Come(dies) of Ageism: Kingsley Amis’s Barmy, Old Devils

• Main Author: Georges Letissier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2016-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Kingsley Amis; Ending Up; The Old Devils; Alenka Zupančič; The Odd One In; On Comedy
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3438
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

Today Kingsley Amis seems to have fallen into relative oblivion and to his name is associated the figure of a reactionary writer averse to literary experimentalism. This being said, Amis senior has remained to this day a major representative of the comic vein in English fiction writing, poised between caustic realism and social satire. The Old Devils, which ranks amongst his best works, is one of the rare comic novels to have been awarded the Book-McConnell Prize–as the current Man Booker was known then. Taking up the subject of old age, The Old Devils (1986) bears close resemblance with Ending Up (1974), a tragi-comic novella recording the final days of a group of old age pensioners living in an isolated country cottage, as in a sort of commune. This contribution purports to reread both novels, which incidentally are often listed in Ageing Studies bibliographies, by drawing from Alenka Zupančič’s study, The Odd One In, On Comedy (2008), to propound new approaches to comedy in Amis’s fiction. Instead of sticking to a reformist message, in the manner of Horatian satire, or of inciting his readers to make the best of life under adverse circumstances, Amis displays outrageous, excessive elderlies prompted to act by ‘an increvable désir that will not die or “snuff it.”’ Rather than acting as a useful, salutary reminder that it is presumptuous to venture beyond the humanly possible, Amis’s comedies of old age foreground the sheer unpredictability of the Real. This is precisely in the contingent, intractable course of events that lies the possibility of a new take on the age-old figure of the comicum senex.