Nonsense Novels

 
Nonsense Novels
by Stephen Leacock
NYRB

1911, reprinted 2004

 

 

More than anything else, reading the short stories in Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels reminds me of an afternoon spent watching Looney Tunes. Each story parodies one of the popular genre fiction styles of its day. 

 
Leacock published the collection in 1911, so they were written a good 20-30 years before the cartoons they resemble, but it would be easy, for example, to envision Daffy Duck as Doorlock Holmes acting out the role of the detective in Leacock's mystery story. (Robert Coover's short story "Hat Act" feels like a Tex Avery cartoon in much the same way.)

 
There's also a ghost story, a Gothic romance with an orphaned governess, a Horatio Alger style rags-to-riches story, a story of piracy and shipwrecks, a sentimental Christmas story, and a utopian future history scifi story, along with others belonging to genres that have died out, or at least I'm unfamiliar with.

 
Leacock relies on dramatic irony for a lot of his humor. Although he writes ridiculous variations on classic stories, and the characters are all idiots, the narration is always 'straight.' Leacock trusts his audience to know enough about the genres to get the joke. 

 
The Great Detective spends his whole story deducing that the kidnapping victim he's searching for is a dog, never finds the poor thing, uses his mastery of disguise to imitate the victim and win the dog show, and then gets put down by the city dogcatcher. A man communicates with the ghost haunting his neighbor's house exclusively by leaving cash on his neighbor's coffee table - when the cash vanishes, that's the ghost talking back, right? 

 
I loved the rags-to-riches story. Everyone in the big city (even the police) punches the plucky young man when he announces his intention to do honest work. But when he takes up a life of crime, they treat him like a celebrity. In the house he burgles, he can't set any of the wooden furniture or even the books on fire, because 'they've been fireproofed,' but the iron elevator and its steel cables catch fire instantly...

 
Apparently Leacock was a student of Thornstein Veblen, and I feel like it shows a bit in his attention to class inequality, and the thoroughness of his 'boring, safe future' utopia. I think one's enjoyment of these stories depends on familiarity with the styles being parodied, but the ones where I was fully in on the joke, I enjoyed a lot.