RESEARCH General Arts

LITERATURE
Literary wit -- its history, meaning and usage -- focus of new book

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

3/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- If wit is, as Mark Twain said, the poor cousin of humor, then that cousin is now in debtors’ prison. Sure -- the quip is still revered in conversation, but in literature, wit gets no credit or respect.

So says Bruce Michelson, who, with his new book, "Literary Wit," hopes to restore lit wit’s honor. In the past, Michelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois, has written about many authors whose prose dances on the page, but he "yearned," he said, "for a better description of wit and a better understanding of its intellectual and emotional power." His new book includes the first thorough reading of Tom Stoppard's acclaimed recent play, "Arcadia," and the first study of Margaret Edson's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Wit," which soon will be released as a feature film.

Michelson not only offers many examples of wit created by the masters of the trade, but also a good deal of biographical detail. Readers will learn, for example, that by 1890, Twain and Oscar Wilde had both run out the string on their popularity and were looking for ways to "transcend their own celebrity without destroying it." Literary wit -- snappy epigrams in Wilde's preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray," and calendar maxims from Twain by way of Puddn’head Wilson -- made their transformations possible.

Michelson also exposes the traps people often fall into when thinking about wit, and he challenges readers, especially scholars of literature, to break free of the beguiling "auras of certainty" and "rituals of logic" that surround interpretations of literary works. What he is calling for is "a questioning of outmoded assumptions that have kept our thinking and our reading closed."

According to Michelson, scholars still keep Twain's work "locked up with definitions that are literally 100 years old and that make no distinctions between wit in a literary situation and broad jokes in a locker room. So much has changed since Bergson and Freud made the rules -- we really need to liberate and modernize our conversation about wit and humor."

They are different animals, he said. "Humor foreshadows itself, telegraphs its punches. Literary wit is trickier. It often pretends to be transient, an amusement for the moment, but behind it you sense measure and care." Wit can be empty or pretentious, but it also can be thematically rich. It can complicate a novel, a poem, a play "and break it free from the house rules of its own genre or mode."

While it can be described, literary wit cannot be defined, Michelson said. This is so, because wit is a "quick, liberating disruption of definitions. It can eat definitions, categories, methodologies, logic, all conventional ways of thinking," he said.

"There's a great line in Stoppard's play 'Arcadia': 'It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.' That's what wit in literature can do. It can give us moments of recognition just like that. Literary wit is one of those human achievements that can keep us awake, afloat, moving and spiritually alive."