Comic Sense

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The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova­ tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo­ dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and, more often than not, a disputable category. Frederick Karl, in his sur­ vey of American Fictions 1940-1980, maintains, for instance, that much comic writing consists in ridicule that lacks deeper intellectual and cul­ tural roots. "Wit and mockery, " he notes, "by themselves have little lasting value. Even in the best of such fiction, Gravity's Rainbow, one is made aware of attenuated skits stiched onto previous segments, rather than baked in by a defined point of view. " (Karl: 27) Such assessments of course challenge my view that the comic is in significant ways connected with what is innovative in postmodernist US-American fiction. Yet the term comic -or related terms like humour, parody, irony and so fort- is regularly and heavily employed in discussions or reviews of con­ temporary fiction.