In one of my favorite clips from The Simpsons, Marge Simpson sits on a green stool. “At times like this,” she says, “I guess all you can do is laugh.” She does not laugh afterwards. She just sits there, stone-faced.
That humor — but not pessimism — flows through Jennifer Dawson’s reissued 1961 classic The Ha-Ha, in which Josephine, a student at Oxford, cannot help but be astonished at the absurdity of the natural world, its parties and people, its situations and themes. At so many times she sits and thinks how silly it all is, really, that it borders on philosophy. “It is all too strange and chancey to be worried or angry about,” she wonders about houses, the people that go in and out of them, and umbrellas. “There were so many things in the world… and it might so easily not have been at all.” Sometimes reading the novel is like babysitting a high person who once in a while says something profound, something inarguably true and beautiful.
Her laughter is a real thing, too — though she was institutionalized during a particularly hearty laughing fit, she did it constantly before her mother’s death. “My giggly girl,” the mother would first say as a pet name, then as a warning to behave in public. As Josephine grows up her laughter remains (you notice more absurdity as you continue through life…) until she is barely able to go a second without being unable to process life correctly. “I wanted the knack of existing,” she thinks, “I did not know the rules.” This will make sense for anyone who has attended an event and hopelessly reconfigured their arms to resemble a parody of reality.
At the mental hospital, she meets Alisdair, an erratic man who nonetheless takes to Josephine and her way of perception. She, not like the others in the outside world (if that’s even a thing) is the realest of the bunch, as she’s cut through the noise and understood the world’s fragility, its paper people and flimsy rules. After she attends a party an old Oxford colleague invited her to, she laments that she wasn’t able to make in-roads. Alisdair says forget about them. “You say you don’t know the rules, and can’t learn them. But that is what is so nice about you,” he tells her. “You are real, you are serious. You aren’t just playing a game as other women are.” Eventually, he flees town, and leaves her with the rationale (excuse?) that if he were to stay around her longer, he’d only corrupt her. “Yours is such a secret, intense, unworldly life” that he can’t let himself ruin, he writes.
In the aftermath of the party scene (which is just as good, if not better, than any depiction of social awkwardness in a contemporary novel), The Ha-Ha agrees with the same conclusion that much of the mental health theorization of the 2020s came to — that you aren’t sick, but rather, everyone who doesn’t see society’s troubles is. “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” goes the Jiddu Krishnamurti quote, which has been passed around and infographic’d so much that it occupies the same realm as “sex work is real work” or “pride was a protest.” But it is true, and even though the current American government is on a tirade against anything “woke,” it really just means staying informed and critical. Josephine is not woke so much as half asleep, seeing everything through bleary eyes, nonetheless getting the picture partially right.
But The Ha-Ha is emblematic of Krishnamurti’s phrase not as condescension — us being able to see all injustices means we are one of the chosen, elite few — but as an irreverence and awe that everything is not worth figuring out. “I was already awakened and free, and the rest did not seem a matter of importance at all,” Dawson writes, which could be read either as apathy or a miraculously healthy way of knowing what you can and cannot control. In her shrugging off society’s rules, Josephine can simply be Josephine, unburned by any prescribed ways of being.
Not necessarily sad in the vein of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which The Ha-Ha has been compared to (and which Plath was reading before her death); Dawson’s novel sees Josephine get everything wrong, and this is what makes her get everything right. Both charmingly original and completely idiosyncratic, Josephine’s foibles make for a compelling character story and a relatable way of seeing the world — that is, too much and not at all.
The Ha-Ha is out now.
