ABSTRACT: This paper aims at presenting a brief analysis on two prose compositions by Woody Allen. My main purpose is to focus on the elements of incongruity and nonsense observed throughout the texts, regarding them as typical procedures of the comic genre, and particularly of Woody Allen’s prose. For this intent, I selected the pieces “The Whore of Mensa” and “The Early Essays”, both taken from Allen’s collection Without Feathers (1975).
KEY-WORDS: Woody Allen; “The Whore of Mensa”; “The Early Essays”; incongruity; comicality
RESUMO: Este trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar uma breve análise de duas composições em prosa de Woody Allen. Meu principal propósito é focar nos elementos de incongruência e nonsense observados nos textos, considerando-os como procedimentos típicos do gênero cômico, e particularmente da prosa de Woody Allen. Para tal fim, eu selecionei os títulos “The Whore of Mensa” [A Puta com Ph.D] e “The Early Essays” [Os Primeiros Ensaios], ambos extraídos da coleção Without Feathers[Sem Plumas] (1975), de Allen.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Woody Allen; “The Whore of Mensa”; “The Early Essays”; incongruência; comicidade
Before being widely recognized for his versatile work on the movie screens, Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Königsberg, Brooklyn, New York, 1935) started his career as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for the radio and television, and also publishing several books of short humor pieces[1]. Then, in the early 1960’s, persuaded by his agents, Allen began to perform monologues of his own authorship as a stand-up comedian, which, after a few years, gained him an invitation to write the script for “What’s New Pussycat?”, a feature film in which he would also act. In effect, the comic persona that Woody Allen has developed during his activity on stage – an insecure, intellectual and neurotic character – would be present in many of his films and texts. As a writer, Allen’s short pieces were published in some of the most prominent organs of the North American press – particularly in The New Yorker Magazine –, and then they were collected and edited, together with some of his plays, in books such as Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), Side Effects (1980) and Mere Anarchy (2007). Although he went to the University of New York, Allen has never finished college.
Without Feathers (1975) is notably one of Woody Allen’s best-known literary work. The collection is composed of eighteen texts, including the plays “Death” and “God”, and pieces written in varied formats (some of them, for instance, parody and transgress the established conventions of the essay, of the documental and of the epistolary genres). The mentioned title is seemingly a cunning and controversial comment on Emily Dickinson’s famous quote “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”[2], which Allen uses as epigraph for the book. As a matter of fact, Without Feathers extensively delivers Allen’s hopeless and neurotic sense typical of his comic persona. Among the most commented and appreciated stories of the book, we may first cite “The Whore of Mensa”.
“The Whore of Mensa”[3] (originally published in The New Yorker, in 1974) is a humorous short story about young, beautiful and intellectual ‘prostitutes’ who, instead of engaging in sexual intercourse, are rather called up to have intellectual discussions with their clients. The story opens with Word Babcock – “a quivering pat of butter” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 51) – entering the office of private detective Kaiser Lupowitz – the narrator of the story – and asking him for help for a peculiar situation. Mr. Babcock says that he, as an intellectual man, sometimes feels lonely, and all he wants is to have a smart conversation with a learned woman, which Flossie – “a madam, with a master’s in comparative lit.” (Ibid., p. 52) – can easily arrange for him. The problem is that Word is married, and now Flossie is blackmailing him: if he does not pay her ten thousand dollars, she will report to Carla, Word’s wife, everything he has been doing in the past six months, i.e., having intellectual intercourse with other women. Finally, Kaiser accepts the case. He gives a call to Flossie and asks her to set him up with a girl who could talk about Melville:
“I’d like to discuss Melville.”
“Moby Dick or the shorter novels?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The price. That’s all. Symbolism’s extra.”
“What’ll it run me?”
“Fifty, maybe a hundred for Moby Dick. You want a comparative discussion – Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred.”
“The dough’s fine,” I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza.
“You want a blonde or a brunette?”
“Surprise me,” I said, and hung up. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 53).
One hour later, Sherry, the girl sent by Flossie to Kaiser, arrives at the hotel. When Sherry is about to leave and after their having discussed literature, the detective pretends that he wants to have a ‘party’ with two girls explaining Noam Chomsky to him. Sherry falls into his trap, and Kaiser finally reveals that he is a cop: “I´m fuzz, sugar, and discussing Melville for money is an 802. You can do time.” (Ibid., p. 55) Then, the girl, desperately crying, is forced to conduct Kaiser to Flossie.
According to Sherry, Flossie manages her illegal business in the back of the Hunter College Book Store. Kaiser goes there, and behind a secret wall of books, he finds many young and beautiful women reading. Suddenly, someone surprises the detective with a gun. It is Flossie (who is actually a man with a woman’s voice, due to an unsuccessful plastic surgery). Rapidly, the detective makes a move and grabs the gun from Flossie. The police arrive and arrest the ‘madam’. Later that night Kaiser looks up Gloria, an old account of his who had graduated cum laude – “The difference was she majored in physical education.” (Ibid., p. 57)
As many of the short stories included in Without Feathers, the plot and the language of “The Whore of Mensa” are notably structured on incongruent and nonsensical elements. The very fact that the ‘prostitutes’ alluded in the text are not exactly ‘common prostitutes’, but are rather women paid for engaging in philosophic and literary discussions with ‘intellectually unsatisfied’ men, already puts the reader in confront with a ‘strange’ and ‘unusual’ reality. Besides, not only the plot but also the dialogues, the atypical associations, linguistic choices and especially the images evoked throughout the whole piece result in this inventive, uncommon and extremely comic narration. In fact, as Isabel Ermida (2011, p. 351) shows, “the semantic organisation of [Woody Allen’s] texts, based on a combination of script oppositeness and overlap, is blended with a proficient use of stylistic devices which signal, and enhance, comic incongruity.” Although Ermida is specifically considering Allen’s Mere Anarchy (2007), this general assumption can be also applied to many of the pieces included in Without Feathers.
According to Ermida (2011, p. 340), most theories of linguistic humour acknowledge that incongruity is the key to comic effect. By incongruity, Ermida refers to “a discrepancy between two meanings which overlap, and corresponding surprise” that “establishes the humorous nature of an utterance.” Yet, in rhetorical terms, we could even establish an association between the comic incongruity and the conception of trope, traditionally understood “as the figure created by dislodging of a term from its old sense and its previous usage and by transferring a new, improper, or ‘strange’ sense and usage.” (CONTE, 1986, p. 23) Hence, when I suggest that Allen makes use of incongruity as a mechanism to produce comicality, I am trying to argue that the comic effects obtained through his texts are fundamentally related to the overlap, or rather to the dislodging of a known and conventional situation, sign or image into an unusual frame, as it may be attested in the following example:
“Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she´ll come over and discuss any subject – Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I´m driving at?”
“Not exactly.”
“I mean, my wife is great, don´t get me wrong. But she won´t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn´t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who´s mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I´m willing to pay for it. I don´t want an involvement – I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I´m a happily married man.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 52).
In the excerpt above, taken from the first pages of “The Whore of Mensa”, Word is confessing to the detective, in a very dramatic way, the reason why he has been engaging with one of Flossie’s girls. Considering that the customary argument culturally expected from a married man for calling up a prostitute would be related to affective and sexual problems concerning his relationship with his wife, the unusual arguments used by Word to justify his ‘infidelity’ – his need of “a woman who´s mentally stimulating” and of “a quick intellectual experience” – immediately establishes a conflict between expectation and surprise. From this conflict, then, emerge incongruence, nonsense, and ultimately comicality. This same conflict may be clearly seen in other significant passages, such as when Kaiser mentions that the police were already suspecting something involving a group of ‘intellectual prostitutes’[4], or when the detective visits their ‘brothel’:
Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian décor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartók records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing – the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 56-57)
Here, too, the cultural expectation is frustrated by an exceptional picture; after all, in a regular context, the conception of what a brothel is would certainly not involve girls reading Penguin Classics, nor a situation in which a Jewish brunette starts a date picking up someone at the Museum and ends with a fake suicide would be considered a probable erotic fantasy.
Actually, in making use of deviations from what is normatively expected by the reader in terms of social, cultural and linguistic conventions, Allen is employing a comic formula already remarked by the Ancient Greek and Latin theorists. Aristotle, for instance, states in his Rhetoric (3.11) that:
“Novelties of expression” arise when there is an element of surprise, and (…) the thing turns out contrary to what we were expecting, like the jokes found in comic writers, produced by deceptive alterations in words, and by unexpected words in verse, where the listener anticipates one thing and hears another. (ARISTOTLE apud ERMIDA, 2011, p. 340)
And also Cicero in his De Oratore (II, LXIII.255) claims that “when we are expecting to hear a particular phrase, and something different is uttered (…) our own mistake even makes us laugh ourselves.” (Apud ibid.)
As we could see from a few examples, there is a great profusion of incongruent dialogues and situations which make up the basis of Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa”. Moreover, this procedure is not only manifested in the content, but also in the structure of the narrative. Considering that the plot of “The Whore of Mensa” is centered on detective Kaiser and on his attempt to solve a particular case, we could finally state that Allen’s story maintains a close bond with the detective fiction genre, characteristic of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. Once again, however, Allen employs the conventional elements of that fictional genre – the figure of the detective, the ‘victim’, a difficult problem to solve, a ‘risky investigation’, the solution of the case – only for the sake of parodying them, for the circumstances related to Kaiser’s case are motivated by a peculiar and pathetic reason, which in the end, instead of inspiring tension and creating suspense, as it could be expected in a detective story, turns out comic. In order to better examine how the parody of genre functions as a literary procedure in Allen’s prose, we could also make an account of another literary piece included in the book Without Feathers, the one which is entitled “The Early Essays”.
As its title already suggests, “The Early Essays” (first published in The New Yorker, in 1973 – one year before the publication of “The Whore of Mensa”) is a piece which consists of the supposed early essays written by Woody Allen. Thus, since it is composed of concise texts written in the format of essays, this particular piece, unlike “The Whore of Mensa”, is not regulated by a plot or by a narrative unity, but instead it depicts a number of pseudo-reflections concerning a variety of themes, as may be attested in the indication forged at the opening of the text:
Following are a few of the early essays of Woody Allen. There are no late essays, because he ran out of observations. Perhaps as Allen grows older he will understand more of life and will set it down, and then retire to his bedroom and remain there indefinitely. Like the essays of Bacon, Allen’s are brief and full of practical wisdom, although space does not permit the inclusion of his most profound statement, “Looking at the Bright Side.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 61, author’s emphasis)
In the introductory note quoted above, Allen presents the reader with the genre of his piece, and he establishes a connection between his following compositions and the famous essays by Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)[5]. Indeed, the excerpt above, which is apparently written in a formal and informative language, one which could be used, for example, by the fictional editor of these essays, is pervaded by irony – another procedure characteristic of Allen’s style. This element, which could be probably noticed even by one who might not be very familiar with Woody Allen’s works, already alerts the reader to the fact that these alleged essays cannot be taken ‘seriously’, or as authentic pieces which convey a personal opinion or reflection of the author himself. Nonetheless, if in this short introduction, the comic element is not particularly evident for a less attentive reader, in the subsequent paragraphs the comicality will be manifest in a more perceptible manner, as we will see.
As already remarked above, “The Early Essays” is a piece which encompasses short texts in the format of essays. These so-called essays are respectively entitled “On Seeing a Tree in Summer”, “On Youth and Age”, “On Frugality”, “On Love” and “On Tripping Through a Copse and Picking Violets”. In fact, these titles, at least in appearance, follow the typical naming of a traditional essay, which is usually made up of an allusion to a generic topic and is introduced, in English, by the preposition on orof, like those of Bacon, for instance: “Of Truth”, “Of Death”, “Of Revenge”, or even “Of Love” and “Of Youth and Age” [6]. At a first glance, this detail, in addition to the introductory note quoted above, corroborates the intended affiliation between Allen’s and Bacon’s essays. From those mentioned titles, however, the first and especially the last one may call our attention to the ‘unusualness’ of the topic alluded, inasmuch as the other three titles apparently recall philosophic or moral issues more suitable for the conventional essays.
Due to their complex and abundant associations based on nonsense, it is worthless to try to summarize each of Woody Allen’s essays; actually, even the titles give only a fair impression of the content dealt in the texts, serving more as a pretense to build up incongruent pieces than as trustworthy descriptions of them. Nevertheless, in spite of its lack of a plot or of a linear argument, each one of the essays has peculiar characteristics that could be pointed out here.
In “On Seeing a Tree in Summer”, Allen starts making a praise to the aspect of a tree in summer, which he considers one of the most remarkable wonders of nature – “with the possible exception of a moose singing ‘Embraceable You’ in spats.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 61) What follows is a sequence of incongruent associations and digressions which rise from that initial topic; furthermore, as if in a sort of a stream of consciousness, the essayist presents a series of thoughts which have little or nothing to do with trees in summer, in such a manner that, at the end of the essay, Allen is disserting about a lumberjack, a dwarf and Roman numerals:
Once a lumberjack was about to chop down a tree, when he noticed a heart carved on it, with two names inside. Putting away his axe, he sawed down the tree instead. The point of that story escapes me, although six months later the lumberjack was fined for teaching a dwarf Roman numerals. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 62)
Thoroughly contradicting the reader’s expectations concerning the conventional purposes of an essay – and particularly those characteristic of a ‘humanistic essay’, which frequently renders a moral example or an admonition towards the reader, as attested in Bacon’s or in Montaigne’s compositions on the genre –, Allen’s essay “On Seeing a Tree in Summer” completely neglects the need of any ‘moral of the story’ and it lacks a systematic discussion about a specific subject. In fact, as a parody, Allen’s first essay has no focus at all – a peculiarity that in normal circumstances would put into question its very classification as an essay, traditionally understood as a “prose composition with a focused subject of discussion.” (Gale’s Glossary of Terms)[7]
“On Youth and Age”, by its turn, is by no means alike Bacon’s “Of Youth and Age”, as it could be imagined at a first moment. While in the latter the author expounds the most prominent characteristics of the young and of the aged men, at the same time that he provides historical examples of notable figures and consequently elaborates an admonition towards virtue, Allen, on the contrary, mocks the traditional topics or clichés commonly alluded in a reflection about maturity, age and life. Moreover, in “On Youth and Age”, it is noteworthy that Allen first introduces a stereotyped formula, such as “the true test of maturity is not how old a person is but…”, “each time of life has its appropriate rewards, whereas…” or “the best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age”, and then he completely deviates from its original connotation and installs an unexpected conclusion, as if he were inverting the primary functions related to the employment of these well-known maxims.
The true test of maturity is not how old a person is but how he reacts to awakening in the midtown area in his shorts. (…) The thing to remember is that each time of life has its appropriate rewards, whereas when you’re dead it’s hard to find the light switch. The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife – a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. (…)
In short, the best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald. On the other hand, if you are over eighty, it is extremely good form to shuffle down the street clutching a brown paper bag and muttering, “The Kaiser will steal my string.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 62)
This same procedure may be seen in the subsequent essays as well. In “On Frugality” the essayist begins talking about the importance of saving money – “As one goes through life, it is extremely important to conserve founds, and one should never spend money on anything foolish …” –, a type of statement that is thoroughly disseminated in popular wisdom; but then the examples Allen uses to illustrate this opinion are unpredictable, for it is likely to assume that people who would generally utter this kind of thought would not immediately call up these examples: “… like pear nectar or a solid-gold hat.” (Ibid., p. 63) After that, Allen makes a more striking deviation when, through his comic persona’s voice, he starts saying that “Money is not everything” – another commonplace largely professed in Western popular culture – but, having said that, he installs a paradigm by affirming “but it is better than having one’s health,” (Ibid.) insofar as, at least in accordance with the moral standards propagated in Western society, health is considered to be a greater or a preferable value in comparison with money. Further, the argument Allen uses to corroborate this opinion is highly unexpected and it seems totally random, which again produces the effect of incongruence and of comicality in the reader: “After all, one cannot go into a butcher shop and tell the butcher: ‘Look at my suntan, and besides I never catch colds,’ and expect him to hand over any merchandise.” (Ibid.) Then, however, the fictitious essayist accepts that money cannot “buy happiness,” and he illustrates this by alluding to Aesop’s fable on the ant and the grasshopper, which is largely acknowledged to be a story that provides a moral lesson about the virtues of hard work, but he naturally makes an odd intervention in its original ending:
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Not that it can buy happiness. Take the case of the ant and the grasshopper: The grasshopper played all summer, while the ant worked and saved. When winter came, the grasshopper had nothing, but the ant complained of chest pains. Life is hard for insects. And don’t think mice are having any fun, either. The point is, we all need a nest egg to fall back on, but not while wearing a good suit. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 63)
Taking this same procedure ahead, in the following essay “On Love” Allen also makes use of the major premises which form the basis of some commonplaces, now related to love, and again he subverts their expected conclusions, as may be attested right in the beginning of the text: “Is it better to be the lover or the loved one? Neither, if your cholesterol is over six hundred;” (Ibid.) or in the third paragraph: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Should the beholder have poor eyesight, he can ask the nearest person which girls look good.” (Ibid., p. 64) In a sense, perhaps, it is possible to say that Allen’s comic persona is acting like a sophist here, since he initially makes use of valid or effective arguments, that is, arguments symbolically recognized as truths, or as accepted opinions or beliefs shared by the members of a certain circle of culture; then he concatenates them in a logical structure; and, finally, he ‘deceives’ the reader by inducing what we could call a ‘false’ demonstration or conclusion. This analogy is yet useful if we think of all the incongruent elements, not only in terms of language but also of images and situations which we have analyzed in both Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa” and “The Early Essays”. This technique seemingly attends to comic purposes in Allen’s works, insofar as the reader is presupposed to recognize these deviations as incongruent.
The last piece which constitutes Allen’s “The Early Essays” may be considered the most curious one, both in terms of topic and literary treatment. More than the others, “On Tripping Through a Copse and Picking Violets” is considerably dissociated from the canonical essay genre, and the topic itself, already given in the title, rapidly institutes an estrangement, because, contrarily to the others – maybe with the exception of the first essay, “On Seeing a Tree in Summer” – it does not depict, in theory, an issue proper or expected to be dealt with in a traditional essay. Thus, the first questions we could formulate as readers are: What do violets and copses have to do with an essay? What kind of reflection may be developed based on that unusual topic? By doing this, the intrinsic incongruent and nonsensical aspect of this particular essay is made evident right from the start. On the first line of the text, as if the essayist were replying to an objective question made by another person, and without making any introduction to the topic but going straight to his exposition, he remarks: “This is no fun at all, and I would recommend almost any other activity.” (Ibid., p. 64) Then, after giving some suggestions of better activities, such as visiting a sick friend or reading a book in a tub, Allen’s persona categorically affirms that “Anything is better than turning up a copse with one of those vacuous smiles and accumulating flowers in a basket,” so he emphatically recommends to call the florist instead – “That way, if an electrical storm comes up or a beehive is chanced upon, it will be the florist who is rushed to Mount Sinai.” (Ibid.) Yet, at the end of the text, the mordacious essayist makes it clear that he is not “insensitive to the joys of nature,” although he has come to the conclusion “that for sheer fun it is hard to beat forty-eight hours at Foam Rubber City during the high holidays. But that is another story.” (Ibid., p. 65)
As we could see, in “The Early Essays” Allen basically recurs to the same strategies he uses in the composition of “The Whore of Mensa” in order to achieve comicality. In comparing the two pieces, however, what seems to stand out is the fact that, because of the different genres involved in their respective structures – one being a fictional narrative with a linear and central plot; the other, a collection of comic essays –, in the “Early Essays” the procedure of incongruity is in general better noticed in the linguistic associations and in the semantic connections made up along the whole piece, while in “The Whore of Mensa” what seems to be more effective in terms of comicality is the association of divergent images, unconventional situations, dialogues, and the progression of the story itself.
Anyhow, it is important to emphasize that if, on the one hand, Allen makes a prolific use of those deviations, establishing an unusual and sometimes even an absurd setting, on the other hand, the author still provides a verisimilar and coherent framework. This ultimately means that even if the two pieces are full of incongruent and nonsensical elements – i.e., full of elements which somehow diverge from the expected norm culturally and socially instituted, and because of that they cause an initial estrangement –, the reader never questions the authenticity or, better saying, the verisimilitude of Allen’s compositions. In fact, the realistic space set up right at the opening of “The Whore of Mensa”, and which is carried out till the end of the story, permits the introduction of incongruent and ‘strange’ elements without the overall configuration of the narrative being altered or corrupted by them. By doing so, Allen sets up unusual events inside a consistent frame, in such a way that the reader, though at first surprised, is even induced to consider those incongruities as probable and not totally impossible to happen in the ‘real world’. To the same extent, “The Early Essays”, in spite of their innumerous divergences from the norm and of the essayist’s mocking interventions spread along the pieces, still respect, though almost in a scarce way (as if the author were actually pushing the limits of the genre to the extreme), some capital rules and conventions in order to maintain a necessary bond between these comic pieces and the essay genre. Hence, we noticed the traditional pattern followed in the naming of the essays (the same adopted by reputable essayists as Bacon or Montaigne), the use of the first person singular (a feature characteristic of the essay, due to the personal tone generally acknowledged to this type of composition), and the constant allusion to commonplaces related to morality, to say some of the most prominent elements observed in the surface of Allen’s forged essays. What is more striking in this is that, by respecting those elementary precepts of the essay genre, Allen makes the contradiction between form and content even more evident, which once again gives rise to the incongruent effect and, by consequence, to the comicality expected from Allen’s characteristic production.
Concluding remarks
In this paper, I have suggested that incongruence, as a literary procedure, plays an important function as a mechanism responsible to engender comicality in Woody Allen’s prose. In fact, as I have briefly pointed out, this type of practice is regarded by linguists of humour, and was already acknowledged by some authors from Antiquity, as a characteristic procedure of comedy. In “The Whore of Mensa”, for instance, Allen’s use of incongruity could be attested in the uncommon events and descriptions recalled throughout the whole story – the ‘intellectual prostitutes’, the nature of their illegal business, Word’s ‘intellectual infidelity’ to his wife: these are some of the unexpected elements with which the reader is confronted in the course of the short story, which are not supposed to have parallel in the external reality. In “The Early Essays”, in its turn, the incongruent effect could be obtained especially by the contrast between form and content instituted in the pieces, since Allen’s persona at first suggests reflections upon ‘philosophic’ topics, but then he completely frustrates this premise by giving random examples and subverting the expected ‘moral of the story’. Actually, here, incongruity emerges along with other comic strategies, such as parody, irony and acid humour.
Nonetheless, based on my observations on “The Whore of Mensa” and on “The Early Essays”, I have argued that the incongruities or the unusual elements present in Allen’s compositions do not interfere with their respective overall configurations, nor do they obliterate some necessary criteria to their compilation, both in terms of the genre and of verisimilitude – the latter being more relevant to the writing of a short story, as in the case of “The Whore of Mensa”. This, however, cannot be seen as a restrictive factor or a limitation, but rather as a literary choice through which the potential of the incongruities becomes even more effective in terms of comicality, insofar as the rupture with the norm turns out more significant on the surface of the text.
References
ALLEN, W. “The Whore of Mensa”; “The Early Essays”. In: The Complete Prose of Woody Allen: Without Feathers, Getting Even, Side Effects. New York: Wings Books, 1991, p. 49-57; 59-65.
_____. Sem Plumas. Trad. Ruy Castro. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2011.
BACON, F. The Essays. Available in: <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/bacon/essays_contents.html>. Accessed on 19 November 2012.
CONTE, G. B. The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets. Cornell University, 1986, p. 23.
DICKINSON, E. “314. ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”. In: VENDLER, H. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries.Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 118.
DRABBLE, M. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
ERMIDA, I. “Losers, poltroons and nudniks” in Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy. In: DYNEL, M. (ed.) The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011, p. 335-352.
Gale’s Glossary of Terms. Available in: <http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/glossary/glossary_de.htm> Accessed 20 November 2012.
Mensa International. Available at: < https://www.mensa.org/> Accessed on 16 Oct 2012.
Data de envio da 2ª versão: 15 de março de 2013.
[1] This paper was developed in the course ‘Literatura Inglesa III’, taught by Prof. Renata Philippov at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP – Guarulhos), during the first semester of 2012. I thank Prof. Philippov for all her readings, suggestions and comments on the text.
[2] “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.”
(DICKINSON, 2010, p. 118.)
[3] By Mensa, probably Woody Allen is referring to the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. Mensa (which means ‘table’ in Latin) is a non-profit organization which “provides a forum for intellectual exchange among its members. (…) Activities include the exchange of ideas through lectures, discussions, journals, special-interest groups, and local, regional, national and international gatherings (…).” (Cf. <https://www.mensa.org/> Accessed 16 Oct 2012.)
[4] “I had heard rumors that the boys at headquarters were on to something involving a group of educated women, but so far they were stymied.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 53)
[5] “Essays, The, of F. Bacon, first published in 1597, together with the ‘Christian Meditations’ and ‘Of the Colours of Good and Evil’, consisted of ten essays, in extremely bare style. The sentences are printed separately, marked with a paragraph sign, giving them the status of aphorisms, discrete observations drawn from experience, in the realm of public life. The second edition (1612) contained 38 essays, in a more varied style, and on a wider range of topics: a manuscript copy now in the British Library describes them as his ‘writings . . . in Moralitie, Policie [politics] and Historie’. In this collection Bacon began to fill a lacuna he had noted in his Advancement of Learning (1605), the lack of concrete knowledge of the different ‘natures and dispositions’ of human beings, and how they were affected by psychological and social factors (such as gender, health, social standing, physical appearance). The final version, now called Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), included 58 essays, filling in more of these gaps in treating both ‘civil’ or public life, and the mores or behaviour of private individuals. Bacon’s approach varies greatly from essay to essay, approaching each topic from several different viewpoints, juxtaposing systematic analysis with brilliant aperçus. The styles used range from the detached and laconic to the passionately engaged, especially when expressing his moral beliefs. Dr Johnson said that the Essays were ‘the observations of a strong mind operating upon life; and in consequence you find what you seldom find in other books’.” (DRABBLE, 2000, p. 336.)
[6] Cf. BACON, F. “The Essays” (1601). Available in: <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/bacon/essays_contents.html>. Accessed 19 November 2012.
[7] Gale’s Glossary of Terms Available in: <http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/glossary/glossary_de.htm> Accessed 20 November 2012.