Unidirectional Downward Comparison.

This review by Michael W. Clune (in The Point) of Céline’s novel War (the first English translation, by Charlotte Mandell, has just appeared) makes it sound like a book any Céline fan (me, for example) should investigate (“In War, he sets these elements swirling around each other, each interacting on each, to produce in the reader—me, at least—an absolute convulsion of hippopotamic laughter without any parallel in my experience, and which caused my wife and daughter to literally recoil in shock and disgust as I sat there in the corner reading”), but what brings me to post it here is this passage of literary analysis:

Perhaps the most original aspect of War—when compared both with Céline’s classic published novels of the 1930s, Death on the Installment Plan and Journey, as well as with most other great examples of dark comedy—is its liberation from the Quixotic model. Of course Don Quixote’s influence as the greatest and arguably the first Western novel extends far beyond dark comedy. But Céline’s example sensitized us to a special branch of Cervantes’s progeny—call it dark comic quixotism. Quixote provides the template for virtually all literary dark comedy that succeeded it, ranging from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to George Schuyler’s Black No More to Nabokov’s Lolita to Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote.

Central to all these works is what I will call the Unidirectional Downward Comparison (UDC). Cervantes’s novel is organized around the comparison between the idealized images of chivalric romance and the quotidian images of daily life. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, roadside taverns as castles. This constant comparison between the real and ideal takes a form so strange and even perverse in its logic that it’s very difficult to find analogues for it outside Don Quixote and its progeny. To explain it, I often draw on a photograph that a friend drew my attention to 25 years ago.

The photograph shows the rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe standing next to each other in a space without other visible objects. I think they were in an alley, with walls to either side of them. Perhaps the photo can still be found somewhere on the internet. At any rate, the feature that my friend pointed out to me was that, in setting up a comparison between Fat Joe and Big Pun, each made the other one look thinner. […]

The point is that this photograph is an example of a Unidirectional Downward Comparison, a comparison in which both terms travel in the same direction. Stop for a moment and reflect how contrary this dynamic is to our usual experience. Our thin friend will make us look fat, while we will accentuate their slenderness. Or our fat friend will make us look thin, while we will enhance observers’ sense of their girth.

Like the Big Pun/Fat Joe photo, the Don Quixote comparison pushes each term in the same direction: down. Each becomes lesser in the presence of the other. Each term of the comparison—the ideal and reality—makes the other one look worse. The idealized images, gestures and phraseology of the chivalric romance make the images, gestures and speech patterns of contemporary Spain look like crap. No, that’s not a palace, it’s a shitty inn. No, that’s not a princess, it’s a prostitute.

Yet, at the same time, reality makes the fantasy look bad. Chivalric romance appears delusional, idiotic. Sometimes the capacity to see the world through the lens of the ideal seems like selfish, willful escapism, leading directly to material harm for the unfortunates whose paths cross Don Quixote’s. Sometimes it simply seems insane.

The fictional world established by the UDC—a world structured by a real/ideal opposition which makes each term look worse, and where each shift between the real and the ideal deepens the worseness of both, as they sail, to borrow a phrase from Beckett, “worstward ho”—this kind of fiction is incompatible with satire. Because satire depends on some actual or implied term of comparison which is not degraded, corrupt, insane or vile. […]

Perhaps my all-time favorite example of the UDC is the moment in Dead Souls when the landowner Manilov drifts into a reverie, imagining that he and Chichikov—a man about whom he knows almost nothing—become such close friends that the tsar gives them a special award. The puerile insanity of this flight of idealism is brought into focus when one considers Chichikov’s identity as a low-level conman, on a mad quest to be recognized as a landowner by buying up the deeds of deceased serfs. Manilov’s gentle dream highlights the impossible degradation of the actual world, even as reality exposes in him a cluelessness amounting almost to a new kind of depravity. Like Céline’s thirties novels, Dead Souls constantly stages the confrontation between ideal and real to accelerate the degradation of both terms. […]

Journey and Death both feature Ferdinand’s attitude—the aspect of the novels that perhaps exerted the greatest influence on the initial wave of English-speaking Céline imitators—like Philip Roth or Kurt Vonnegut. But there’s no parallel in Céline’s previously published fiction to the proximity between this attitude and the surreal intensities of the vision of War. Between the delirium and the attitude, the published novels insert the ideal, which from the perspective of War now feels like a buffer, an avoidance mechanism. In Céline’s new novel, his attitude performs its dance steps and pickpocketing on the very verge of the abyss.

I’m just sorry jamessal isn’t here to appreciate the use of Big Pun and Fat Joe as touchstones.