This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, positing an affective reading of how bodies that suffer come to produce laughter as a confounding, unexpected, and at times inappropriate readerly affect. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King both explore suffering as a form of excessive somatic cruelty inflicted on protagonists who, in experiencing such punishment, engender a strange, troubling, and potentially transformative form of laughter. In order to bring together a discussion of the body, suffering, cruelty, and laughter in Nabokov and Bellow, the essay uses Henri Bergson's idea of the "elasticity" of laughter in connection to cruelty and suffering, and various “affective” formulations of the body. In both writers, such Bergsonian elasticity of laughter is what allows for laughing at suffering, but there are crucial differences in their depictions of somatic suffering, particularly the responses they elicit from the reader. In Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, it is the protagonist himself who jokes about his suffering body. In Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, it is the ironic narrator who simultaneously invites the reader to “laugh in the dark” and to check such laughter. What emerges in both novels is laughter as an unsettling readerly affect. Laughing about suffering thus may well become suffering after laughing, as the reader is forced to explore the emotional and ethical implications of such cruel laughter. Gerald David Naughton and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton, "The Suffering page 2 of 10 Joker and the Cruel Joke: Nabokov's and Bellow's Dark Laughter” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.5 (2019): Special Issue Suffering, Endurance, Understanding. Ed. Simon Estok, Douglas Berman, and Frank Stevenson Gerald David NAUGHTON and Yulia Pushkarevskaya NAUGHTON The Suffering Joker and the Cruel Joke: Nabokov's and Bellow's Dark Laughter This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, positing an affective reading of how bodies that suffer come to produce laughter as a confounding, unexpected, and at times inappropriate readerly affect. For the purpose of this comparative analysis, we have selected Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, both because of the intimate connections between the writers and the significant overlaps in the texts themselves, in terms of how they posit suffering and laughter. Elsewhere we have spoken of the difficult and, in some ways, intense relationship between the two writers : the "almost unbridgeable gap between them as writers and artists, as well as their rare, even for the literary world, burning hostility towards one another" (Pushkarevskaya Naughton and Naughton 121). Nabokov once complained that "Saul Bellow, a miserable mediocrity, should never have appeared on the jacket of a book about me" and asks his editor if it is "too late to eliminate that exhaust puff" from the cover of his book (Vladimir 434). Bellow once wrote in a letter that Nabokov "rubbed [him] the wrong way" and that Nabokov, "at his gruesome worst ... pins feminine roses to simian bosoms" (Saul Bellow: Selected Letters), suggesting perhaps that Nabokov is a writer who is inordinately fond of the grotesque. Despite these tensions, the two writers' novels frequently exhibit startling, precise mirror reflections of each other. Bellow and Nabokov, indeed, weave complex matrices of similarity, divergence, and antipathy. They frequently occupy similar fictive terrain, leaving a sense that, despite their proclaimed ill feeling, comparative readings of Bellow and Nabokov can help illuminate our understanding of the two writers, and unpick the matrices that such comparisons create. Key to this comparative enterprise is an analysis of Bellow's and Nabokov's divergent understanding of suffering. Laughter in the Dark and Henderson the Rain King both explore suffering as a form of excessive somatic cruelty inflicted on protagonists who, in experiencing such punishment, engender a strange, troubling, and potentially transformative form of laughter. Suffering in Saul Bellow has typically been conceived of either in its connection to humanism, English romanticism, or—more typically—as part of a tradition of Jewish literature that expresses despair out of a frustrated idealism (Chavkin 161). According to John J. Clayton, Bellow's frequent writing on suffering expresses simply "Jewish despair, Jewish guilt and self-hatred, Jewish masochism" (53). Many critics also point to the fact that in Bellow, suffering need not to be seen futile, as "it leads to self-knowledge and also to knowledge of the other" (Flath 84). Much of Bellow's work, however, cautions against placing value on suffering, which he sees as a ubiquitous and unromantic fact. In this regard, we may recall Moses Herzog's depiction of the effects of suffering, which most commonly "breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating" (317). Yet, in the very same paragraph, Herzog also writes the following: Why not say rather that people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and self-sufficient fictions, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves to feel awake. I know that my suffering, if I may speak of it, has often been like that, a more extended form of life, a striving for true wakefulness and an antidote to illusion, and therefore I can take no moral credit for it. I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. (317) Here, we arrive at a complicated framing of what suffering means, or potentially can mean to Bellow's suffering jokers. While refusing the unnecessary and "unilluminating" doctrines of suffering that may fashionably be offered as validation or transformation of human pain, he equally values the potential to "extend" reality at the core of the experience of suffering. Nabokov is similarly preoccupied with the transformation of suffering into laughter. Suffering in Nabokov is generally startling because he typically eschews suffering. In his lectures on Russian literature, Nabokov famously described "Dostoyevsky's lack of taste" in depicting the excessive suffering of his characters" who agonize and "sin their way to Jesus" (Lectures 104). Although Bellow was influenced by depictions of spiritual suffering in Dostoyevsky, the focus in his own novels, like in Nabokov's novels, is on physical suffering. Cruelty in both Nabokov and Bellow is endured and articulated by the suffering body. The critical questions here are: to what extent is it possible to laugh at a suffering body, how can the suffering body, subjected to cruelty or punishment, produce laughter, and what reconceptualizations of suffering ensue? In order to bring together a discussion of the body, suffering, cruelty, and laughter in Nabokov and Bellow, we use Henri Bergson's idea of the "elasticity" of laughter Gerald David Naughton and Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton, "The Suffering page 3 of 10 Joker and the Cruel Joke: Nabokov's and Bellow's Dark Laughter” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.5 (2019): Special Issue Suffering, Endurance, Understanding. Ed. Simon Estok, Douglas Berman, and Frank Stevenson in connection to cruelty and suffering, and various 'affective' formulations of the body. In both writers, such Bergsonian elasticity of laughter is what allows for laughing at suffering, but there are crucial differences in their depictions of somatic suffering, particularly the responses they elicit from the reader. Theory's much discussed “affective turn” -or perhaps more accurately “sensory turn”—primarily focuses on the non-discursive construction of individual and social experience. Much of this work, of course, stems from biological and neuroscientific models which configure the body and the mind as inextricable systems. In the words of Nicholas Daly, such theories posit "that feeling and thinking are not discrete activities; that cognitive decision-making is shaped by emotion; and that emotions might be considered as a form of embodied cognition" (226). To give one example, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has famously suggested that "emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks for worse and for better" (xii). Key to this "enmeshed" image of thought and emotion is an altered understanding of the sensory body's own primacy in human experience and subjectivity. Claire Hemmings, for instance, argues that the work of affect theory is to construe "states of being," rather than socially determined perspectives on the subject. "All of our affective experiences to date that are remembered", she claims, constitute us in "the moment of responding to a new situation" (552). In other words, according to this view, the body "registers" experiences and stimuli which create individual subjectivity as we understand it. Thus, the body operates outside of social or humanistic explanation. The sensory body carries a primacy that questions and complicates notions of an autonomous self beyond processes of embodiment. Or, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously put it in his final lecture, it is the body itself, le corps propre, that makes consciousness corporeal. He wrote: "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (511). What of the suffering body? Suffering has often been spoken about by affect theorists, though usually in its more dark and somber forms. Sara Ahmed, for example, has done much to highlight the

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痛苦的小丑和残酷的笑话：纳博科夫和贝娄的黑暗笑声

这篇文章审视了索尔·贝娄（Saul Bellow）和弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫（Vladimir Nabokov）小说中残酷，痛苦和笑声之间的相互关系，提出了关于受苦的身体如何产生笑声的情感读物，这些笑声是令人困惑的，意料之外的，有时是不适当的读者影响。纳博科夫的《黑暗中的笑声》和贝娄的《雨国王》，都把痛苦看作是对主角施加的过度残酷的虐待，他们在遭受这种惩罚时会产生一种奇怪的，令人烦恼的并且可能是变革性的笑声。为了集中讨论纳博科夫和贝洛的身体，痛苦，残酷和笑声，本文使用了亨利·伯格森关于笑声与残酷和痛苦有关的“弹性”的思想，以及各种“情感”表述。身体。在两位作家中，笑的这种柏格森弹性都可以嘲笑苦难，但是他们对躯体苦难的描写，尤其是他们从读者那里得到的回应，存在着至关重要的差异。在贝娄的《雨王亨德森》中，主角本人嘲笑了他的痛苦身体。在纳博科夫的《黑暗中的笑声》中，讽刺的叙述者同时邀请读者“在黑暗中笑”并检查这种笑声。这两本小说中出现的笑声都是令人不安的读者情感。因此，嘲笑痛苦很可能会在笑后变成痛苦，因为读者被迫探索这种残酷笑声的情感和伦理含义。Gerald David Naughton和Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton，“十个小丑的第二页和残酷的笑话：特殊问题的折磨，耐力，理解。埃德 西蒙·埃斯托克（Simon Estok），道格拉斯·伯曼（Douglas Berman）和弗兰克·史蒂文森·杰拉尔德·戴维·纳乌顿（David NAUGHTON）和尤利娅·普什卡列夫斯卡娅·尤纳（Yulia Pushkarevskaya NAUGHTON）受苦的小丑和残酷的笑话：纳博科夫和贝娄的暗笑。对遭受痛苦的身体如何产生笑声进行情感分析，认为这是令人困惑的，意料之外的，有时是不适当的读者情感。为了进行这种比较分析，我们选择了纳博科夫的《黑暗中的笑声》和贝娄的《雨中之王》的亨德森，这都是因为作者之间的亲密联系以及文本本身在承受痛苦和笑声方面的大量重叠之处。 。在其他地方，我们谈到了两位作家之间的艰难而紧张的关系：“他们作为作家和艺术家之间的几乎不可逾越的鸿沟，以及他们之间罕见的，甚至对于文学世界而言，也加剧了彼此之间的敌意” （Pushkarevskaya Naughton和Naughton 121）。纳博科夫曾经抱怨说：“索尔·贝娄，一个悲惨的平庸之辈，不应该出现在关于我的书的封面上”，并问他的编辑是否“为时已晚，要从书的封面上消除这种排气现象”（弗拉基米尔·434） ）。贝娄曾经在一封信中写道，纳博科夫“用错误的方式擦[他]”，而纳博科夫“在最糟糕的情况下……将女性的玫瑰花固定在猿猴的怀里”（索尔·贝洛：精选信），这暗示着纳博科夫是一位非常喜欢怪诞派的作家。尽管存在这些紧张关系，但两位作家的小说经常表现出彼此之间惊人的，精确的镜面反射。贝娄和纳博科夫的确编织了相似，分歧和反感的复杂矩阵。他们经常处于相似的虚拟地形中，从而感觉到，尽管贝洛和纳博科夫感到不适，但比较阅读可以帮助阐明我们对两位作家的理解，并且不挑剔这种比较产生的矩阵。这项比较工作的关键是对贝洛和纳博科夫对苦难的不同理解的分析。《黑暗中的笑声》和《雨中之王亨德森》都将痛苦看作是对主人公施加的一种残酷的躯体虐待，在经历这种惩罚时，会产生一种奇怪的，令人困扰的，可能具有变革性的笑声。索尔贝娄的苦难通常被认为与人文主义，英国浪漫主义有关，或者更典型地，作为犹太文学传统的一部分，表达了沮丧的理想主义（Chavkin 161）。根据约翰·克莱顿（John J. Clayton）的说法，贝娄关于苦难的频繁著述简单地表达为“犹太人的绝望，犹太人的内and和自恨，犹太人的受虐狂”（53）。许多批评家还指出，在贝娄，不必将苦难视为徒劳的事实，因为“苦难会导致自我了解，也可能导致对他人的了解”（Flath 84）。但是，贝娄的许多作品都告诫不要将痛苦放在重中，他认为这是普遍存在且不浪漫的事实。在这方面，我们可能会回想起摩西·赫尔佐格（Moses Herzog）对苦难影响的描述，这种描述最常见的是“使人破碎，压垮他们，并且简直是毫无意义”（317）。然而，在同一段中，赫尔佐格还写了以下内容：为什么不这么说，那些有强大想象力的人们，如梦deeply以求的奇幻小说和自给自足的小说，转而有时会陷入痛苦之中，人们捏自己感到清醒。我知道，我的痛苦，如果我能说的话，经常是这样，生活的延长，为真正的觉醒而努力，并且是幻想的解毒剂，因此我不能为此而道义上的赞赏。我愿意在不进行进一步锻炼的情况下就敞开心heart。这不需要痛苦的学说或神学。（317）在这里，我们对苦难意味着什么，或者可能对贝娄的苦笑者意味着什么，形成了一个复杂的框架。尽管他拒绝了不必要的和“毫无道理的”痛苦学说，这些学说可以作为验证或转变人类痛苦的方式来表达，但他同样重视将“扩展”现实作为痛苦经验的核心的潜力。纳博科夫同样专注于将痛苦转化为笑声。纳博科夫的痛苦通常令人吃惊，因为他通常回避痛苦。纳博科夫在有关俄罗斯文学的演讲中，著名地描述了“陀思妥耶夫斯基的品位不足”，描绘了苦恼和“向耶稣行罪的”人物的过度苦难（第104讲）。尽管贝娄受到陀思妥耶夫斯基的精神苦难描写的影响，但他自己的小说（如纳博科夫的小说）的重点是身体的苦难。纳博科夫和贝娄的残酷行为受到痛苦身体的折磨。这里的关键问题是：在多大程度上可以嘲笑一个受苦的身体，受苦或受刑罚的苦难的身体如何发出笑声，以及对苦难的重新概念化？为了集中讨论纳博科夫和贝娄的身体，痛苦，残酷和笑声，我们使用亨利·柏格森关于笑声的“弹性”的思想，杰拉尔德·戴维·诺顿和尤利娅·普什卡列夫·斯卡娅诺顿，“痛苦的第3页，共10页和残酷的笑话：纳博科夫和贝娄的暗笑” CLCWeb：特殊问题的折磨，耐力，理解。埃德 西蒙·埃斯托克（Simon Estok），道格拉斯·伯曼（Douglas Berman）和弗兰克·史蒂文森（Frank Stevenson）与残酷和痛苦以及各种“情感”身体表达有关。在两位作家中，笑的这种柏格森弹性都可以嘲笑苦难，但是他们对躯体苦难的描写，尤其是他们从读者那里得到的回应，存在着至关重要的差异。理论上讨论最多的“情感转向”（或更准确地说是“感官转向”）主要集中在个人和社会经验的非干扰性建构上。当然，这些工作大部分来自生物学和神经科学模型，这些模型将身体和心灵配置为密不可分的系统。用尼古拉斯·戴利（Nicholas Daly）的话，这种理论认为“ 感觉和思想不是离散的活动；认知决策是由情感决定的；神经科学学家安东尼奥·达马西奥（Antonio Damasio）著名地提出，“情绪和情感可能根本不会在理性的堡垒中侵入：它们可能被深陷于理性之中”（226）。 （xii）这种“陷入”的思想和情感形象的关键是人们对感觉身体自身在人类经验和主观性方面的首要地位的理解有所改变。例如，克莱尔·海明斯（Claire Hemmings）认为，情感理论是要建构“存在的状态”，而不是由社会确定的关于该主题的观点。“迄今为止，我们记忆中的所有情感经历都得到了记忆”，她声称，在“应对新形势的时刻”构成我们（552）。换句话说，根据这种观点，身体“记录”了我们所理解的创造个体主观性的经验和刺激。因此，身体在社会或人文解释之外进行活动。感官主体具有超越实施方式的过程而使自主自我的概念产生疑问并使之复杂化的首要性。或者，正如莫里斯·梅洛·庞蒂（Maurice Merleau-Ponty）在他的最后一次演讲中所说的那样，正是身体本身（即乐团的支持）使意识变得肉体化。他写道：“就我的手，脚，身体而言，我维持着意图，这些意图不取决于我的决定，并且以我不选择的方式影响我的周围环境”（511）。痛苦的身体是什么？情感理论家经常谈论苦难，尽管通常以更黑暗和阴沉的形式出现。例如，萨拉·艾哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）做了很多工作来突出