Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

April 5, 2001

English professor relishes puns, wordplay found in 19th-century American literature

A self-styled "literary Marxist — of the Groucho variety," Michael West, professor of English at Pitt, has written a book on puns and wordplay in 19th-century American literature and culture focusing on the wide-spread etymological obsession of Americans in that century.

"Transcendental Wordplay: America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature," issues a clear warning: "If you don't think puns are fun, close it now." According to West, "puns were a 19th-century art form relished by ordinary folk and cultivated with genius in the literature of the American Renaissance," including in the works of Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau.

In his book, West reinterprets the works of the American romantic writers, exploring their use of puns, off-color insinuations and just plain jokes, as appropriate to a time when Americans were pre-occupied with the meanings and origins of words, sometimes legitimate, sometimes phony.

For example, in analyzing Washington Irving's short story, "The Stout Gentleman," West finds parody in the narrator's obsessive search for detail about an inn's mysterious guest who is never seen. Irving's story ends with the narrator getting only a short glimpse of the stout gentleman's rear-end as he enters a coach ("The skirts of a brown coat parted behind, and gave me a full view of the broad disk of a pair of drab breeches"). Writes West, "The story burlesques Gothic conventions, of course, but it transcends parody to dramatize larger issues that would become central to American Romanticism: the bias inherent in physical observation, the linguistic basis of understanding. At the end the narrator's multiple meanings collide cheekily with the inscrutable universe of Hawthorne and Melville, and Irving offers us a startling comic vision of the world as Scarlet Arse, as Moby Buttock."

The book focuses three of its 14 chapters on Thoreau, billed by West "as our witty moralist, satirist, and social critic," rather than depicting him in the traditional portrait of a nature-loving aesthete. Thoreau's "Walden," for West, is "the chief literary monument of the etymological fervor that permeated the American Renaissance"; its heart was romantic irony and its chief mechanism was wordplay.

Coined by German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, the phrase romantic irony, West writes, "denoted a different, more unsettling attitude than classical irony."

Intellectual predecessors of the American romantics, including Voltaire and Franklin, assumed a common understanding of words wherein an elite reader could recognize truths that their irony was inverting. "But as language came to seem increasingly equivocal [in American society], that fostered a more radical and enveloping ironic sensibility. It sought less to correct social abuses than to keep the ironist afloat, like Melville's Ishmael, in a billowing, dynamic, paradoxical, and even menacing cosmos. … The Romantic ironist could achieve transcendence through an orgy of self-destructive recreation."

The book also serves as an elaborate defense of the oft-maligned pun as a legitimate literary instrument.

"To call the pun the lowest form of humor is a striking claim and bizarrely incorrect," West told the University Times. "Puns are a subspecies of irony. Irony is an utterance capable of being misunderstood by the overly literal while simultaneously the perceptive reader can see the true meanings it conveys." In that sense, the pun is a form of elevated language, he said, whose detractors are "linguistic idiots."

"I also found in my research for this book," West said, "curious, even scary connections between puns and various psychological and biological disorders, including in the case of Thoreau, who died of consumption."

Recognizing that his family had a history of the disease and he was prone to get it, Thoreau sought medical advice and was told he should be as cheerful as possible. "Puns became a kind of self-therapy for him," West maintains. "For many of these writers, puns were a way of dealing with certain unpleasant facts of life, of dealing with the tragic."

"Transcendental Wordplay" also offers a large dose of the evolution of the emerging science of linguistics, in an American society chock-full of made-up etymologies, newly created dictionaries, grammar books, manuals, jokebooks and quixotic attempts to find a Ur-language "lurking beneath all natural languages."

West's writing style, wherein he practices what he preaches, extends his audience beyond literary scholars to include students of linguistics, culture and history as well as fans of wordplay. As he writes in his preface, "My hope is that this book can be read with pleasure and profit by people who recoil from most academic literary criticism. I too mistrust it, rest assured. What I have to say may interest ordinary readers amused by puns, riddles, acrostics, anagrams, dirty jokes, and other forms of wordplay."

"Transcendental Wordplay" in manuscript won the Northeast Modern Language Association/Ohio University Press award in 1999, prior to publication by Ohio University Press in 2000. Favorable reviews have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Thoreau Society Book Review and The New England Quarterly.

–Peter Hart


Leave a Reply