Abstract: “The Political Economy of Comedy: On Disinterested Value in Romantic Criticism”
Political economy and comedy seem to work in contrary governing principles. The one conceives value in terms of utility and productivity, while the other enjoys the excess of unproductivity or counterproductivity: comedy revels in irony, chaos, errors, and waste. An underlying metaphor is Laurence Sterne’s influential notion of the hobby-horse: fruitless labor that is autotelic, self-indulgent, unproductive, but defies moral or utilitarian judgment. Such is probably William Hazlitt’s criterion of the comic art when he claims in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) that George II’s England was “an age of hobby-horses.” The vibrance of comedy is to be found in the gloriously disinterested activity of individuals enjoying themselves. As Ronald Paulson argues in Don Quixote in England (1998), the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an “aesthetic of laughter”: laughter’s use value is precisely its useless disinterestedness. It seems that this disinterested laughter, as it informs Hazlitt’s critical judgement, reiterates Hazlitt’s well-known skepticism about political economy.
But comedic criticism had an intriguing link with vocabulary of political economy. Many prominent writers of the Scottish Enlightenment argue that modern economic sophistications, such as developments in commerce and the division of labor, diversified types of character and enlarged the sphere of entertainment: this resulted in a feast of unproductive, self-enjoying Don Quixotes and Shandys. The implication seems to be that the fruits of economic success stories in modern times were a luxury of unproductive hobby-horses. The festivity of unproductivity, paradoxically, is built on a system of productivity, whose fruition in turn produces its wasteful antithesis. In addition, one may recall economy’s etymological origin in oeconomy, household management. Didn’t eighteenth-century Quixotes and Shandys represent chaos of household management? Could comedy be read as a genre about the prehistory of political economy? How is one to read the complex evaluations of the comic in economic terms?
This paper draws on the eighteenth-century comedic discourse to read and compare two Romantic writers, Hazlitt and Maria Edgeworth. While Hazlitt celebrates useless hobby-horses, Edgeworth’s take on comedy is more ambiguous. For her, wit and humor contribute to an alternative productivity, but they need to end somewhere where political economy has to come in to exert its relevance in addressing problems of national development. Her Castle Rackrent (1800) presents precisely a comedy of chaotic oeconomy as an allegory of national underdevelopment, while her Ennui (1809) writes off its comic elements as aesthetic of waste and introduces political economy into the fiction of improvement. Using Edgeworth and Hazlitt as two cases in point, this paper explores how comedy figures in Romantic criticism’s negotiations of value with political economy.
Bio: National Chiayi University, Taiwan
Chi-Fang Chen is Contract Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, National Chiayi University (Taiwan). He has published on the politics of the comic genre in the eighteenth century, Romantic period, and beyond, and is currently working on the discourse of humor’s connection with theories of modernity.