Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

104 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY
psychotic male taxi driver. However, the narrator’s anger at Delores remains
unabated and unresolved.
In contrast with the novel’s grim narrative is its employment of gallows
humor. As heard in the above quotations, Schulman’s narrator speaks (as do the
other lesbian characters) in a world-weary, sardonic tone that, in some measure,
shields her from the emotional pain and stress of her everyday life. By way of
another example, the narrator justifies her propensity for continually engaging
with those people who she knows in advance will harm her by dryly observing:
I’ve trained myself to avoid all potentially unpleasant situations with men
even though I walk into them constantly with women. Once I realized
women could be pretty nasty I actually considered boys for about five
minutes until I remembered that they bored me very quickly, and if
someone you love is going to bring tragedy into your life, you should at
least be interested in them.
(35)
Through these humorous commentaries the narrator accounts for her relationship
to both Delores and the hegemonic forces of homophobia, as well as classism,
ethnocentrism, racism, and so forth, while she simultaneously expresses her
disdain via her humorous attitude. Significantly, in a 1928 essay, Freud
celebrates humor in general, and gallows humor in particular, as a psychic
mechanism that “saves” the humorist’s ego from unpleasant confrontations with
the material world by means of “a saving in expenditure of affect” (1963:263).
Freud views humor as a noble “triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious
assertion of its own invulnerability” (265). He further suggests that “Humor is
not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph of not only the ego, but also
of the pleasure principle, which is strong enough to assert itself…in the face of
the adverse real circumstances” (265). Through “repudiating reality and serving
an illusion” (268), humorous pleasure allows for the psychic refusal of material
vulnerability of everything from hegemonic power structures to neighborhood
bullies; thus enabling the humorist to deny or ignore his or her own subjection.
Freud observes, “By its repudiation of the possibility of suffering, it [humor]
takes its place in the great series of methods devised by the mind of man [sic] for
evading the compulsion to suffer” (265). 20
To the extent that Freud posits humor as an affective response (the humorist
responds to specific material circumstances), humor can be differentiated from
abstract, rhetorical devices such as irony, parody, or satire. More importantly, if
indeed the queer discourse of Camp develops from the material effects of
homophobia (the proscription of the queer subject), and brings to bear queer
logics upon the un-queer hegemony by destabilizing binary relations of
“difference,” then Camp analysis requires a model that can account for its
deployment and its enunciative form. Freud’s theory offers a means to identify
and interrogate how the discourse of Camp may humorously mark and