Forum: Featured Discussions: What is wise counsel? Part III

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

To continue our discussion of wisdom and wise counsel in the context of comedy, on June 1 our reading group discussed Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

We began with the question, “What is Jim’s luck?” and with the humorous quotation from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, “The wise are luckier than others.” This conjunction led us naturally to the further questions, “Is Jim wise? And if so, what is his wisdom?”

In contrast, Jim appears to believe himself a loser. He seems fatalistic. Perhaps part of his problem is that Jim starts the novel appearing to believe that doing the right thing is divorced from being happy; that is, he appears ascetic. But by the end he appears to see that happiness and morality can go hand-in-hand.

How does he make this development? We noted the role of counsel in the novel. It is not extensive, but Jim’s turn seems rooted in the “advice” he receives from Carol Goldsmith, another character who appears to look at herself as a sort of “loser.” Is perhaps seeing oneself as a “loser”—set apart from the rest of society—an important element of wisdom or at least insight?

Despite Jim’s fatalism, asceticism, or “loserdom,” though, we like him! We compared Jim to other famous characters such as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Pierre in War and Peace, and Rick in Casablanca. All three share Jim’s sarcasm and his “outsider” status, but none immediately appeal to us (at least those of us in this group!) and the other characters the way he does.

Part of the difference appeared to us to be that Jim, especially in his thinking, gets the best lines in the book. Amis poured his wit into Jim. In this respect we likened Jim to Wodehouse’s Bertie. And certainly wit—linguistically as well as in reality—appears to be a sort of wisdom. Further confirmation for our search for wisdom and wise counsel within the comic realm …
 

Photo from Wikipedia.