Howard Jacobson on taking comic novels seriously

'Show me a novel that's not comic and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job." I've put those words in quotation marks, though in fact they are mine. The quotation marks are a sort of acknowledgement that I exaggerate my case. But only a little. And exaggeration, anyway, is what, as a novelist, I do.

To my ear the term "comic novelist" is as redundant and off-putting as the term "literary novelist". When Jane Austen rattled off the novel's virtues in Northanger Abbey – arguing that it demonstrated the "most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour . . . conveyed to the world in the best chosen language" – she wasn't making a distinction between the literary novel and some other sort, or between the comic novel and the not so comic. The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.

The two rogue terms I'm addressing – literary and comic – share a vice: they both make exceptional what should go without saying. The novel was born of restless critical intelligence, and it was born laughing. "It pleases me to think," said Milan Kundera, in the course of accepting the Jerusalem prize for literature in 1985, "that the art of the novel came into the world as an echo of God's laughter." If this is so, then talk of the comic novel is tautologous. If we are to be true to the form there will be only "novels" and they will be effusive with wit and humour; thereafter, to help the bookshops categorise, we can allow all the sub-species they have shelf-space for – the novel of distended plot and fatuous denouement, the novel of who cares who dunnit, the novel of what Orwell in his great defence of Henry Miller called "flat cautious statements and snack-bar dialects", the novel, to sum up, of anorexic mirthlessness. But let's not forget that those are the anomalies.

No reader dare decry the pleasure any other takes in what he reads. But there is a fear of comedy in the novel today – when did you last see the word "funny" on the jacket of a serious novel? – that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure. It isn't as though we have lost the capacity to laugh. Stand-up comedy is riding higher than ever. If anything there is an argument to be made that we are laughing too much. But we have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.

For some reason we are running scared. Aspiring writers of pornography are warned by publishers who specialise in such work not to let comedy anywhere near. This precaution makes perfect sense. Comedy breaks the erotic trance. Comedy breaks every trance – that's its function. Comedy is nothing if not critical. From the very beginning the comic novel set out to argue with everything and to set us arguing with one another. The need for such a form has not gone away: consensus is still a curse; we are no less pious than we ever were, for all that our pieties have changed their object; we remain sanctimonious; and we have relegated reading to a sort of sleeping, praising books whose pages we cannot stop turning – as though the automatic act of moving forward is a virtue in itself.

By saying that it pleased him to think of the novel as echoing, in its origins, God's laughter, Kundera was reminding his listeners not only of the novel's actual history – the debt we owe to Rabelais and Cervantes – but also of its essential character. He borrowed, for this purpose, a Jewish adage: man thinks, God laughs. One day Rabelais heard God's laughter, Kundera fancies, and set the novel on its course, in opposition to thought as philosophers or theologians understand it, with its pursuit of a consistent truth.

This is not to deny the novel the capacity to think; there is a kind of thinking in novels – as say when DH Lawrence, or Robert Musil, or Saul Bellow, or even Kundera himself thinks – which is first among the reasons some of us go to novels at all. The accommodation the English 19th-century novel reached with the nation's ethical life – the great novelists of the time not embarrassed to speak as from the pulpit or the soap-box – was essential to its vitality. But thought in a novel is still quite different from thought in an essay or a work of philosophy, in that it is more intimate and contingent, must chance its luck in the dialectic of the drama, and is forever put to the test of circumstance, just as the novel's characters are. And what governs that test of circumstance is something akin to comedy: the absurdity of our supposing that we understand, that truth will stay still for us, that events will turn out as we think they should. God's laughter, in other words, is laughter at the very idea that we can think our way out of the unthinkable. And the nearest we approach to it – in scepticism, in play, and yes, in cruelty – is the novel.

Historically, the novel was an expression of our disillusionment with the existing certainties of state and religion. Tragic drama shakes the bars of our confinement, but once the hero is vanquished the old limitations are restored, and the glimpse we briefly enjoyed of a world built to accommodate our ambitions and desires has faded before we have even left the theatre. In this, drama – whose origins are in religious ritual – is existentially conservative. From the start, the novel was able to be more God-defying and subversive, equivalent in intention to the satyr plays with which a day at the theatre ended for the Greeks. Three tragedies and then a comedy to send you home in good cheer: the former accepting as final whatever the gods decreed, the latter revelling in the unreliable human world of sex and drunkenness and jokes. This is not to say that the Greeks valued comedy higher than tragedy, but they were in no doubt which was the better note to end on. Comedy affirmed the vigorous and unpredictable livability of life.

The novel comes into its own in Europe as an expression of freedom. Don Quixote – a man, don't forget, who has lost his wits reading idealistic books about "impossible absurdities" – sets out on his charger into a world that conforms to no rules and won't ever sit still. It isn't simply his chivalric idealism that is mocked, but his rigidity. The novel discovers itself as the best of all vehicles for "anything might happen". And in Rabelais as the best of all vehicles for "nothing is to be respected".

Over the whole caboodle of obedience went in one great gust of ridicule – obedience to heroes, obedience to law-givers, obedience to epic and saga, obedience to nationhood, obedience to God, obedience to certainty in any form. If Rabelais is the most immoderate of writers, he is also the cruellest, rejoicing in trickery and malice, sending people to their discomfiture or death with an oath and a jest. Some readers find this upsetting. Rabelais called them the "agelasts": the men who couldn't laugh. But we cannot have it all ways. If we are to rejoice in that sense of life's plenitude that comes with blasphemy and parody – recognising ourselves in Rabelais's extravagant depictions of appetites run wild, our behaviour no longer governed by timidity and respect – then we must face the logic of such exuberance. Let our natures rip and we will destroy as much as we create. And the comic novel is a brief licence for such abandon – deadly serious at the last because we are a frightening species when we are released into our own custody. And because the truth hurts.

To my mind, the savagely erotic fantasies of the Marquis de Sade are in this tradition and should be read as comedies of sorts. Rabelais's characters wish never to exhaust all there is to eat in the world or the number of ways there are to eat it; in the same way De Sade's libertines and prostitutes wish never to run out of whatever acts of murderous indecency their imaginations can conjure up. But the body tires before the mind does. The 120 Days of Sodom peter out at last in gory preposterousness as boredom thwarts desire. I don't say De Sade is laughing at the end, but someone is. God, maybe.

Hyperbole is the soul of comedy. Minimalism is its enemy. Freed from the fetters of those who would make us smaller than we are, we glory in the sensation of too-muchness we have regained. This is why it is inappropriate, not to say impertinent, to judge a novel (the "literary'" and the "comic" going without saying) by standards that still belong to shrinkage: standards of religion, morality, political rectitude, or the agelast's preference for prose which is parsimonious. Thus a novel may be as offensive as it chooses or happens to be – so long, of course, as it is funny or, at the least, enlivening. It may be sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, masculinist, man-hating, misanthropic, etc. And the reader who complains of finding any of those unpalatable is describing his own nervous system, not the novel.

It's possible I overstate the case, overstating the case being what a novelist working in the tradition I describe is bound to do. Rabelais gave the novel a grand start in life, rooting it in immoderation, but it's not only by virtue of making us laugh cruelly and without constraint that we call a novel comic. Take the case of Prince Oblonsky's pear with which that great novel of adultery Anna Karenina (not normally thought of as a comedy) opens. Oblonsky, Anna's brother, a man who when he dreams of women dreams of decanters, is having an affair with a French governess. His wife knows about it. Waking up on a sofa in his study, having been denied the marital bed, he recalls with dismay coming home the previous night drunk from an evening at the theatre, "happy and good humoured, with a huge pear in his hand" as a gift for his wife. Why the detail of the pear? Because, in the most subtly comic way, the pear renders the man, his incorrigible affability, the tactility of his pleasures, his lack of imagination for his wife's humiliation, but most importantly of all because its foolish inconsequence as a gift confounds our morality. We are sorry for his wife, we cannot excuse Oblonsky, but the happy good humour with which he brings home the pear makes him lovable to us, or at least more lovable than he should be, given our views on marriage and French mistresses. Right is with his wife, Dolly, but that something other for which we search to find a word is with Oblonsky.

I see this as comedy's province – taking our engagement in a character where a solemn sense of what is fair and decent won't. And taking us there, not by a passage of abstract persuasion, but through the laughable mundanity of things. The pear just is. Oblonsky just is. And not all the sadness we feel for Dolly can diminish our appreciation of either. What is more – for comedy is always accruing cruelties – her very sadness works against her as Oblonsky's cheerfulness works for him. We wouldn't find for him in a court of law, very likely we'd approve of Dolly taking him to the cleaners, but a novel isn't a court of law. Nor is it the cleaners.

The comic imagination, then, not only overthrows the morality we are given from on high, it upsets our more intimately held sympathies, our sense of what is fair and right and decent. Which is why it will always irk a novelist to be told that his characters are not nice or easy to identify with, when as like as not they are not meant to be. The novelist is under no obligation to clear up the mess life makes.

Mr Micawber is not as insufferable as that other great financial incompetent Mr Dorrit, but he is a variation on the same theme of improvidence and unreliability – qualities which, incidentally, Dickens had reason to hate as they were possessed in abundance by his father. I take the scene in which the young David Copperfield sees Mr Micawber sitting up on the back of a coach, eating chestnuts out of a brown paper bag, just hours after discoursing on the certainty of his financial ruin, to be one of the supreme comic moments in literature. The picture of contentment that Micawber presents is straightforwardly funny – the chestnuts doing for him what the pear did for Oblonsky – but what vexes our amusement, making it far from straightforward, is the fact that it's selfishness we're enjoying here, Micawber's irrepressibility, like Falstaff's, being a function of an egoism of gargantuan carelessness.

I don't say comedy is the only means of challenging our routine sympathies and valuations. George Eliot, who tried to learn comedy from Dickens but didn't quite have the ear for it, is forever shaking us out of our complacencies. "We are all of us born in moral stupidity," she writes in Middlemarch, à propos Dorothea's failure to imagine how being Mr Casaubon feels to Mr Casaubon. It is the beginning of a marvellous passage of writing, at once homiletic and imagistic. What Dorothea lacks is the capacity "to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self . . .".

Here, you could argue, is the very justification of the novel itself – the education of our imaginations not by precept but through the inconsequent palpability of art, what Henry James called its "irresponsible plasticity". And in the chapters that follow, we accompany Dorothea in this education of the feelings and the senses as Casaubon becomes a creature of flesh and blood. Why do we read? This is why we read. How is a novel different from what isn't a novel? In a novel, ideas are wrought back to the directness of sense. Middlemarch isn't only one of the greatest novels ever written, it makes the most irresistible case for why the novel must exist.

But I would still argue that a novelist of comic genius – let's stay with Dickens – can, in the course of realigning our sympathies, create a deeper disquiet. Think of that scene in Little Dorrit when young Ferdinand Barnacle, the most sprightly of all the Barnacles, visits Arthur Clennam in debtors' prison. Clennam is a quiet hero by Dickens's standards, a modest, idealistic man who, like just about everybody else in the novel, has lost money by investing in the shyster Merdle. Hence his confinement in the Marshalsea, where "anybody might see that the shadow of the wall was upon him".

Into this gloomy place enters, unexpectedly, Barnacle, youngest scion of the Barnacle family, the bloodsuckers who run the Circumlocution Office, that body dedicated to seeing that nothing worth happening ever happens. Considering the vitriolic satire directed at the Barnacles throughout Little Dorrit, we would have expected him to be given short shrift. But in fact his incongruous vivacity asserts its own rights in the prison. "We must have humbug," he tells the wilting Clennam. "We all like humbug, we couldn't get on without humbug. A little humbug, and a groove, and everything goes on admirably, if you leave it alone."

Clennam might dismiss this as cynicism, but who's the one with the shadow of the wall upon him, and who's the one in rude health? Impeccable in his manners, frank and courteous, Barnacle warns Clennam of society's gullibility – "You really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating of any old tin kettle" – hopes that "the passing cloud" of Clennam's gloom will soon "give place to sunshine", and with those words goes downstairs, hums his way through the Lodge, mounts his horse in the front courtyard, and is gone. In the cadences that describe his departure we hear not only Ferdinand's breezy swagger, we hear the vigour of selfish life itself. Idealism 0, Cynicism 5.

That might not be the result we want, but the novel doesn't exist to give us what we want. Feel good? Forget it. If there's one thing the novel at its comic best knows for sure it's that a happy outcome – the good getting what they deserve and the bad getting their comeuppance, and all being for the best in the best of all possible worlds – is an illusion. How not feeling good nonetheless conduces to our not feeling bad, indeed conduces to our feeling exhilarated, is one of the great mysteries of art. Nietzsche had a go at explaining it in The Birth of Tragedy. It was the satyr play, he argued, that gave Greeks the "metaphysical solace that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyous and powerful".

This is not quite the solace we take away from Middlemarch with its final quiet consolation of life being not so ill as it might have been for you and me, thanks to those who have faithfully lived a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. Little Dorrit, on the other hand, ends on a note of terrible invigoration, with the great world of the Merdles and the Barnacles invincible in its arrogance and vanity, fretting and chafing and making its "usual uproar".

I am not proposing a competition between Eliot and Dickens, but I think it is easier to accommodate a Casaubon in one's imaginative system than it is a Barnacle. To risk our enjoying the latter in the face of Clennam's deep despondency and, if you like, Dickens's own compassionate humanity, is, anyway, the boldest of comic moves. But that's a risk comedy is equipped to take, and certainly the more comic the novel, the more likely it is to go against its own interests.

What, after all, are the interests of the comic novel? If it's written in the spirit of Cervantes then it has no interests, no predetermined direction, nothing to prove. Joyce might sometimes have thought he knew where he was going in Ulysses, having a map of the journey provided by Homer, but in fact it's nowhere in particular. Verbally incontinent, utterly fantastical in its depictions of the material life of the city, where the butcher's shop can be as sexually provocative as the bordello, Ulysses goes on its merry way, spiralling Leopold Bloom into unimaginable humiliations, each one of which somehow makes him more indomitably the hero. Up is down in tragedy; in comedy down is up.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the greatest comic novels give the impression of starting on a whim and heading for they don't know where. In Our Mutual Friend, his most disgusted novel, Dickens endows the schoolmistress Miss Peecher with a gift I like to think of as the very antithesis to his own. "Small, shining, neat and methodical . . . she could write a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule." Whatever else there is to say on Miss Peecher's behalf, she will not, with those skills, write a comic novel.

But it does sometimes seem as though our times favour the methodical over the seemingly directionless. Some of the most successful popular novels of the last few years have been invitations to codebreaking, and you can't hope to crack a code if there is none. Crime novels and thrillers, too, trade on our confidence that the novelist knows precisely what he's up to and won't let us into the secret until he's good and ready. They are not so much read as solved. That these novels often follow well laid-down patterns – beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other – is clearly part of the appeal as well. Readers of such books want simultaneously to be kept in the dark and to know where they are. Hence the success of serial novels that stick rigidly to a formula of plot and personage. "A good read" is now considered the highest recommendation, though the phrase is entirely non-descriptive and reduces a once purposive and active verb to a meek and passive noun. Who, when we speak of a good read, is reading whom?

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve. Anyone would think that the whole art and pleasure of reading consisted in getting helter-skelter through a novel, unscathed, unchallenged, and without encountering anyone but oneself. Once we wrestled with the angel when we read; now we ask only to slumber in his arms.

But the greatest novels won't let us. The novelist, at his swelling comic best – a Dickens or a Dostoevsky, a Cervantes or a Kafka, a Joseph Roth or a Henry Miller – goes where Hamlet dares the skull of Yorick to go, straight to my painted lady's chamber, rattling his bones and making her laugh at the terrible fate that awaits her. His comedy spares nothing and spares no one. And in the process asserts the stubbornness of life. Why would we want to read anything less?

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question is the winner of the 2010 Man Booker prize.