Surrounded!

 

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy that has no common name or phrase. I call it dis-identification.  It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with, even if it is not clear what the contest is all about or what the rules are. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump,  etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Donald Trump, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat,  which is the contest absolutely realized; there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by liberal types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, centrist reactionaries. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – which is on account of the fact that the French have a genius for enmity. In English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind.

But Dickens rather ends a certain line of humor than opens up the kind of humor, the kind of odd frivolity, that imbued English comic writing in the 20^th century. Evelyn Waugh, whose character Tony Last is, famously, captured by a maniac and forced to read Dickens to him, is not only dis-identifying with Dickens but mocking, snobbishly, Dickens appeal to the vulgar masses -even as those masses include jungle explorers. Frivolity, as Fintan O’Toole pointed out in his book on Brexit, Heroic Failure, is the mask assumed by English nationalism.  While celebrating loudly the struggle of good and evil, the battle of civilizations, and English yeoman values, the celebrants are all such scoundrels and trust fund brats that it is hard not to suspect they are on to themselves – that they too have been dosed with English comic writing, from Wodehouse to Amis.

I’d like to make generalizations about the American version of dis-identification, but this subject requires way too much coffee for me to make it this morning. This will have to do.