Cold Comfort Farm: The Ideal Comedy?

 I don't mean to keep droning on about Northrop Frye at every opportunity, but I can't help myself: once one has internalized his anatomy of literary tropes one starts to see them in everything one reads. Stella Gibbons's classic comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is no exception—and in my defense it must be said, seldom has there been a novel that was itself more self-consciously about tropes, so one cannot be blamed for bringing Frye in. 

The specific tropes of the now-extinct literary sub-genre that Gibbons was self-consciously parodying—the gothic tragedy of the dilapidated English countryside—are harder to spot than they would have been in her day. The only author she had in mind that I have read at all would be Thomas Hardy. But I must say she does execute some very fine Hardyisms, even if I can't speak to her parodies of the now-forgotten authors in the same genre. Gibbons has perfect pitch for the Hardy-esque purple passage—the shameless resort to the "pathetic fallacy" in the description of the countryside. Gibbons's image of the farmhouse as a "crouching beast ready to spring" recurs multiple times and is successfully mined for parodic mirth. 

There are also traces of jabs at other novels and plays that I think I could dimly recognize. The running joke about whatever sinister and "naughty" thing Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed is perhaps a nod to May Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriett Frean, where a similar childhood memory is mined for psychoanalytic drama.

Then there is the play that Gibbons's protagonist Flora nearly goes to see—described as a "Neo-Expressionist" drama by "Brandt Slurb" called Manallalive-O! Is this a joke on the 1927 Ernst Toller play, Hoppla, We're Alive!? If so, that would be a stunning coincidence, since I read this play literally the day before I opened Cold Comfort Farm. Yet, there are unmistakeable parallels: the play is certainly Neo-Expressionist, and—just like the parody version that Flora almost sees in the novel, it stars a waiter in a state of psychological distress, with a revolver, who ends up taking his own life. (And both have the word "alive" in the title.)

The fundamental tropes in Gibbons's novel, however, extend far deeper than the late Victorian novel or the early twentieth-century psychological drama—reaching back rather into the very origins of literature. For, in many ways, Cold Comfort Farm follows Northrop Frye's typology of the comedy to the letter. There are the outrageous self-deluded characters (alazons), the central "blocking" antagonist—the comic obsessive, in this case, Aunt Ada, who is gripped by a single "ruling passion" that gets in the way of all the charming young people ever managing to find love. And the comic resolution comes—as it does in the classic plays Frye describes—through curing the blocking antagonist of her obsession, reconciling her with the other characters, and thereby creating a new, more open society that the audience is invited to join. 

Like all the classic comedies, at last, the novel ends in a series of weddings, with all the living characters being mated and paired off, and thereby finding happiness—even the most insufferable alazons, like the pedantic sex-obsessed intellectual Mybug (the character Frye would dub the philosophus gloriosus). The new comic society, as Frye would explain, must be made to include all the characters who remain on the stage at the end of the play. 

Is there something deeply satisfying—at an instinctual level—about this profound loyalty to the primeval form of the comedy? No, not actually. Gibbons's novel is hilarious and wonderful and witty, to be sure—a treasured classic for a reason; but it is considerably less interesting in its second half. Why? Because Flora succeeds in conquering and taming all the impostures and ruling passions of the Starkadders and the Mybugs, the alazons of the play. In so doing, they become more normal, and considerably less funny. 

In a "low-norm satire," which this novel might also constitute, according to Frye's scheme, it is ultimately social convention and common sense that triumph. The humor is directed chiefly against people who try to push against the teachings of experience and transcend the ordinary limits of human life, and their defeat at the hands of ordinariness, and their eventual reconciliation to social norms, is what resolves the satire's plot. In Gibbons's novel, Flora, who insists on taking the artiness and dryad-ness out of Elfine and turning her into a conventional beauty, who cures Aunt Ada of her Freudian troubles with the latest issue of Vogue, and who indeed arrives at Cold Comfort Farm equipped with a tome tellingly entitled "The Higher Common Sense," very much embodies this role. When she triumphs, it is social convention that triumphs through her. 

In so doing, therefore, the novel again is playing the part of the ideal comedy. But, perhaps this just reveals why I have never particularly liked comedies, and why they are my least favorite of all the classic ur-plots. For the more social convention reigns at Cold Comfort Farm, the less interesting its characters become, and the less funny the book. I challenge anyone to tell me honestly that they laughed aloud as many times in reading the second half of Cold Comfort Farm as they did in devouring the first. 

Perhaps it's that I'm just a Starkadder at heart—a creature who finds passions and griefs and tragedies to be more real and interesting than a forced pairing off of all the lingering characters—a great unsolicited railroading into marriage and convention—in a story's final scenes. I would rather be with Judith atoning over unknown sins, and Aunt Ada wailing in the attic about the woodshed incident, than forced to yawn my way through a pleasant English wedding.