In 1957, Roth v. United States brought a ruling that obscenity had to be »utterly without redeeming social importance«, thus rewriting America’s notion of censorship. Formerly banned works, such as D.H. Lawrence’sLady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, would suddenly enjoy circulation. Moral turpitude ceased to be an issue, so long as redeeming social value were identifiable in a work. 

Momus’ first novel, The Book of Jokes, jauntily weaves through a universe opaque with bestiality, incest, rape, and murder, all in the context of the Ineluctable Joke. The premeditated rape and murder of a young girl is a breezy affair, when contrasted to the novel’s insurmountable adversary — Jokes, with their »punch lines« hovering like death. Momus’ delivery is gentle yet with a note of urgency obviating clear narrative structure – »a gripped kind of note, like the sound of someone playing a cheap rubber clarinet while wearing a high-quality pair of welding gloves«, as the Murderer, one of the book’s characters remarks.
 
Jovial narrator/protagonist Peter Skeleton ushers us through unrepentantly ribald family anecdotes. He lives in a glasshouse with his well-endowed father, named Sebastian, and his tetchy sister Luisa. Life’s unfolding must adhere to Jokes, with which all thoughts and utterances pullulate. In earlier times, when the family lived on a farm, his mother Joan, »a woman as well-endowed with intelligence as with beauty«, left his father for a secret look-alike lover also named Joan, after his father confessed to an affair with a goose. It is monotony that prompts young Skeleton to stonewall and prevaricate, hoping to short-circuit Jokes. For reasons that do not become apparent, Sebastian Skeleton is imprisoned. He and his two cellmates, the Murderer and the Molester, are innocent. Together they escape so that each may carry out his alleged crime, thereby conferring honor on their respective sentences, and justly return to the cell. When the trio bands together as fugitives, the reader is toured through Skeleton’s life –dreamily, in the manner of Annie Hall, where Alvy brings Annie not only to his childhood home but to dramatic childhood scenes therein. 

Chapter 33 examines an owl joke told by a country lady serving apple pie to the Skeletons. The three Skeletons’ interruptions, probing the joke’s cumbersome details, transform the rustic scene into a productive Rorschach. 

»There were three mes,« she said, »on an expedition in search of the source of the Lumbeezee River, deep in the jungle.« »Three yous?« echoed my father, puzzled, waving aside clouds of cream steam. »Yes,« said the lady. »The over me, the me, and the under me.« Luisa blushed slightly as the lady pronounced the words ›under me‹. It was an odd story, but the lady continued it, placing three hot bowls of sweet white food in front of us. »Suddenly the three mes were surrounded by an owl.« »Surrounded by an owl?« asked my father, his consternation growing. »How so?« »Have you never been surrounded by an owl, when there are three of you?« asked the lady. »No,« said my father …

Jokes needn’t be dogmatic. We live within the psychosexual framework of Jokes, and they needn’t be repeated verbatim. Jokes may be dismantled, thus augmenting our breadth of experience. Peter’s father, Sebastian, carries on a lengthy secret affair with his ex-wife’s lover, Joan. 

Joan (my mother) was wearing a diplax hymation and powder-blue mantile in Thracian style. Joan (her lover) had on a double-girded pink chiton, kilted at the knee.

We find Momus heroically drawing ponderous chapters to a sensible close, his insights creatively captivating and intellectually challenging. The Book of Jokes, in examining tufts of familial discord, heuristically moves the reader to cheat Eternal Recurrence through exemplary aleatory revisions of the Joke. 


DAVID WOODARD is a music conductor residing and writing in Berlin. In 2010, Christian Kracht’s imprint for Blumenbar Verlag launches with Woodard’s debut novel Nueva Germania. 

MOMUS, The Book of Jokes, Dalkey Archive Press 2009.

MOMUS