? Folly ridicules those popes and priests who dress themselves in fine garments and enjoy the fruits of the world. How miserable the popes would be if they really had to imitate the life of Christ, with its poverty and labor and contemptus mundi.

This is funny, and also cleverly slippery: Folly, while obviously criticizing such churchmen, affects to be praising them as fine examples of the foolish life. Thus Erasmus gets to mock superstition while seeming to praise it. Folly's very praise of such nonsense reveals its suspect quality more powerfully than if Erasmus himself were simply satirizing it, or writing a tract against it. The unreliable narrator's praise is more undermining than would be the satirist's dispraise. This is one of those moments where The Praise of Folly leaves its religious and satirical roots and, borrowing proleptically from the techniques of the novel form, benefits enormously from its own literary complexity, ushering in a new kind of comedy.

Yet the book begins to wobble, and it wobbles on just this fault line, between the old and the new, the religious and the secular. As Erasmus continues his mockery of clerical abuses and theological absurdity, Folly's "praise" of such folly begins to recede, and we encounter several pages of straightforward, if highly entertaining, satire. Erasmus begins to speak in his own voice. And he realizes this, making Folly quickly concede that she should stop talking about popes and priests "lest I should seem to be composing a satire rather than delivering an encomium." This is a literary uncertainty, the moment at which Erasmus either chooses not to, or cannot, maintain the consistency of the unreliable narrator, and diverts instead to the stability, the didacticism, of satire. Folly, as a character, is finally less important to Erasmus than the content of Folly's message. Were Erasmus to maintain Folly's voice with absolute novelistic consistency, Folly would praise the popes and priests more than she would attack them -- after all, they are her foolish beneficiaries, she supposedly approves of them. But Erasmus does not approve of them, and he shows that he will sacrifice a little novelistic cohesion in the interests of satiric victory. It is the moment in which old religious comedy asserts itself, and wins back ground from the new secular comedy; when The Praise of Folly stops being slippery and jokey and gets a little self-justifyingly hard and angry.

To be fair to Erasmus, though, he soon re-gains his slipperiness. By the end of the book, Folly is arguing, most persuasively, that Christians need to be a little foolish. Did not Jesus choose to ride on an ass rather than a lion, and prefer children and poor people to tax collectors and Pharisees? Christians are called "sheep" by Christ, and everyone knows how stupid those animals are. Yet just as you are nodding your head in agreement, convinced that once again Erasmus is poking through the fabric -- for Folly is beginning to sound suspiciously wise and sane -- his unreliable narrator seems to undermine her own argument: "Notice first of all that children, old people, women, and retarded persons are more delighted than others with holy and religious matters." Suddenly, the rich folly of the Christian disciple, following his shepherd, has become something close to imbecility!

Folly ends by recommending the spiritual life, and its "madness." The pious believer, she says, yearns to be in heaven, and his life on Earth, being "a meditation and a certain shadow (as it were) of that other life," sometimes experiences "a certain flavor or odor of that reward." Such believers may be transported into mystical regions, may lose the power of speech, begin to babble incoherently, have strange visions. When they wake up, "all they know is that they were never happier than while they were transported with such madness. Thus, they lament that they have come to their senses and want above all else to be forever mad with this kind of madness." Who does this sound like? It is Don Quixote we can see here, riding towards us. And it is Erasmus who first saw him.

IV.

The idea that ancient comedy is "religious" and modern comedy "secular" would seem to be obstructed by the apparent anti-religiousness of writers such as Rabelais and Erasmus. Bakhtin's theory of comedy, after all, posits Rabelais as the great saturnalian comedian, mocker of orthodoxies and absolutisms. But the anti-religiousness of pre-modern comedy is often closer to anti-clericalism: the waste of religion is being mocked rather than its food. Molière, perhaps the purest example of religious corrective comedy, may have "corrected," in the character of Tartuffe, an atrociously hypocritical priest -- and in turn been censured by the Catholic Church for it -- but the play is careful to separate Tartuffe's perversion of religion from its true practice. Cléante reminds Orgon, who is Tartuffe's at first infatuated and finally disillusioned host, that "you mustn't think that everybody is like him and that there aren't sincerely devout men left nowadays. Leave such foolish inferences to the freethinkers, separate real virtue from its outward appearance..." Hypocrisy, like blasphemy, is one of those modes of behavior that needs the existence of the positive of which it is the distorted negative. It is an essentially stable category of thought.

By the same token, the continued existence of corrective comedy in a secular age should not necessarily disable its description as "religious." If by "religious" one means the dream of transparency; the victory of knowing over the smudge of unreliability; the existence of a stable system of human categorization; and a certain odor of didacticism -- then religious comedy continues to flourish well into an unreligious age. One finds it still in political theater (Dario Fo, for instance, who is proud of his roots in commedia dell' arte ), in dystopian allegory (Orwell, who is only wanly amusing, or Margaret Atwood, who can be bitingly funny); in the daily "corrections" of the hilarious tabloid press (who need icons like Princess Diana so that they can have devils like Camilla Parker-Bowles); and in the kind of social comedy that descends from Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.

But what constitutes "correction" in a secular age? Who is correcting whom, and on what warrant? Lacking a true religious funding, modern "religious" correction tends to feel unmoored, a punishment in search of a sin. One reads Waugh reliably amused, but rarely with the feeling that what he is satirizing matters very much. Not surprisingly perhaps, a great deal of Waugh and Amis squanders itself on slightness; and, as if to compensate for this slightness, the rhetoric of correction gets more and more strident. Take the famous passage from Decline and Fall, when the primitive Welsh brass band makes its appearance at the school garden party:

Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape.

The clumsiness of the writing almost renders its punitive tendencies harmless. That word "revolting" is gratuitous, and the men's animality is hammered home through simple repetition and assertion: "wolves...slavered...ape-like." And above all, there is the notion that appearance merits such cruel scrutiny.

If the traditional category of hypocrisy is premised on the notion that behind appearances may lie truth, then this passage is the inversion of that notion: here appearance has become truth, and the style announces that nothing more to be known exists. This is the pale, modern image of the gods at laughter, except that Waugh has arrogated to himself the privilege that Homer accords to his characters: "And unquenched laughter arose among the blessed gods/As they saw Hephaestus limping through the hall." Decline and fall, indeed.

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