Humour in exile: The subversive effects of laughter in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia

Abstract

This study challenges the common misconception of laughter as simply light-hearted entertainment by exploring its strategic use and subversive effects in two Caribbean novels: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia. Selvon’s and Pineau’s humorous depictions of the migration to the metropolitan centres of London and Paris after World War II of two elderly female figures, Tanty Bessy and Man Ya, both bring to light and lighten the serious subject matter of Britain’s and France’s practices of exclusion toward their former colonized subjects. In examining Selvon’s and Pineau’s use of humour in light of Henri Bergson’s theory on the social significance of laughter as a corrective to man’s vices and impertinences toward society, this article argues that Tanty Bessy and Man Ya generate laughter at their own expense for the purposes of “correcting” the negative cultural perceptions of the Caribbean migrant population in 1950s and 1960s Europe. This reading of humour uncovers the subversive power of these two seemingly marginalized figures, in turn, serving to overturn and expand upon Bergson’s own theory on the normative effects of laughter.

Keywords:

• Henri Bergson
• Sam Selvon
• Gisèle Pineau
• laughter
• exile
• subversive

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at the Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The author wishes to thank the Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers for their suggestions, and Marian Gabra and Sarah Older Aguilar for reading drafts of this article.

Notes

1. See, for example, Ramchand; Rampaul.

2. Rampaul briefly discusses Tanty Bessy’s “West Indian comeuppance” and her “effervescent and earthy language” (315) in terms of the oral nature of Selvon’s writing.

3. Gérard Genette’s term “focalization” addresses the distinction between “the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator? – or, more simply, the question who sees? and the question who speaks?” (186). Pineau’s repeated superimposition of the French people’s and Man Ya’s points of view is the key for uncovering the humorous ironies of her novel.

4. My reading contrasts with those who view this scene in terms of Man Ya’s almost complete lack of power and control. See, for instance, Suárez; Mugnier.