P. G. Wodehouse’s ‘Thoughtful Lightness’ and Detached Involvement: Satire, Parody and the Subversive Use of the Canonical Intertext in Code of the Woosters (1938)

P. G. Wodehouse has long been neglected, if not ostracised, by academia and critics, because of a persistent prejudice against light writing and reading. He was (re)discovered from 2000 onwards, a period corresponding to a new critical awareness that aesthetics and ideology cannot be understood in isolation, and that ‘levity’ does not necessarily mean shallowness. This paper will analyse the modalities of comedy and humour in The Code of the Woosters—particularly the burlesque and mock-heroic diversion of the proliferating classical and Biblical intertexts, as well as the subversive use of parody, by Bertie Wooster, the falsely naïve first-person narrator who often plays the role of his creator’s spokesman. Wodehouse’s comic stories and hugely enjoyable style have an often unperceived or ignored ideological and satirical subtext. He was undeniably a comic genius but no mere ‘entertainer’. His novels operate both comic and iconoclastic attacks on gender roles, class relations and the canon. There is actually more complexity, more ‘thoughtful lightness’ to his works than he had so far been credited with.