Second Nature: Comic Performance and Philosophy 9781786615091, 9781786615107, 1786615096

Citation preview

Second Nature

Second Nature Comic Performance and Philosophy Edited by Josephine Gray and Lisa Trahair

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Selection and editorial matter © Lisa Trahair and Josephine Gray 2023 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78661-509-1 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-78661-510-7 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Chapter 1: Comedy: Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis María J. Ortega Máñez



1

Chapter 2: The Two Laughters of Lecoq: The Clown and the Bouffon 17 Caterina Angela Agus, Giovanni Fusetti and Davide Giovanzana Chapter 3: The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy Fred Dalmasso

37

Chapter 4: The Body That Laughs and Cries: Helmuth Plessner’s Keys to Anthropology and Theatre Xavier Escribano

63

Chapter 5: Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity: Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change Meg Mumford

89

Chapter 6: Happiness, Dead and Alive: Object Theatre as Philosophy of the Encounter Carolyn Shapiro

113

Chapter 7: Living in the Doll House: Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man Lisa Trahair

133

Chapter 8: Trouble in Paradise?: Impotence and Comedy Lisabeth During

v



167

vi

Contents

Chapter 9: “Only What Is Born Lives”: Kafka L.O.L. Jean-Michel Rabaté



191

Chapter 10: The Grotesque: Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting 209 Josephine Gray Index

233

About the Authors



243

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Anmar Taha for his invaluable insights and discussions on theatre and comedy during the production of this volume, and Angela Rockel for her stupendous work as copyeditor. The editors’ work for the volume was supported by the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, and the Gothenburg Mime Festival.

vii

Introduction Josephine Gray and Lisa Trahair

In Theatre of Movement and Gesture, the renowned director and theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq observes that the social conditioning of the human being entails aspirations to good conduct and moral rectitude that are physically manifest in the comportment, gestures and movements of the body. These modes of embodiment conditioned by society are our “second nature.”1 According to Lecoq, second nature is in fact the “first [learned] language” of the human being. The movements of the body that we call second nature can be both universal and natural but also specific and particular.2 Human beings develop their second nature by acquainting themselves both consciously and unconsciously with the gestures acquired in the process of socialisation. Insofar as we have less control over our passionate gestures than we do over our intentional ones, second nature is also a language that escapes us to reveal “our profound nature to others.”3 Becoming a socialised human being requires observation of the effects of our gestures on others, the development of an awareness of their impact, and of clarification and deliberate use in order to achieve desired ends. Gestures become second nature when “[by] force of habit, we end up assimilating them to our own being and using them without noticing.”4 Second nature in this respect is an automatic language that can be, but isn’t necessarily, unconscious: it is often polite, conventional, mechanical, but can also be instrumental, political and manipulative. The universal character of second nature gestures implies that we are in some instances able to read one another regardless of our cultural origin or spoken language—an observation comedians throughout history have always made and used to great effect. Second nature comprises gestures of expression, action and demonstration that are to some extent presented to be seen or to be read. These gestures are revealed by facial expressions, hand gesticulations and mimetic indications ix

x

Introduction

which combine in our demonstrative “language,” when for example they are drawn upon to indicate “here it is” or “I found it!” Second nature gestures traverse the entire body in addition to localised areas such as the face and hands. They reveal the state of mind of a person in the manner in which she comports her body. By leaning forwards, she signals to those around her an eagerness/ curiosity/stupidity; by leaning backwards, reservation/fear/scepticism. Gestures and comportments are multivalent, each operating as a transitional point for a variety of very different motivations. Raising one’s arm for example is a movement performed to get attention, to answer a question, to point to the sky, to demonstrate suffering, or to retrieve an object.5 Gestures are thus nodal points for wildly different circuits of action, meaning and expression. Along with attitudes and movements, they can be read as the scriptural elements of bodily memory at the same time that memory is the constitutive storehouse of the multiplicity of circuits woven among the body’s gestures, attitudes and so on. Second nature gestures are not uncommonly used as substitutes for vulgar words that would be impolite to use. Hence second nature gestures account for much of the obscenity exhibited in human gestural language and can originate in the face, hands, or entire body. They can also signify in absentia as much as in palpable rendition and by inversion as much as in their positive sense. Not showing one’s physical feelings, for example, can be read equally as a sign of stoicism and pride and as a sign of indifference. A particularly striking example of the performative use of “second nature” noted by Lecoq is the “competitive game of deference,” where each person in polite society bows lower than the previous one.6 The comic potential of this game is indicated in Lecoq’s consternation when he tries to determine how such a ritual could be brought to an end. Laughter is one means of bringing the performance of the reductio ad absurdum to a close, and this is a factor in the success of Paul Klee’s etching, Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (1903), a satirical grotesquery of the leader of the Austro-Hungarian empire Franz-Joseph and Wilhelm II of Germany bowing obsequiously to each other. The work is a long-acknowledged jibe “at power, emperors, soldiers and dictators” and appreciated as a prescient observation of the relations between the two men that would spiral Europe into World War I.7 Just after the start of World War II, Chaplin returned to this theme in The Great Dictator, retaining the idea demonstrated in Klee’s image that diplomacy is nine-tenths posturing, but replacing Klee’s downward gesture of self-deprecation with the ascending movement of one-upmanship. Noting that gestural expressivity exceeds the limitations of the body and extends into space, Lecoq considers Chaplin’s take on Hitler and Mussolini in the barber shop, each leveraging their adjustable chairs to outbid the other: “Authority attempts to dominate the other, or to lower him, but with the minimum of

Introduction

xi

gestures: to gesticulate would be like speaking to no purpose.”8 Lecoq is pointing out here that were the two dictators to exaggerate their bodily gesticulations rather than make use of the chairs, their waning sense of authority would instead be revealed. Statesmen in authority are calm and collected— much like Chaplin’s Hitler and Mussolini on the chairs—each one embodying an idea of neutrality and alertness, but in fact adopting a bodily posture that is stiff and displaying subtly exaggerated features of voice and gesture. Lecoq here responds to the earlier work by the French philosopher Henri Bergson who in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic notes that gesticulations by statesmen whose power is on the wane are repetitive, especially when it comes to the use of their head and arms.9 The audiences of such displays of powerlessness laugh because they cannot listen to the statesman’s speech without being distracted by the repetition of such gestures. Yet Bergson is less interested in the symbolic status of gesture than the point where the automatism of repetitious gesturing loses contact with the intentional human being. Reconsidering “second nature” from a Bergsonian vantage, we would say that gesticulation fails not because it is redundant with respect to speech or the endeavour to dominate, but because it gives the viewer the impression of a machine stuck on repeat. Indeed, it is Bergson’s thesis that the comic is something mechanical encrusted upon the living. We laugh at the speaker’s inability to compose himself in a moment of supposed seriousness and gravity. On becoming visible to us in its comic posture, second nature loses sight of both its origin and end, yet speaks to us of our humanity in a dimension other than that of quotidian intention, transaction and instrumentality. It is no doubt the obtrusiveness and obstinacy of second nature that leads Bergson to situate the comic between art and life.10 The rigidity implied by inelasticity finds outlets in stiff postures, repetitive gestures, inanimate objects, machines and automatons that constitute our second nature—inelasticity that has been frequently called upon by theatre-makers and cineastes to indicate the shortcomings of the human condition. In inviting contributions to this collection of essays we asked artists and scholars to approach Henri Bergson’s pioneering endeavour to tackle the question of the comic head on by beginning with laughter, and from there observing the kinds of behaviours and comportments that stimulated it, only to lament at the end of his essay philosophy’s failure to grasp the elusive substance of comic production. More than a century after Bergson tried to tackle a problem that had plagued philosophers for more than two millennia, we have at our disposal a plethora of comic objects and expressions in an unprecedented range of media, and a transdisciplinary cohort of artists and scholars interested in the comic. We also have a general consensus that the comic conveys something of our collective unconscious and a revitalisation of philosophy through its openness to other academic approaches and disciplines.

xii

Introduction

The essays we present to the reader here attest to a shared recognition that to philosophise about the comic, to fully appreciate the comic, to dare to ask what it is and what it means, one has to begin with simple observations, with analysing images by making use of our capacity to see. Far from thinking of the comic and comedy as something that plays second fiddle to tragedy, or experiencing the ludicrous as something frivolous or mindless, or sanctimoniously affirmative of self-satisfied subjectivity, the essays of this volume engage in a serious revaluation of the purpose and potentiality of the comic as a mode of expressivity peculiarly able to tackle and speak through the operations and limits of second nature. The reading of comedy as a base dramatic genre that mimetically treats “men of lesser value” has resounded throughout Western civilisation since the circulation of Aristotle’s seminal Poetics, where he discusses the fundamental differences between Tragic and Comic poetry. In her essay “Comedy: Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis,” María J. Ortega Máñez offers an exciting and radical reconsideration of the much-disputed philosophical concept mimesis and its relation to comedy. She bids us to start from the beginning, ex archè, echoing Plato’s injunction, by placing ourselves in the midst of the “philosophical quarrel” between philosophy and theatre as “mimetic poetry.” Echoing Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed, Ortega Máñez recounts the story of Plato’s thwarted ambition of becoming a tragic poet himself, as revealed when by chance he crossed paths with Socrates on his way to the Dionysus Theatre and, upon listening to Socrates—that gadfly who had only just begun to disturb the leaders of Athens—Plato subsequently burned his tragic play, vowing to devote his life to philosophy instead. It seems fair to say that such a dramatic action on the part of the philosopher who later in his life famously banned all poets from the ideal city-state would at the very least engage in a profound understanding and questioning of the mimetic operations upon which theatre rests. Ortega Máñez offers a close reading and comparative analysis of passages from both Plato’s Sophist and Symposium and Aristophanes’s The Clouds and discloses in the process an operation of comedy as philosophical thinking. Her reconsideration of mimesis recognises that the Western philosophical canon has been predominantly preoccupied with the operation of mimesis praxeos of Tragedy but proposes that evidence of another view of mimesis is to be found in Comedy. In proposing that we henceforth distinguish tragic mimesis from comic mimesis, Ortega Máñez appreciates and honours the emphasis that Aristotle placed on both dramatic genres, as evidenced in the Poetics, but more importantly she finds reason to heed the wisdom of his teacher Plato. In Ortega Máñez’s examination of the early development of the idea of mimesis, it becomes obvious that comedy, for both Plato and Aristophanes, was more than a pastime—it was a method to examine the state of political

Introduction

xiii

affairs in the Athenian city-state. Combining witty anecdotes and meticulous scholarly rigour, Ortega Máñez sheds new light on the origins of comedy and its close ties to mimesis, upending the long-held philosophical position that comedy is irrevocably linked to morally inferior behaviour. More importantly, she shows that Plato’s dialogues are dancing with, rather than fighting off, Aristophanes’s criticism of philosophers as “sophists.” This rings even more true when we consider that sophist [sophós] was the term commonly used at the time to denote anyone who was deemed knowledgeable, while the word philosophos did not yet properly exist. Aristophanes’s denomination of Socrates as a “sophist” thus offers a perspective hitherto overlooked. The alleged epitaph that Plato wrote for Aristophanes, comparing his soul to the “eternal shrine for the Graces,” as Ortega Máñez reminds us, is a good reason for us moderns to take comedy seriously too. Writing from the perspective of the comic performer, Caterina Angela Agus, Giovanni Fusetti and Davide Giovanzana in their essay “The Two Laughters of Lecoq: The Clown and The Bouffon” also find textual evidence in the Socratic dialogues to support the idea of an ambivalent rather than strictly oppositional relation between tragedy and comedy. Taking as their starting point Socrates’s jibe at the dramatic poet in the Symposium, whereby Socrates aims to “persuad[e] his two friends to admit that the same man could write both comedies and tragedies and that whoever is a tragedian, by vocation, is also a comedian,” the authors find a reason for reconsidering the common view of comedy as a genre inferior to tragedy.11 If, as Socrates states, tragic poets are able to write comedies, knowledge of tragedy might be considered a prerequisite for comedy, with the implication that comedy is the more difficult dramatic genre to write. Considering the sheer volume of tragic and comic plays written by the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the point is not implausible. The idea of tragedy as the progenitor of comedy also resonates with comedians, as seen in the famous claim by Totó that only those who have suffered hunger can make us laugh. Demonstrating the intimate ties between tragedy and comedy, the authors distinguish between tragic and cruel laughter as the modus operandi of two diametrically opposed comic figures they find in Lecoq’s methodology of the actor: the clown and the bouffon. In providing a precise overview of their respective origins, Agus, Fusetti and Giovanzana elucidate the clown and bouffon as seen in the pedagogy of Lecoq and his students. Their reconsideration of the consequences of laughter also stands as a profound reconsideration of Bergson’s notion that laughter is primarily social. When closely inspected, the clown’s gags and pantomimes reveal a figure akin to the tragic hero. A close relative of Beckett’s anti-heroes waiting for life to take place, the clown displays her failings simply by being alive. Laughter at her, but also her own laughter at herself, stems entirely from what

xiv

Introduction

she is incapable of doing, and so the clown crosses over to the realm of the tragic. The bouffon, on the other hand, literally swells up in order to caricature and hysterically laugh at humanity’s failings. If the clown is embedded in our human nature, the bouffon stands apart from our existence. The ancestors of the bouffon are found in the deformed jesters, fools and shamans of indigenous cultural practices across the world—figures who communicate truths from another dimension. As an otherworldly creature, the cruel laughter of the bouffon is better able to penetrate the guard of the audience. Her gaze from the underworld provokes and illuminates the cruelty of humanity’s contradictions. By differentiating between the laughter elicited by these canonical comic figures, the authors demonstrate that comedy takes a radical turn towards a dramatic genre that supersedes tragedy. Fred Dalmasso, in his essay “The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,” examines the commedia-inspired half-mask worn by the title character in Alain Badiou’s tetralogy of Ahmed plays. Dalmasso looks specifically at the use and history of the mask, giving a persuasive account of the mask’s pivotal importance for Badiou’s philosophical conversation with theatre. As well as tracing the inspiration for Badiou’s tetralogy to the theatrical traditions of commedia dell’arte and Molière, Dalmasso highlights the importance of the (Marxist) politics that Badiou advocates, and vindicates, through his plays. As Badiou argues, theatre reveals the state of the State and “comedy is their [the markers of the State’s power] joyful deposition.”12 Comedy thus acts, for Badiou, as a means of propagating the metatheatrical action of revealing “theatre-truths” [vérité-théâtre]. Dalmasso argues that these “truths” are rooted in Badiou’s philosophical project and explicated in works such as The Immanence of Truths and Being and Event and bears on the role of the actor, especially the masked actor. Through a detailed analysis of both the plays in the Ahmed tetralogy and Badiou’s text on theatre, Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise, Dalmasso shows that the mask worn by the title character insists that only the abandonment of a “theater of presence” will bring forth what he calls a theatre of inexist[a]nce (echoing the linguistic turn of Derrida). The inexistance of the subject, in this case Ahmed, is only possible because of the mask he wears. Indeed, the comic stock character of the migrant worker, operating in the vein of the traditional zanni, allows Badiou to caricature the other characters in the Ahmed tetralogy. By wearing the commedia-style half mask, Ahmed functions in these plays as placeholder, a void, for all in his position. Yet it is precisely because of the inexistance provided by the mask that Ahmed is the only character who has the privilege of breaking the fourth wall. The mask allows him to directly communicate with the spectators in a game that equates the relationship between spectator and actor with the relationship between the State and its citizens—and denounces it. What comes to the fore is a complex

Introduction

xv

understanding of how comedy in Badiou operates within a materialist dialectic that questions the powers-that-be with regard to politics, society, ontology and the very act of acting itself. In Xavier Escribano’s essay, “The Body That Laughs and Cries: Helmuth Plessner’s Keys to Anthropology and Theatre,” focus switches back from inexistance to existence, namely the existence of the expressive body and its gestures of laughter and crying. Engaging with both Plessner and the more widely read work of philosopher Merleau-Ponty, Escribano explicates the stakes of our perception of the body as an is-body and as a have-body. In his fascinating study on the irrational nature of laughter, Plessner describes how both laughter and crying operate on the site of the body to show the fragmentary relation humans have to their own existences. The impetus for this exploration comes from the working methods of the actor, especially as understood by Diderot in The Paradox of Acting [Paradoxe sur le Comédien]. Plessner argues that the Diderotian notion that the actor in character is a being in total control of her body and emotions entails a splitting that separates the actor from the character. Plessner believes that the “split” also operates, though to a lesser degree, and only at an unconscious level, in human behaviour as such. Laughing and crying are not rational responses to an individual’s situation but rather indicate the fragmentation of an appropriate response. The motion of laughter—cracking up—shows that the body that we have is separate from the body that we are. While the actor, whose métier is to balance this fine line between having and being, is equipped with tools that simulate a split, the non-actor has no such resources. Although there are pathological cases of such a “split” in human behaviour, Escribano draws attention to the potential revelation that the phenomena of laughter and crying can produce. The destabilising moment of laughter facilitates a claim to self-knowledge, whereby one discovers one’s position, not only in the world, but also in oneself. This positional revelation bears on the perception of comic performance: more than something simply amusing it suggests the possibility of profound change, especially in the spectator. An impetus for change is also at the fore in Meg Mumford’s essay, “Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity: Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change.” Mumford highlights how key characteristics of the comic identified by Bergson such as automatism, rigidity, disguise, habit and unsociability filter into Brecht’s work through his fascination with the comic performance of the likes of Charlie Chaplin and in Brecht’s collaborations with the Bavarian performer Karl Valentin. She also questions the extent to which Brecht’s commitment to dialectical materialism and social change puts him at odds with the non-serious aspects of the comic. Does Brecht’s rejection of Valentin’s so-called apolitical fatalism, which borders on the cynical, diminish the comic spirit as Bergson articulated it? Or is Bergson’s analysis itself

xvi

Introduction

limited by his ahistoricism? Such questions emerge when Bergson and Brecht are brought face to face with each other. Mumford compares Bergson’s broader philosophical project of understanding creativity and change in an endlessly adaptive human society with Brecht’s focus on the dichotomy of flux and stasis in concrete reality as the contradictions that both comprise the political economy of capitalism and drive its historical unfolding. Valentin’s and Brecht’s shared interest in circuses and fairground aesthetics introduced them to lifeless automata: marionettes, wax sculptures and masks. Valentin drew on these automata to exploit the skeletal substrate of his own body, at the same time adopting the disguises and distortions documented by Bergson. Mumford interrogates in particular how Valentin and Brecht used humorous devices to explore the idea of rigidity. Valentin emphasised the body’s resistance and inertia to express his bleak outlook on the world, and in Brecht’s hands rigidity became a means to analyse class struggle and engage in a more thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and the contradictions of economic and social oppression. What Brecht brings to the fore is that the elasticity that Bergson associates with creativity and élan vital becomes a kind of malleability, a deeply human capacity to be too accommodating to change. Adaptability here finds its own limit and itself becomes a kind of rigidity. Brecht thus takes Bergson at what appears to be face value and then proposes a different ground for his array of comic devices. It is not so much a question of mechanism threatening intelligence by making humans into things, rigid, like the machines themselves, but of the machinic forces of capitalism seizing upon the elasticity that Bergson sees as indicative of the healthy functioning of the socius. As Mumford so aptly demonstrates, what Brecht insists on is that under capitalism the human being is the “standing reserve” of the machine because human adaptability is the baseline of capitalism’s productivist ethos. In spite of recognising that machines have taken over much of what used to be human activity, destroying the livelihoods and ways of life of many peoples in the process, we are drawn towards machines and automatons. Equally terrifying and amusing, they remind us of rigid and distorted versions of ourselves. One mode of theatre that has taken this recognition on board is the puppet and object theatre around which much of Carolyn Shapiro’s essay “Happiness, Dead and Alive: Object Theatre as the Philosophy of the Encounter” revolves. Shapiro contemplates the happening of the comic and particularly the clown in the theoretical contexts of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Aristotelian ethics of eudaimonia. Taking her cue from the suspicion that “happiness” cannot be experienced in the present and is not necessarily associated with subjective satisfaction or pleasure, Shapiro lays the groundwork for an appreciation of the “philosophy of the encounter.” Noting that the root hap is shared between the words happening and happiness but also

Introduction

xvii

haplessness, Shapiro’s discussion gains pertinence by analysing the clown and the world of objects that comprises his mise-en-scène. The clown is hapless precisely because he not only strives for but believes in happiness. His naive disposition means that the reality he endures will never meet his expectation (it will always be too little or too much). Yet his abiding trust in the fortuitousness of circumstance means his life will be rich in encounters. A similar trust underpins the therapeutic situation shared between the analyst and analysand. For Lacan, it is a situation constituted by a non-dialectical relation between two kinds of movement, tuché (encounter) and automaton (repetition), where what is sought is the missed encounter with the original traumatic experience. In both cases, the common conception of happiness as correlated with subjective satisfaction and pleasure fails to grasp the more ambivalent experience of the encounter. Similarly, Shapiro’s analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Harry Holtzman and the Label Brut Collectif play Happy Endings shows that “happiness” is not guaranteed. In both of them, happiness is not something that happens in the present but can only be said to have happened posthumously or in the tense of the future anterior. Whether happy, hapless, or simply happening, attention to the encounter requires focus on the objective relations between things—both animate and inanimate. The objectification of trust gives the clown his mode of comportment but is also bound up with the “involuntary gesture of anguished defeat” that Lecoq equates with “the flop” and the “insistence of signs” that for Lacan signals absentmindedness. In Happy Days Winnie apprehends the various objects of her environs as things with a life of their own and independent of her. In the object-theatre play Happy Endings, the things operate within a psychical economy, whence the clown Harry Holzman as human subject is visibly staged in direct relation to everyday objects around him with the common denominator that both seem to be operated by strings. The tuché as missed encounter with the real is the source of Jerry Lewis’s character’s anxiety and automatism in The Ladies Man and Lewis’s treatment of the tuché’s psychopathological underpinning can be cited as one of the ways in which this film demonstrates its understanding of the provisions of the genres of film comedy. Within this broad genre, Lisa Trahair identifies two distinct groups of films—comedian comedy and romantic comedy. Each lays claim to the status of genre in its own right. A substantial part of the allure of comedian comedy undoubtedly relies on the tension between the already-known comic persona and the fictional character he or she plays in any given film, as is the case with Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, yet the question of romance is also prevalent in the genre even if it is rarely taken seriously or considered as one of its defining features. In her essay “Living in the Doll House: Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man,” Trahair undertakes a close analysis of the philosophy of genre ventured by Stanley

xviii

Introduction

Cavell in his seminal work Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Genre of Remarriage and brings it to bear on the interpretation of Jerry Lewis’s film and the critical reception of his comedy. In unpacking how The Ladies Man works with the provisions of both comedian comedy and romantic comedy, Trahair makes use of Cavell’s refutation of the structuralist practice of classifying comic genres on the basis of shared “features” and supports his argument for treating film genre as more like an artistic “medium” that reflects on itself by considering its constitutive freedoms and constraints. Treating film genre as medium permits a given genre to be viewed as a “quasi-organic vital entity” that renews itself by understanding itself and thinking about other participants in its medium. Instead of having membership of a genre ratified by the degree to which a given film resembles others in the genre, the genre as medium argument conceives films of a specific genre as sharing claims, clauses and provisions. These claims, clauses and provisions both derive from and contribute to a common myth that is necessarily shared by all the films in the genre. Trahair asks whether this philosophy of genre supports Cavell’s surprising contention that remarriage comedies, conceivably a subgenre or cycle of romantic comedy, can rightfully lay claim to being the direct heirs of the slapstick films of the 1920s (Chaplin’s and Keaton’s in particular). And what then to make of films that are conventionally interpreted as belonging to the genre of comedian comedy: do they likewise make use of what they inherit from romantic comedy? In the case of Jerry Lewis, Trahair refers to the dual legacy of both genres, and while she suggests that Lewis’s solo work renders the conventions of the comedian comedy genre so explicit as to raise the question of its ongoing efficacy, her analysis of The Ladies Man’s utilisation of the clauses of romantic comedy also suggests that a new “medium” might be on the verge of giving birth to itself. Thus, the film makes use of the comedic persona of Lewis, familiar to his audiences from the comic duo he previously formed with Dean Martin, while it renews the genre of romantic comedy by an act of non-comedy. In Lewis’s work we detect a comic aggressiveness that refuses to affirm the audience or afford them the pleasure both genres conventionally promise, and which instead places the spectator in the uncomfortable position of feeling the hurt of the jokes and gags. While the issue of masculine prowess is one of the subtexts of The Ladies Man, in the next essay in the collection “Trouble in Paradise: Impotence and Comedy,” Lisabeth During treats the reader to a veritable romp through theological, religious, philosophical, literary, psychoanalytic and cinematic contemplations of the problem of impotence from antiquity to modernity. During provides an entirely new perspective on the culture of phallocentrism by scrutinising how the specifically male—at least in her treatment of

Introduction

xix

it—affliction of impotence performs morally to lay down the law about the viability of marriage, hermeneutically to signal demonical intervention and politico-metaphorically to thematise the limits of sovereign power. During finds, however, that it is not only that sexual performance is bound up with the privileges and prerogatives of masculinity but that a supplemental capacity of the penis is expressed not in its flourish but in its flaccidness. It is the latter that gives us its comic proportion, while it in turn gives to the comic a different kind of libidinal energy. The flaccid penis thus ceases to be a sign of suffering strictly speaking and acquires the surplus value of play, and with it the permission to turn one’s back on the phallic imperatives of mastery. During shows that the comic value of impotence has been exploited since antiquity and was enjoyed no less by medievalists than reformationists and restorationists in the figure of the cuckold. During’s essay, however, is not just concerned with whether sexual failure can be funny—evidence for the affirmative can be found as early as Ovid’s Amores—but an inquiry into the how and the why of it. While philosophers and theologians obliged us by dissecting the impotence of impotence, poets, writers, and filmmakers saw possibility and potential in it, hence transforming it into a surplus, an excess whose joyful expenditure could be shared among the brethren and devoured by the community of the failing heterosexual couple. It’s true that it starts with laughing with Hobbesian superiority at the flaccid one, or what Bergson calls the inelastic, but the moral imperative to protect the restricted, regenerative economy of civil society (beyond the chagrin of the humiliated couple) by making sure that errancy is identified, underlined and rebuked doesn’t get the last laugh. In the arts, impotence is not only a sign of abjectness and shame but becomes a source of inspiration. During finds the specifically modern comic potential of impotence in the prototype of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. She also bookends her essay with observations about two Hollywood comedies that make impotence their source of inspiration. Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), During observes, is the outstanding cinematic example of impotence humour— Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Rae performs on point to cure Tony Curtis’s character’s feigned impotence and thus puts paid to the broader culture’s despair about the fact that psychoanalysis does a better job of diagnosing disorders than of curing them. The same could be said of Ernst Lubitsch’s single contribution to the remarriage genre, That Uncertain Feeling (1941), which sets out to show that two negatives can indeed make a positive. An alternative mode of being to the game of romance is that of the recluse. Yet in Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay “‘Only What Is Born Lives’: Kafka L.O.L.” the solitary figure is considered neither an outcast nor a misanthrope. Rather, the perceived gloominess of the twentieth-century author is upended

xx

Introduction

as Rabaté reflects on the comic dimension of Kafka’s writing, including its reception in literary criticism. The reader will laugh out loud at the story of the children on the country road, even more so at the story of a man with a hole in the back of his head. As well as treating us to some of Kafka’s most imaginative descriptions of physical caricature, his wittiest aphorisms, and some of the jokes he shared with his friends, from Gustav Janouch to Paul Klee and Max Brod, Rabaté advances the thesis, which is both consistent with Freud’s theory of the joke yet nuances it considerably, that the comic in general emerges from a stillborn thought (in statu nascendi). Playing on this idea, Rabaté concludes that Kafka’s sense of humour was absolutely intrinsic to his literary commitment: the existence of literature could be justified only to the extent that it engenders existence, not, however, with a view to completing itself, but rather as testimony to the creative process. Stillborn here is not dead but still-being-born, forever being born, much like Artaud’s conception of the unthought in thought, the babe in search of its mother, or the event yet to come. Kafka’s humour identifies the hitherto comic tropes of doubles, metamorphoses and grotesqueries as the cherished forms of the modern because modern power does not reside in excessive rationalisation but in the “unsystematic arbitrariness” that abides in the bureaucratic apparatus. Kafka’s conception of comicality consists of oscillating affective states, of laughter redoubling shame, not so much as tragic irony but as mirthful futility. In Kafka’s hands, ideas absorb material realities before they get a chance to play themselves out, while material realities in turn can only be made sense of through mixing incompatible ideas. An inversion of classical values occurs to the extent that humans can only see themselves when reflected in their animal counterparts, while gods and demigods have to endure the earthly banalities and trivia of ordinary people. That Kafka’s jokes resonate with his real-life traumatic experiences is testament, Rabaté maintains, to his paradoxically thwarted creativity resting on a specific configuration of the membrane between the inner and the outer. Laughter was Kafka’s internal shield, devised to protect him from himself. Not quite invoking Freud’s conception of humour as the superego looking after the ego, then (as exemplified in gallows humour), Kafka shuns any mollycoddling of internal psychical life and opts instead for reworking external relations. Knowing that any aggression toward the other is simultaneously an aggression toward the self, Kafka understands laughter as a defence mechanism internal to the self that has imbricated the other. Rabaté finds in Kafka’s humour a deep appreciation of the co-implication of identity and distinction, and an elevation of the mechanical base of laughter to the most reflective of all capacities: Kafka’s sense of humour is not divisive, one might even say that it is ethical. The ethical dimension of comedy as a protection of the self is examined further in the workings of the actor in Josephine Gray’s essay “The Grotesque:

Introduction

xxi

Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting.” Etymologically, the Greek word for komos is linked to komodia (comedy), and while the twin masks of tragedy and comedy have continued to signify the theatrical arts through the millennia by referring to the respective muses, Melpomene and Thalia, of the two performance modes, Gray makes the compelling argument that the aesthetic dimensions of mask-work have been more rigorously explored and interrogated in comic performance than in tragedy. Gray sets out from Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, more specifically from his notion of the spectre as that which emerges from yet is irreducible to the relation between the actor and the character she plays. Gray considers the extent to which Diderot’s spectre can be understood as the heir of the actor’s mask by examining the evolution of mask-wearing in various performance settings. Indeed, Gray proposes that the paradox of acting and its genesis in the grotesque is not simply one of the characteristics of the acting profession but the fulcrum on which it pivots, just as mask-wearing is its foundation. Gray gives an account of how Aristophanes continued a tradition that dates back to the komastai dancers of antiquity. These dancers, whose characteristic poses are preserved on antique vases, donned both face and body masks to affect physical deformities and disproportion for comic purposes. Body-masks, in particular, were worn by them to contort, distort and disguise themselves and thereby immerse themselves in play. From here, Gray makes the case for a grotesque genealogy of acting that continues to develop the confluence between the distortion and play of the komastai. In the marvellous netherworlds of the grottos of Nero’s palace that were rediscovered in the Quattrocento, whomsoever dared to enter them confronted a cosmos populated by a multitude of hybrids, of beings incessantly shifting between the formed and the unformed in an infinite becoming that would be simultaneously terrifying, beautiful and ludicrous. Gray delineates how the experiential reality of transitioning from one form to another provided the epistemological underpinning of the grotesque aesthetic. This identification of transformation as key to the grotesque phenomenon leads Gray to consider the demonstrative pedagogies of religious worship performed by St. Francis, where the mask itself would be abandoned while its capacities were retained. The mask could only be dispensed with because St. Francis conceived the body as a prosthetic of the divine. St. Francis’s unorthodox understanding of transubstantiation allowed him to call upon God for the spectral protection enjoyed by the komastai in their masks, and in his encounter with other bodies to “suffer” the fundamental metamorphoses of the spirit commonly associated with religious epiphany. Gray provides a vivid description of how in the mediaeval period St. Francis, along with his followers, the joculatores Domini, dramatised biblical scenarios by adhering to the comic

xxii

Introduction

possibilities of the theatrical tradition, blasphemously combining grotesque metamorphoses with scriptural messages. Following St. Francis’s monstrous encounter with a leper, where he learns that the leper’s revulsion at contact with “the other” far outstrips his own, Gray builds on Jacques Copeau’s intuition that the monstrous problem of the actor is that she does not know what to do with herself. Indeed Copeau, along with Vsevolod Meyerhold, returned to the tradition of commedia dell’arte, specifically its emphasis on mask-work as a means to refute naturalism. The mask, now taken to be either actual or virtual, permits the subtraction of feeling as emotion. The essays that follow do not lend themselves to an unequivocal theory of what constitutes the comic, why we laugh, or how best to understand the relation between comedy and tragedy—nor would we expect them to; the comic, we maintain, is always a matter of perspective. That said, the reader will find some common threads among the contributions: concern about the intimate relation between pleasure and pain that makes for an ambivalent experience of the comic, inquiry into the ethico-political potentialities of comic forms, and an implicit questioning of the implications of the comic both for the methodology of acting and for philosophical thinking, to name just a few of them. Taken together, the essays strike us as taking the comic very seriously, and on this basis we commend them to you. BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. “Images du temps present.” Unpublished seminar transcribed by François Duvert, November 21, 2001. Translated by Fred Dalmasso. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Dover, 2005. Hensher, Philip. “Why Paul Klee Was a Comic at Heart,” Guardian, October 5, 2013. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​/2013​/oct​/05​/paul​-klee​-tate​-modern​ -comedy Lecoq, Jacques. Theatre of Movement and Gesture. Edited by David Bradby. London: Routledge, 2006. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Harold N. Fowler, vols. 5 and 6 of Plato in Twelve Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925.

NOTES 1. Jacques Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, ed. David Bradby (London: Routledge, 2006), 17. 2. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 7.

Introduction

xxiii

3. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 7. 4. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 6. 5. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 6. 6. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 18. 7. Philip Hensher, “Why Paul Klee Was a Comic at Heart,” Guardian, October 5, 2013, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​/2013​/oct​/05​/paul​-klee​-tate​-modern​ -comedy 8. Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 18. 9. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, (New York: Dover, 2005), 16. 10. Bergson, Laughter, 11. 11. Plato. The Republic, trans. Harold N. Fowler, vols. 5 and 6 of Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925), 223d. 12. Alain Badiou, “Images du temps présent” (Unpublished seminar transcribed by François Duvert, November 21, 2001), translated by Fred Dalmasso.

Chapter 1

Comedy Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis María J. Ortega Máñez1

In the Amsterdam Zoo, there was a pair of bitterns of which the male had “fallen in love” with the zoo director. In order to allow the bitterns to mate, the director had to stay out of sight for quite some time. This had the positive result that the male bittern became accustomed to the female. This ended up in a happy marriage, and, as the female sat brooding over her eggs, the director dared to show his face once more. And what happened then? When the male saw his former love companion again, he chased the female off of the nest and seemed to signal by repeated bows that the director should take his proper place and carry on the business of incubation. —Jakob von Uexkiill, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934).

Figure 1.1 Marx Brothers, Duck Soup, directed by Leo McCarey (1933). Screenshot captured by author.

1

2

Chapter 1

‌‌ What relationship can there be between the director of a zoo mistaken for a female bittern by a male bittern and a mustachioed man in a nightgown making faces that his doppelgänger imitates on the other side of a broken mirror? Although at first sight they belong to different realms—biology for the first, cinema for the second—these scenes have two points in common: both report mimetic phenomena and both make us smile. My wager is that the reason for our smile might be an inherent aspect of mimesis, marginalised in its long history, but which takes center stage in comic phenomena. This is what I aim to analyse in what follows. “Let us start from the beginning,” ex archè, as Socrates says in Plato’s dialogues. In other words, let us place ourselves in the middle of the contest between philosophy and theater (or “mimetic poetry”) and let us reconsider that “ancient quarrel” that Socrates mentions in Plato’s Republic.2 This point of the dialogue marks the final assault of his critique of mimesis and the beginning of the history of “one of the most baffling”3 and influential concepts in Western thought; a history that, like some well-known ancient myths, still bewitches us.4 Because of the history of mimesis, a kind of philosophical narrative surrounds this word. Like intellectual rhapsodists of modern times, scholars engage with this particular narrative when addressing mimesis. I will briefly recapitulate its renowned milestones: 1.  Plato is doubtlessly the starting point of this saga, the totem whose shadow reaches us.5 A biographical anecdote usually illustrates a kind of Freudian return of the repressed between life and theory. As a playwright, young Plato was the author of dithyrambs and tragedies. One day, on his way to the Theatre of Dionysus to submit his tragedy for the annual competition, he ran into a small group of people around Socrates. After having listened to him for the first time, the twenty-yearold Plato decided to become his student. That day, on the steps of the Theatre of Dionysus, he burned his play and devoted the rest of his life to philosophy.6 As a response to this anecdote it has become customary for scholars to evoke the passage from Plato’s final dialogue, the Laws, which compares the perfect city-state to a tragedy. In the name of the Athenian Stranger, Plato claims that the legislator of this perfect city is the author of “a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy.”7 According to this view, Plato’s failed vocation as a tragic poet would years later be achieved through a political philosophy pretending to be the best tragedy.

Comedy

3

2.  Books III and X of Plato’s Republic constitute the core of what is considered the earliest theory of mimesis. One finds here, among other things, the famous banishment of the mimetic poet from the just city, the mention of the “ancient quarrel,” as well as many references to Homer and the tragic poets. 3.  The idea of mimesis that provides the model for poetics from antiquity onwards derives from Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as mimesis praxeos in the Poetics.8 Despite the compelling yet fictional hypothesis of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, the Aristotelian Poetics is almost entirely devoted to tragedy. The part on comedy, if it ever existed, is missing. I call this story, predominant throughout the Western history of ideas, Tragic Mimesis. It is a history of mimesis that treats tragedy as the main theatrical point of reference. Consequently, the philosophers’ preference for tragedy in their aesthetic or metaphysical inquiries (Hume, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Unamuno, Benjamin, Camus)9 is concomitant with their rejection of comedy and laughter (Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, Pascal, Nicole, Rousseau). We must wait until the twentieth century to find, with Bergson’s Le Rire, a comprehensive, serious but not censoring, philosophical account of comedy. And comedy is what this chapter shall focus on, thus setting Tragic Mimesis aside. Reconsidering the early ideas of mimesis, I wish to highlight different elements and interconnections between philosophy and comic theater that have eluded the canonical history of mimesis. My aim is to sketch an alternative genealogy of mimesis. The protagonist will still be Plato, but the antagonist—in the etymological sense of the word, that is, his partner in the agon—will be a comic poet: Aristophanes. His comedy, Clouds, has attracted attention from philosophers mainly because of its depiction of the character of Socrates rather than for the artistic reflection on mimesis that it also contains. In this chapter, I will demonstrate the relevance of Aristophanes in the earliest questioning of mimesis, both with respect to the staging of the play as well as for the Platonic reactions that the comedy elicits. I will do this firstly via a genealogical reconstruction of the theatrical origins of mimesis as well as some attention to the operation of mimesis in Aristophanes’s comedies. This will allow us to distinguish how comic mimesis confronts the dominant epistemic concerns with regards to copy/ originals. Secondly, a comparative analysis of selected passages from Clouds and Sophist will bring to light an interesting case of intertextuality between Plato and Aristophanes, suggesting that some ideas of the philosopher were determined in a tug-of-war with the comic poet.

4

Chapter 1

COMIC MIMESIS This alternative story—or reversal of the canonical history of mimesis— could also be presented as three milestones, mirroring the tripartite history of Tragic Mimesis that I have highlighted: 1.  To examine the contest between Plato and Aristophanes let us look at some biographical episodes that might add nuance to the perceived strength of the univocity of their antagonism.10 Plato’s hopes for the implementation of his vision of the best political system were placed upon Dionysus I of Syracuse to whom he sent Aristophanes’s complete comedic oeuvre to be read as a study of Athenian politics.11 Plato also, allegedly, wrote an epitaph for Aristophanes, in which the playwright’s soul is compared to an “eternal shrine for the Graces.”12 These anecdotes prove, at the very least, the philosopher’s high estimation of the works of the comic poet. 2.  In the wake of Diogenes Laertius, scholars tend to see a Platonic poetics inherent in his own dialogues.13 Thus, as it relates Socrates’s death, Plato’s tragedy would be Phaedo, and his comedy, Symposium.14 By contrast, I find that Gerald F. Else’s consideration carries a deeper appreciation: “Plato’s own genius was comic rather than tragic.”15 3.  Even if we lack the presumed second book of the Poetics, the preserved text contains brief but precious information on Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy: its history and definition (chapters 4 and 5). As he puts it, Comedy, as we said, is mimesis of baser but not wholly vicious characters: rather, the laughable is one category of the shameful. For the laughable comprises any fault or mark of shame which involves no pain or destruction: most obviously, the laughable mask is something ugly and twisted, but not painfully.16

Two points call for attention. Firstly, Aristotle’s definition of comedy as mimesis phauloteron (in other translations, “representation of morally inferior people”) is not symmetrical to that of tragedy. Although both are defined as mimesis, the object in tragedy is action—with the subsequent development and repercussion of the plot (mythos)—whereas in comedy it is a specific type of character, defined by its social or moral (low) qualities. Secondly, and surprisingly, there is no mention of important Attic comic poets such as Aristophanes. Else interprets this as a sign of aversion to fifth-century Attic comedy on the part of Aristotle: “His disapproval of this ‘iambic’ kind of poetry led him to a tendentious slanting of the definition of comedy (in chapter 5), and a gross distortion of its history (in chapter 4), including total

Comedy

5

suppression of the two most important persons in the story, Archilocos and Aristophanes.”17 Be that as it may, given the importance and influence of Aristotle’s Poetics, comedy, theoretically detached from one of its most brilliant representatives, will be for posterity, in the best case, the mimesis of the undesirable (fault, ugliness and shame) and, more generally, unworthy of consideration. Aristotle himself confesses the lack of links in the historical chain he presents when affirming that “comedy’s early history was forgotten because no serious interest was taken in it” [dià tò mè spoudáxesthai 1449a37]. “Almost a pun,” adds Else, “since comedy is non-serious by definition.”18 Perhaps this partly explains the marginalisation of comedy by philosophy and the eminently tragic trajectory of mimesis. MIMESIS: A DIFFERENT EXPLORATION Back to the Origins Looking at the semantic evolution of mimesis,19 we first notice that the word appears during the late fifth century. It came to the Ionic-Attic orbit from the home of the mime, Sicily. The original word, mimos, denotes a certain kind of dramatic performance—the mime—as well as the person performing these short, humorous, sketches whose characters are essentially general types engaged in everyday situations. Some mimes by Sophron,20 Herodas, and other popular fragments have been preserved21 and their titles suggest a popular, comical mood: Women at Breakfast, A Jealous Person, The Fisherman to the Farmer. Note the proximity of this genre to the Aristotelian definition of comedy based on characters (see above). Deriving from mimos, mimeisthai seems to denote originally the miming of a person or animal by means of voice or gesture. The essential idea rests upon the rendering of characteristic looks. From, and out of, this primary sense a second one was developed: to imitate another person in general, that is, to do as or what he or she does. Later, mimeisthai was transferred to material images: pictures, statues and so forth. It is important to note that although all of these three senses of mimeisthai were currently in use when Plato was born, the original sense retained its main use in theater and acting, predominantly in a comic manner.22 The Comic Path Given the strand of meanings attached to the notion of “looking or acting like someone else,” it is clear why mimesis became a main resource for comedy.

6

Chapter 1

We can, for example, observe this in Aristophanes’s Frogs. In view of his imminent descent into Hades, after Herakles has managed to return alive, Dionysus appears disguised as the mythical hero in search of tourist tips. The first stage direction indicates that “the god [Dionysus] is dressed in long boots and a saffron dress, with, à la Herakles, a lion-skin on top and a large club in his hand.” He and his slave Xanthias knock at Herakles’s door. “Herakles, also wearing a lion-skin, steps out aggressively—but soon starts to crack up at what he sees” . . . that is, Dionysus’s disguise is so grotesque that Herakles can hardly stop laughing. DIONYSOS. Well, the reason I came here wearing these clothes you see, In impersonation (mimesin) of you, was so you could tell me The names of people whose help I could call upon, The ones you used when you went to Kerberos (108–11). A particularly Platonic interpretation has led to the consideration of mimesis, in all circumstances, as an imitative, and misleading, mechanism that seeks to supplant the original. The scene above shows that this kind of comic mimesis, although having a recognisable pattern, is not seriously intended to supplant the original, since the audience are confronted with both the original and the imitation at the same time. The comic effect lies precisely there: the god of theater tries to look like Herakles, but he laughably fails. I claim that the relevance of Aristophanes is paramount to an alternative genealogy of mimesis. Scholars such as Leo Strauss or, more recently, Luciano Canfora have demonstrated similar theses from their own research perspectives.23 In particular, I would like to mark the importance of Aristophanes’s Clouds in the ancient questioning of mimesis; directly (because of the idea that is staged) and indirectly (through the Platonic reactions that this comedy provokes). PLATO VERSUS ARISTOPHANES: INTERTEXTUALITY AND AGON It could be said that Clouds, the philosophers’ comedy by Aristophanes, is also a comedy on the foundations of poetry that entails an artistic reflection on mimesis. As he himself makes clear in the parabasis, Aristophanes was extremely disappointed about the failure of Clouds at the Dionysia in 423 BC. Hence, he revised and put the manuscript into circulation—very unusual at that time—such was the esteem that the playwright had for this comedy of his.

Comedy

7

A brief reminder of the plot: Strepsiades, a once-rich farmer ruined by his son’s aristocratic interests, hatches a plan to escape his debts. He decides to enrol his son at the Thoughtery (phrontisterion, a product of Aristophanes’s theatrical fantasy, the place where philosophers live and think), where one learns how to turn weak arguments into winning arguments, that is, the only way Strepsiades thinks he can beat his creditors in court. The Thoughtery is headed by Socrates, who appears from above, measuring the length of a flea’s jump, and declares himself a devotee of the Clouds, goddesses of thinkers, poets and other layabouts. After their introduction the teaching begins but soon ends in disaster when Strepsiades’s son becomes a perfect sophist, arguing successfully about everything, even about his right to beat his parents. Blaming Socrates for these troubles, Strepsiades sets fire to the Thoughtery. There are interesting resonances between Clouds and certain Platonic passages, which deserve a comparative examination. Although various types of intertextuality can be analysed, we will look at excerpts that have special relevance concerning the idea of mimesis. In doing so, I intend not only to underline the relevance of Aristophanes’s poetic discovery as fundamental to our alternative history of mimesis but also to give specificity to the mimetic agonism between Plato and Aristophanes, citing the concrete ideas or lines that seem to be inspired by, or referring to, the comic poet. According to Stephen Halliwell, Plato’s reflections on mimesis do not constitute a unified doctrine, but “a classic case of a concept that receives fluctuating and constantly revised treatment from Plato. It is approached from various angles in different works and manifests the exploratory impulse that Aristotle shrewdly diagnosed as pivotal to Plato’s writing.”24 In order to confirm this view I have chosen a less commented-on passage of the Sophist (360 BC) that nonetheless proves rich in elucidating the issue of mimesis. CLOUDS PARODOS (299–370)—SOPHIST (230e–235c) Socrates Attesting to Plato’s familiarity with Aristophanes’s Clouds, a direct allusion can be spotted in Sophist concerning the crucial issue of Socrates’s representation. The chorus leader describes Socrates in terms of the peculiar features of his walk and gaze: “You strut like a popinjay through the streets and cast your eyes sideways” (362). Interestingly, towards the end of Symposium, Alcibiades depicts Socrates’s courage in the middle of the battle of Delium with these same words. Explicitly quoting the comic poet, he says, “He was proceeding on his way just as he does here in Athens, exemplifying that line of yours, Aristophanes, ‘swaggering and casting sidelong glances,’ calmly

8

Chapter 1

looking sideways as he does at friends and enemies alike.”25 Therefore, Plato’s precise knowledge of the Clouds is patent; and consequently, the echoes we shall hear below are less likely to be due to chance. Sophist or Philosopher? Socrates’s incessant dialectical struggles against the sophists in Plato’s dialogues (e.g., Gorgias, Hipias and Protagoras) can be seen as the denial of Aristophanes’s attribution according to which Socrates would be the head of the sophists. Let us see it in more detail. The entrance of the chorus [parodos] of Clouds entails their introduction by Socrates to Strepsiades. Venerated by idle people, they provide intelligence and dialectic language to sophists and poets. In Aristophanes’s colorful words: They nourish a great many sophists, diviners form Thurii, medical experts, long-haired idlers with onyx signet rings, and tune bending composers of dithyrambic choruses, men of highflown pretension, whom they maintain as do-nothings, because they compose music about these Clouds.26

We notice that the term used by Aristophanes to refer to Socrates and his fellows is precisely the one used as the title of one of Plato’s late dialogues: Sophist. This dialogue deals with the notion of mimesis as “copy production” relating to forms of knowledge. As Plato repeatedly states, the sophist is an “imitator of realities.”27 In opposition to the philosopher, who looks for the truth in itself, poets and sophists are called mimetés, “imitators,” or eidolopoietés, “image-makers.” Aristophanes never uses the term philosophos, even if the available translations or comments could lead us to believe so. In fact, the word philosophos did not properly exist yet. For the early thinkers, the ancient Greeks used the words phusiológos “physicist,” like the Milesians, or sophós, “wise man,” like the Seven Sages, or even, later, sophistés, “skillful in knowledge,” experts in the art of speech, a designation embraced by experts like Gorgias and Protagoras as much as poets. As Havelock remarks, “Sophistés had long been the standard term for ‘intellectual,’ but it had included poets. The words starting from the root phil- mark the final break with the previous ‘poetized’ intelligence.”28The early occurrences of the word philósophos are attested at the beginning of the fifth century, but in no case do these uses imply a specific activity.29 This meaning, as well as its fixation as a technical term, is due to Plato.30 Moreover, the creation of a new word is in line with Plato’s urge to “make the difference”31 between Socrates and the true sophists, his contemporaries, but also in relation to Socrateses as presented by Aristophanes.

Comedy

9

To Look Like As soon as the Clouds arrive on stage, Strepsiades is able to better observe these vaporous divinities. Then, astonished, he exclaims, “[The clouds] look like pieces of wool that lie stretched out / and not like women, by Zeus! Not even remotely [Pointing at chorus] These have noses!” (340–42). This metatheatrical moment shows that, again in comedy, there is no illusion nor supplantation. The rustic Strepsiades, even when urged by the sophisticated Socrates, is able to distinguish a true cloud from the women dancing and singing in front of him. The ontological status of resemblance is, therefore, addressed. This short scene sets out the point that Plato will deepen philosophically: “A wolf is very like a dog. […] But the cautious man must be especially on his guard in the matter of resemblances, for they are very slippery things.”32 Any / Many The material inconsistency and extreme volubility of the Clouds make them suitable for mimesis since their lack of form allows any form to be marked upon them. Hence, “Clouds turn into anything they want.”33 As they are the lightest and most versatile, they can take any shape. In parallel, “the sophist has by this time appeared to be so many things.”34 Notice in this context the closeness between the clouds and the sophist, any and many: plasticity becomes the problem of multiplicity. Concerning the art of disputing, the logical sequence of Plato’s argumentation can be schematised as follows: the sophist knows nothing, but he is able to argue about anything, so he “argues about all things.”35 Another corollary of plasticity pointed out via Aristophanes’s Clouds is their capacity, at the same time, to reveal and veil the nature of things. They do so in order to mock peoples’ obsessions and to expose their nature.36 This is the reason why they are equally venerated by comic poets and sophists: mimesis is common to both. On Plato’s side, the figures preferably assimilated are the painter and the sophist, especially regarding the ease of execution and the trading nature of their activities: “He makes them all quickly and sells them for very little. . . . He knows all things and can teach to another for a small price in little time,”37 which will lead him to postulate the playful nature of mimesis: “Is there any more artistic or charming kind of joke [paidiás] than the imitative kind [tò mimetikón]?”38 An objection might be raised: the word mimesis does not appear in this excerpt by Aristophanes, even if the idea is there. The reason is given by Leo Strauss:39 mimesis entails production [poiesis]; it belongs to human action. Clouds do not imitate stricto sensu because they do not do; they just are.

10

Chapter 1

Therefore, they “look like” [eíxasi], “become” [gígnontai], “are” or “are not” [ou eisí]—verbs indicating a state, and not an action. Only the poet-actor properly imitates. Clouds are the natural, divine, foundation of mimesis. Through them, Aristophanes suggests that art imitates nature because nature imitates too; there would be no human art of imitation if imitation were not somehow rooted in nature; otherwise, the human art of imitation would be artificial, accessorial. In other words, “generally art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature”; and therefore: “if art imitates nature, it is from nature that the arts have derived.”40 The extraordinary influence of this idea goes without saying. Aristotle will complete the turn of the screw by inscribing mimesis in human nature: “for it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from other animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest understanding).”41 It is curious to notice that a precedent of this Aristotelian idea was expressed by Aristophanes. In Women at the Thesmophoria, Agathon offers a theory of poetic composition that combines creative imagination with quasi-theatrical role-playing: “AGATHON: But as for the things we lack, / We must use roleplaying [mímesis] to help us pursue what we need.”42 As noted by Halliwell, it is necessary to wait for Poetics chapter 17 and Physics for something similar, and yet mimesis is used here in the sense of acting and impersonation. Such an accretive, theatrical conception, as its comic origin, has not so far been found worthy of attention. It is time to take it seriously. The comic is constitutive of mimesis, in practice and in theory. Therefore, we find comedy at the origin of mimesis—the mimes—and mimesis within comedy in the presence of Aristophanes. Mimesis understood as a game (a joke) in Plato retains something of the original comic pattern, but this is attenuated in the more general semantic field of the playful. This connotation will be lost in the passage to Aristotle, where mimesis no longer has a negative ontological connotation; it rather defines tragedy and, therefore, it constitutes the main notion that identifies poetical creation. I propose a revision of the history of mimesis that has been passed on to us, putting comedy center stage rather than tragedy. Such a revision would see Aristophanes as part and parcel of the history not only of mimesis but of ideas as such, while also conceding that if there ever was an “ancient quarrel,” perhaps it was not as old as Socrates claims in the Republic (X, 607b). The intertextual connections made between Plato and Aristophanes are proof of a more recent agon. Something of the original mimesis, which had been lost over time, is preserved in comedy, and could be traced by a philosophical study of comic mimesis, such as the excellent one by Mladen Dolar.43

Comedy

11

Doubles, disguises, mistaken identities, even the most elementary humourism (parody or simple imitation, such as the one performed by Groucho Marx in the Duck Soup scene alluded to at the beginning of this chapter), if seen in a proper perspective, reveal and enact the mechanism of mimesis, since “[c]omedy is mimesis in action.”44 Same and different, deceitful or joyful—the Platonic mimesis stresses the similar but deceptive, its pretention to pass as authentic. “They look alike, but they are not,” says the philosopher about the mimetic forms. Aristophanic mimesis, within the similar, emphasises the different (worse, ridicule). With sincerity and joy the comic poet points at the mimetic forms he creates and suggests: “They are not, but they look alike.” And we laugh. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristophanes. Clouds. Translated by Peter Meineck. Introduction by Ian Storey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000. Aristophanes. Clouds. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Aristophanes. Clouds. Women at the Thesmophoria. Frogs. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Aristophanes. Frogs. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Aristotle. Physics. Ed. W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Brisson, Luc. “Mythe, écriture, philosophie.” In La Naissance de la raison en Grèce: Actes du congrès de Nice (mai 1987), edited by J.-F. Mattéi. Paris: PUF, 2006. Canfora, Luciano. La crisi dell’utopia: Aristofane contro Platone. Bari: Laterza, 2014. Colli, Giorgio. La nascita della filosofía. Milano: Adelphi, 1975. Cousin, Victor. Fragments philosophiques: Philosophie ancienne. Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1840. Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF, 1967. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Translated by Pamela Mensch. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Dolar, Mladen. “The Comic Mimesis,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 570–89. Else, Gerald F. “‘Imitation’ in the Fifth Century.” Classical Philology, vol. 53, no. 2 (1958): 73–90. Else, Gerald F. Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Halliwell, Stephen. “La mimèsis reconsidérée: Une optique platonicienne.” In Études sur la République de Platon. I. De la Justice. Éducation, psychologie et politique, edited by Monique Dixsaut. Paris: Vrin, 2005.

12

Chapter 1

Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1963. Lawtoo, Nidesh. “The Critic as Mime: Wilde’s Theoretical Performance,” Symploke, vol. 26, nos. 1–2 (2018): 307–28. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Phantom of the Ego. Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. Michigan State University Press, 2013. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Violence and the Unconscious: From Catharsis to Contagion. Michigan State University Press, forthcoming. Malingrey, A.-M. Philosophia. Étude d’un groupe de mots dans la littérature grecque des présocratiques au IVe siècle après J.-C. Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1961. Pinto Colombo, Melina. Il mimo di Sofrone e di Senarco: Studio dei frammenti e nuove indagini sui rapporti con la commedia di Epicarmo e sulle origini del mimo greco. Firenze: Bemporad & Fº, 1934. Plato. Laws. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Plato. Republic. Trans. Tom Griffith, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Plato. Sophist. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Plato. Symposium. Translated by Margaret Howatson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sörbom, Göran. Mimesis and Art: Studies on the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vocabulary. Svenska: Bokförlaget, 1966. Strauss, Leo. Socrate et Aristophane. Translated by Olivier Sedeyn. Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1993. Theophrastus. Characters. Sophron. Mimes. Translated by Jeffrey Rusten. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Vicaire, Paul. Platon critique littéraire. Paris: Klincksieck, 1960. Young, Julian. The Philosophy of Tragedy: From Plato to Žižek. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

NOTES 1. This chapter has been written in collaboration with the Homo Mimeticus project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 716181: HOM). I am thankful to Nidesh Lawtoo, Josephine Gray, Carole Guesse, Giulia Rignano and Niki Hadikoesoemo for their respective invitations and comments.

Comedy

13

2. Plato, Republic, X, 607b, trans. Tom Griffith, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1963), 20. 4. “Reconsidérer la conception platonicienne de la mimèsis est non seulement légitime, mais opportun et nécessaire.” Stephen Halliwell, “La mimèsis reconsidérée: une optique platonicienne” in Études sur la République de Platon, ed. Monique Dixsaut (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 45. The main goal of the Homo Mimeticus project is to rethink the ancient concept of mimesis from a transdisciplinary and contemporary point of view. See more: http:​//​www​.homomimeticus​.eu​/the​-project​/. 5. For a recent development concerning Nietzsche, Wilde, Lacoue-Labarthe and Butler, see Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Critic as Mime,” Symploke 26, nos. 1–2 (2018), 307–28. 6. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Pamela Mensch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), Plato, 3:5–6. 7. Plato, Laws, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 817b. 8. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6, 1449b24. 9. Some of these thinkers’ accounts of tragedy are approached by Julian Young in The Philosophy of Tragedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 10. Nidesh Lawtoo speaks in these cases of mimetic agonism. For a definition, see Nidesh Lawtoo, Violence and the Unconscious: From Catharsis to Contagion (Michigan State University Press, forthcoming). For a case study of Nietzsche’s mimetic agonism with Schopenhauer, Plato and Wagner, see Nidesh Lawtoo, Phantom of the Ego (Michigan University Press, 2013), chapter 1. 11. See Ian Storey, Introduction, in Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. Peter Meineck (Hackett Publishing, 2000), x. 12. Olympiodore, Commentaire sur l’Alcibiade de Platon, II, 69, quoted by Victor Cousin, Fragments philosophiques: Philosophie ancienne (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1840), 136. 13. See, for instance, Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–20. 14. It is worth noting that Aristophanes takes part as a character in this dialogue, which is an occasion for Plato to impersonate the comic poet. As some translators and critics have pointed out, Aristophanes’s speech in Symposium is a pearl of style as well as a remarkable imitation: “Cette page est aussi digne d’Aristophane que de celui qui l’écrit pour lui.” Paul Vicaire, Platon critique littéraire (Paris: Klincksieck, 1960), 186. 15. “There is no tragic dialogue, except the Gorgias, to match the long line of comic masterpieces: Protagoras, Ion, Eutyphron, Euthydemos, Menexenos, Symposion; and the whole point of the Phaidon is that it is not a tragedy. Tragedy is impossible in the presence of Sokrates; comedy is not only possible with him, it is, so to speak, built in. But not obscenity, not personal attacks, except on out-and-out sophistic types like the fatuous pedant Euthyphron, the puffed-up rhapsode Ion, or the eristic pair of brothers

14

Chapter 1

in the Euthydemos; and even there, except in the latter case, the satire is tempered by an almost affectionate smile, and Protagoras is treated with notable respect.” Gerald F. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 186. 16. Aristotle, Poetics (1449a 31–35), 45. Italics mine. 17. Else, Gerald F. Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986, 185. 18. Else, Plato and Aristotle, 187. 19. I follow here Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art: Studies on the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vocabulary (Svenska Bokförlaget, 1966), 23; and Gerald Else, “‘Imitation’ in the Fifth Century,” in Classical Philology 53, no. 2 (1958), 73–90. 20. Gerald Else argues that Plato appreciated this theatrical genre, especially the mimes written by Sophron. See Plato and Aristotle, 30. 21. See Theophrastus, Characters and Sophron, Mimes, trans. Jeffrey Rusten (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 22. Melina Pinto Colombo’s classical study Il mimo di Sofrone e di Senarco: Studio dei frammenti e nuove indagini sui rapporti con la commedia di Epicarmo e sulle origini del mimo greco (Firenze: Bemporad & Fº, 1934) pointed to a close relationship between the mime and the Syracusan comedy, especially the works by Epicharmus. 23. The problem of Socrates and the birth of political philosophy for Strauss in his classical work Socrates and Aristophanes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); the history of the texts for Canfora in La crisi dell’utopia. Aristofane contro Platone (Bari: Laterza, 2014). 24. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 38. 25. Plato, Symposium, trans. Margaret Howatson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 221b. 26. Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1998) 331–34. 27. Plato, Sophist, 235a. 28. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1963), 306, note 8. 29. See Luc Brisson, “Mythe, écriture, philosophie,” in La Naissance de la raison en Grèce: Actes du congrès de Nice (mai 1987), ed. J.-F. Mattéi (Paris: PUF, 2006), 55–56, note 16. 30. “Platone chiama ‘filosofia,’ amore della sapienza, la propria ricerca, la propria attività educativa, legata a un’espressione scritta, alla forma letteraria del dialogo,” Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofía (Milano: Adelphi, 1975) 13, 109–10. See also A.-M. Malingrey, Philosophia. Étude d’un groupe de mots dans la littérature grecque des présocratiques au IVe siècle après J.-C. (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1961). 31. “Faire la différence,” see Deleuze’s account of Plato and what he calls méthode de dramatisation in Différence et répetition (Paris: PUF, 1967), 84–85. 32. Plato, Sophist, 231a.

Comedy

15

33. Aristophanes, Clouds, 348. 34. Plato, Sophist, 231 b-c. 35. Plato, Sophist, 232e. 36. Aristophanes, Clouds, 349–352. 37. Plato, Sophist, 234a. 38. Plato, Sophist, 234 a-b. 39. Leo Strauss, Socrate et Aristophane, trans. Olivier Sedeyn (Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1993), 22, passim., which I sum up in what follows. 40. Aristotle, Physics, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), II, 2. 41. Aristotle, Poetics 4, 1448b 4–9. 42. Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 155. 43. Mladen Dolar, “The Comic Mimesis,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017). 44. Dolar, “The Comic Mimesis,” 588.

Chapter 2

The Two Laughters of Lecoq The Clown and the Bouffon Caterina Angela Agus, Giovanni Fusetti and Davide Giovanzana

In his book, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henri Bergson suggests that comedy is a social regulator: we laugh at vices, at ridiculous or eccentric behaviour. For Bergson, life is about fluidity, elasticity, movement. Anything that prevents this fluidity, anything that is rigid or mechanical, and thus threatening to life, is derided. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification. . . . A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. . . . The laughable element consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being. (Capitals in original)1

Bergson, in his treatise, infers that in condemning imperfections, laughter becomes a unifying force: anything that seems strange is ridiculed. Laughter, as described by Bergson, becomes like an invisible cloak that covers and 17

18

Chapter 2

regulates society. This argument may be surprising, since we instinctively think of laughter as an act of liberation, a release of tensions and internal conflicts, or as an act of irreverence. If we pay closer attention, however, we realise that many comedies make provision for this regulating element. Without going into too much detail, we note that most of Molière’s comedies ridicule behaviours that are egocentric (The Would Be Gentleman), exaggerated (The Misanthrope), or hypocritical (Tartuffe), and therefore in line with the notion of laughter as social regulator. Let us call this type of laughter described by Bergson social laughter. Jacques Lecoq,2 on the other hand, with his research on the clown and the bouffon, developed two alternative ways to approach laughter: one tragic, the other cruel. It would be useful to pay attention to the noteworthy differences between the philosophical reflection on comedy and the hands-on approach used by Lecoq. Bergson’s Laughter is the first book on humour by a notable philosopher.3 Previous philosophers also discussed the effect of laughter (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant) but they usually gave the topic just a few paragraphs as part of another topic. The academic approach tends to start its investigation on laughter from a societal position, focusing on the spectator position; it examines the effects of the laughter on the audience. The practical approach focuses mainly on the actors’ work; the process and techniques that the actors should embody in order to make the audience laugh. These two approaches, even if their starting point differs, find convergences—in fact in Plato’s Symposium (416 BC), Socrates seems precisely to hint at Lecoq’s tragic laughter and cruel laughter: “Socrates was persuading his two friends to admit that the same man could write both comedies and tragedies and that whoever is a tragedian, by vocation, is also a comedian.”4 This sentence can be interpreted in two different ways. The first involves truly considering Socrates’s assertion that, in order to write comedies, the poet (playwright) must fully comprehend the essence of tragedy. This implies that comedy is not just a minor genre. Tragedy is often considered superior because it deals with issues that affect both the individual human being and society as a whole, while comedy, and therefore laughter, are relegated to the fatuous fields of playfulness and superficiality. Socrates’s discourse, however, reevaluates comedy, raising it to the same level as tragedy. This is a position upheld by many of comedy’s defenders. Totò,5 for example, was famous for asserting that only those who had suffered from hunger could make people laugh; Chekhov got angry with Stanislavsky on many occasions because he thought the great Russian pedagogue was only able to perceive the tragic dimensions of his texts without recognising the comedic elements.6 In this light, a closer examination of comedies’ dramaturgical structure would suggest that the protagonists of comedies are undergoing tragic experiences but the turn of the events transforms the situations into a comic display.7 If this is true, it means that comedy is not an inferior genre,

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

19

but actually a step beyond tragedy. To reach the comic dimension, the poet must go through the process of transforming a tragic character into a comic one. From this perspective, comedy takes its place on the highest rung of the theatrical ladder. A further interpretation necessitates a consideration of Plato’s text within a broader context. First of all, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates is known for his harsh criticism of theatre. According to Socrates, theatre is about deception and imitation—the playwright gives voice to myriad persons (various fictional characters) instead of searching for truth.8 It is surprising then that Socrates discourses on the differences between theatrical genres after having condemned theatre as a whole. We could argue that Socrates aimed to ironise and diminish tragedy by putting it on the same level as comedy. Socrates’s words could be read as saying that theatre is such an inferior activity that writing a tragedy or a comedy is all the same. With this irony, the entire theatrical structure crumbles.9 One of the two friends with whom Socrates discusses the worth of tragedy and comedy is none other than Aristophanes, who ridiculed Socrates only a few years earlier in his comedy The Clouds (423 BC). Should we read this passage as Socrates’s answer to Aristophanes? Plato’s text, found at the end of The Symposium, is almost absurd. The events narrated in the text take place at a banquet over the course of one evening and the narrator, Apollodorus, is one of the guests. Describing the end of the banquet, he says he was very tired and did not hear all of Socrates’s speech about comedy and tragedy because he fell asleep before the end of the discourse. Thus, Plato’s text ends with an incomplete argument. It is as though Plato is deliberately making fun of Aristophanes, and by extension the reader, by suggesting that theatre is such a trivial activity that it puts people to sleep. Here again, it is necessary to take some distance from Plato’s words. What is striking is the fact that this philosophical text is composed of several voices, in that Plato depicts various characters interacting with Socrates. The character of Socrates, who is known for condemning theatre, for condemning imitation, for condemning the act of becoming someone else, finds himself in a text that upholds the very same principles he condemns. By contextualising the examined passage, we detect an ironic discourse steeped in contradiction. How is it possible for Plato to orchestrate such obvious dissonance? Attempts at interpreting this apparent ambiguity have been made by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze10 and Dénis Guénoun.11 We will not dwell here on the various interpretations, nor will we attempt to evaluate the two possible ways of reading the end of Plato’s Symposium described above. We would like, instead, to indicate that in the first interpretation, tragedy and comedy are interwoven, while in the second interpretation, irony merges with the idea of wisdom. These two approaches to comedy have two distinct dynamics: one that is oriented inward and digs into its own drama, and one that expands outward,

20

Chapter 2

establishing a critical distance. We define these two dynamics as tragic laughter (inward) and cruel laughter (outward), embodied respectively by the clown and the bouffon. Often thrown together within the realm of comedy, in reality these two types are diametrically opposed. This chapter seeks to elucidate the differences and similarities between the laughter of the clown and the laughter of the bouffon by referring to the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. The chapter offers two approaches to each type of laughter: one is theoretical and seeks to define and contextualise the type of laughter in relation to Lecoq’s work, and one is practical, using the approaches to each as outlined in an interview with Giovanni Fusetti12 to explain the most important factors in the teaching of clown and bouffon. THE CLOWN Jacques Lecoq, before dedicating himself entirely to theatre, was an athletics instructor. This allowed him to develop a particular physical awareness of and ability to analyse movement. Moreover, he developed the capacity for observing an event and extracting its hidden dramatic elements. The clown was first introduced into Lecoq’s pedagogy in the 1960s, during a three-day workshop. The presence of the clown in his work continued to evolve over the course of twenty years, ultimately taking its place as the final moment in Lecoq’s voyage.13 Where do the clowns of Lecoq come from? Giovanni Fusetti tells us that, unfortunately, Lecoq rarely discussed the direct inspiration for his research, and in fact, there are several divergent positions on the question of the clown. Lecoq, in his book Le Corps poétique (1999), says that the starting point of his clown research was based on the possible link between commedia dell’arte and the circus clown. Pierre Byland,14 on the other hand, asserts that Lecoq was not at all interested in the subject and that it was he, Pierre Byland, who insisted that Lecoq work on the clown.15 That there is a link between commedia dell’arte and the clown is a theory also supported by Carlo Boso who unfortunately does not state from where he derives his ideas.16 We can note, however, that both Jacques Lecoq and Carlo Boso worked with Giorgio Strehler,17 who gave commedia dell’arte a second life by bringing it back to the stage. Could it be that the idea of a link between commedia dell’arte and the clown comes from Strehler? In any case, Carlo Boso claims that when Philip Astley established the first modern circus in 1768, in addition to various horse acts and acrobats, he also employed two actors to perform scenes inspired by commedia dell’arte’s canovacci (scenarios). These scenes were dialogues between two servants, Arlecchino and Brighella. Carlo Boso concludes that with time, Brighella’s mask was

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

21

replaced by white make-up and Arlecchino’s mask shrank to become just a red nose. As mentioned above, according to Byland, Lecoq was not interested in the clown, but after repeated demands from his students, especially Byland, Lecoq decided to give it a try. Byland recounts that during the first session of clown research, Lecoq and his students were seated while the first volunteer improvised with the red nose. The improvisation was a catastrophe, and everyone felt embarrassed. After painstakingly performing a long series of slapstick, gags and pantomime pieces, the student recognised his failure and came back to sit among his classmates. Completely dejected, he sat and looked at his friends, dismayed. At that precise moment, everyone burst into laughter and the modern clown was born. Lecoq immediately intuited that what was funny was not the exaggerated pantomime, but the flop, the failure, the collapse, what he called in French: le bide! The flop is the precise moment when the clown realises that what he or she is doing is not funny. Paradoxically, it is the flop, the failure to make us laugh, that actually makes us laugh. The clown finds him- or herself free-falling into his or her own tragic condition of being a human who fails. Viewed as such, we understand how this approach to comedy is rooted in tragedy. Immediately, Lecoq’s clown stripped itself of its heavy artillery of gags and embarked on a new search for humanity. This humanity was no longer based on the grandiose gestures typical of classical heroes, but composed instead of minimal gestures, exposing the fragility of the modern clown: a clown closely connected to the tragic dimension. Not surprisingly, one of the most inspiring clown shows staged recently in France was based on Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone. In her Antigone, the actress Adèll Nodé-Langlois proposed a masterful reinterpretation of the Greek myth, where her clown embodied the tragic valence of the classical heroine with a comic twist. This proximity of the tragic to the comic is not, in fact, a new phenomenon. In King Lear, Shakespeare depicts the downfall of a king by stripping him of all his regal attributes and thus allows a new humanity to arise, one that merges the comic and the tragic. After the tragic scene in which King Lear confronts the tempest, he stages a clownish trial against his daughters. This downfall of the classical hero is a common feature in modernity—for example, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1943); Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923); and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). The clown, from this point of view, becomes the new contemporary hero, one who does not make eloquent and dramatic gestures but simply succumbs to his or her inner tragedy. Jan Kott, in his study on Shakespeare, indicated the link between King Lear and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon, the protagonists of Beckett’s play, are two clown-heroes whose tragedy is simply the fact of being alive.18 It becomes evident that the clown, in Lecoq’s perspective, does not need to invent a drama or perform spectacular feats. The clown is already

22

Chapter 2

immersed in drama; the mere fact of facing life, of facing other people, of facing the audience, causes this dramatic downfall. This dimension of the tragic without the need of action parallels Nietzsche’s definition of tragedy. In fact, the German philosopher considered tragedy to be a pure expression of pathos. The concept of action is something that arrived later. Nietzsche associates Dionysus with pathos and Apollo with action. It was Apollo’s arrival in the Dionysian rites that subverted tragedy and transformed it into theatrical action.19 The theatrical action that Nietzsche refers to is nothing more than the drama, the succession of actions that make up a story on stage. This idea is also confirmed by the fact that etymologically the word “drama” comes from dran, meaning “action.” Nietzsche considers that the arrival of Apollo subordinated pathos to the logical sequence of actions, representing a degradation of pure tragedy.20 From this point of view, the modern clown, a character without action who crumbles into his or her pathos, is a Dionysian emissary of the downfall of the human being. THE PEDAGOGY OF THE CLOWN, AS DESCRIBED BY GIOVANNI FUSETTI (The interviews with Giovanni Fusetti from which the transcriptions in this chapter were made took place in Helsinki in June 2015, when Fusetti was invited by Teatteri Metamorfoosi to lead an international workshop on the bouffon. Davide Giovanzana has known Giovanni Fusetti since 2000, when Giovanzana trained in the Lecoq pedagogy; Giovanni Fusetti was his teacher in 2000–2001 at the theatre school of Kiklos in Padova, Italy.) ‌‌ Teaching the clown is very difficult because it is based on four delicate elements: a state of continuous wonder, the amplification of oneself, the flop, and listening. First of all, the actor must accept to express everything she feels. The clown is amazed, astonished by the reality in front of her. I don’t start my class with the construction of a comic character. Instead, I begin by working on a certain state of being: having nothing and just being present, observing. The clown is touched by everything, in the sense that the clown must reveal everything that is happening inside her. It is about sensitivity. She listens and she is aware of everything, emotionally connected to everything. Everything has an emotional effect. Everything is astonishing. The clown is amazed by the yellow colour of a table. The yellow of the table touches her. And the people around her ask, “How on earth can you be touched by the yellow colour of a table? Are you stupid? We are here for serious things, not to be touched by the yellow table.” But this stupidity touches the audience. This availability to

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

23

be stupefied by everything. The clown is not based on events, on actions, on how to perform this gesture or this other gesture. The clown is a state based on feelings. Every event creates an emotion. This pushes the student to discover parts of herself, emotions with which she is usually not in contact or, let’s say, emotional states in which she is not used to being. For instance, our clown might manifest emotions, desires and attractions that as a person we don’t identify with. For instance in one class, there was a student identifying as homosexual who was very assertive about his homosexuality. But during the workshop, his clown turned out to be attracted to women. The fact that his clown was not homosexual like himself, threw him into crisis. The student had a difficult time in accepting this apparent contradiction. But then he was amazed by the power and the freedom of playing this clown. The opposite situation is common too: actors identifying as heterosexual finding that their clown is attracted to clowns of the same sex or even both sexes! The actor, therefore, must put herself on stage, completely, making the private person public. We can see how the work with the clown is the exact opposite of the neutral mask.21 With the neutral mask, we are looking for a neutrality that goes beyond personal idiosyncrasies. With the clown, all the personal anomalies are amplified and in some cases exaggerated to the edge of becoming a caricature of oneself. For this reason, Lecoq considered it logical to initiate the voyage with the neutral mask and to finish the pedagogical journey with the clown. But if you look carefully, the neutral mask and the clown are not so distant. In reality, what do we seek with the neutral mask? Working with the neutral mask, I have discovered the clown. In fact, by working with the neutral mask, we understand that we are not neutral at all. And it is this non-neutral state that gives birth to the clown. It was the work with the neutral mask that pushed me to strip the clown of any attempt to be funny and to physically amplify what is not neutral. There is something that is not neutral about our bodies, which can be magnified by the clown. And this magnification of the body is often liberating for the students. For instance, a student that has hidden her legs her whole life because they turn inward can not only show them off as a clown, but actually transform them into a theatrical engine, a comic catalyst. This makes the work delicate: how to be oneself completely (and exaggeratedly) and, at the same time, maintain a necessary distance between the actor and the character, which is in this case, an intimate part of herself? The clown showcases her human imperfections, her vulnerability, her ability to fail and her fear of failing. The voyage of Lecoq started with the neutral mask and ended with the clown. For Lecoq, this was a way to close the circle, in the sense that the journey began with the search for neutrality and concluded with the work on the red nose, the opposite of the neutral mask. But it is precisely because the neutral mask and the red nose

24

Chapter 2

are so close that I decided to juxtapose these two moments in my teaching. In fact, when I teach the clown, I work with the neutral mask first and then jump immediately to the red nose. I think that one of Lecoq’s many brilliant ideas was to think of the red nose as a mask. Lecoq, in fact, claimed that the red nose was the smallest mask in the world. This underlines the pedagogical importance of clown work. It is not a psychological work on the memory of emotions, but a pure, physical approach to the human experience of being alive, in the here and now of theatrical space and time. Connecting the red nose to the neutral mask frees the clown from any psychological approaches and throws her into this dynamic of urgency: the urgency of imperfection and failure, or the flop. The clown constantly exists in the crisis between urgency and the failure of urgency. As I said before, another important aspect of the clown is the notion of the flop, when you do something that does not work, but you keep insisting. The flop comes from the stupidity of a person who is not aware of her own stupidity, who repeats something that does not work and then asks herself, “But why doesn’t this work?” From this perspective, the clown exorcises our fear of looking stupid in front of other people. For this reason, the laughter of the clown is a tragic laughter. We laugh at the stupidity of the clown. It is also a tender laughter, full of compassion. The final aspect of the teaching is the notion of listening, which tends to be quite difficult. The clown exists only in the presence of the audience; therefore she must always be listening to the audience’s reactions. In her oscillation between the attempt to succeed and the flop, the true objective is to win the attention of the audience. If the audience loses interest in the clown, the clown effectively dies; she has no more reason to be on the stage. Her only motivation is to be loved by the audience. It is the desperate desire of all of us, as human beings, to be loved for who we are.22 THE BOUFFON Lecoq was interested in the bouffon, not so much as a medieval jester or acrobat whose goal was to distract the royal court, but as a bearer of uncomfortable truths. We have seen how King Lear fell and was stripped down to becoming a tragic clown. By his side was the fool, a character whose role was not to entertain the king, but on the contrary, to tell him what he refused to hear. In the Shakespearian tragedy, the fool is the only one who tells the king what everyone sees, but nobody says: King Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool: Lear’s shadow

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

25

(Act 1, Scene 4)23 The answer of the Fool is enigmatic: Who is the shadow? Is it King Lear’s own shadow, meaning that King Lear can find the answer only in himself or it is the Fool, following King Lear like a shadow? Anyway, it is the shadow that will reveal the truth. Lecoq initiated his research on the bouffon in a similar manner, not as a mere entertainer, but as a detector of embarrassing truths. Quite quickly, he realised that telling people the truth to their face was a difficult undertaking. It is a violent and malevolent action. Spectators felt it as an aggressive act, so they unconsciously protected themselves by rejecting the character in front of them. Recognising this, Lecoq drew from the concept of the deformed fool and introduced it into his research. Once the character was deformed and made non-human, the spectators could accept what the bouffon was telling them. Because of this, a crucial aspect of Lecoq’s work on the bouffon is the transformation of the body, as if an enormous mask is placed on the body instead of on the face. It is the invisible cloak becoming tangible. This transformation of the body allows the bouffon to be presented as a character existing outside of society, an ex nihilo creature, observing what stands before her.24 And what she sees are the contradictions, the falseness, the double morality of human beings. Because the bouffon does not participate in society, she does not judge what she sees. She simply enjoys watching and pointing out the ambivalence and hypocrisy of humanity. From this detached vantage point, the bouffon can offer a cruel but honest outlook on reality.25 Lecoq did not reveal the sources of his research, so it is difficult to know exactly which tradition inspired him. Lecoq explained that he was interested in exploring those who make fun of everything, who mock what they see. But where did this interest come from? He does not mention it, but it is possible to suggest some hypotheses. The first one is the satires of ancient Greece; during the Dionysian festivities, after presenting three tragedies, the cycle concluded with a satire based on those tragedies, in which the sacred tragedy was mocked by a satire presenting an intertwining of sacred and profane. The idea of a character who oscillates between the sacred and the profane resembles the idea of the bouffon who ridicules everything. Lecoq often insisted on this idea of opposition, of the bouffon as a counterpoint to tragedy. He even claimed that the more irreverent we are, the nearer we are to the sacred, as if the sacred needed ignominy and vice versa. This is, in a certain sense, cruel laughter, laughing at the tragic. As a second hypothesis, we must refer to the play, School for Buffoons, published in 1942 by the Belgian author, Michel de Ghelderode. The play is about a group of bouffons on their last day of bouffon school. Their excitement has reached its peak as they wait for their teacher to reveal the ultimate secret of the bouffon. The ultimate secret revealed in the end is that the essence of the bouffon is cruelty.26

26

Chapter 2

Lecoq’s vision of the bouffon is very close to this idea. What is both fascinating and frightening about the bouffon is the character’s cruel attitude towards human society. However, to reduce the bouffon to the notion of cruelty or to the mere opposite of the sacred would be to neglect one of its most mysterious dimensions. A striking similarity exists between the bouffon as a symbol of carnival celebrations and the figure of the shaman. The bouffon, along with the fool and the jester, are typical carnivalesque figures that destabilise established social norms through laughter and mockery. Considered hybrids, the bouffon, the fool and the jester wore hoods with donkey ears, which symbolised both inanity and sensuality. Bells were often sewn onto their clothes, and they usually carried a stick topped with the head of the fool, the marotte. They frequently used fur, fake beards and monstrous masks or heavy makeup. These three figures of fool, jester and bouffon, so deeply embedded in medieval iconography, find a common ancestor in the myth of the wild man. Similarly, the shaman costume is also characterised by animal attributes representing the spirits that accompany him on his spiritual journeys. Moreover, these figures are characterised by another similar feature: they both speak a language different from that of ordinary people. The bouffon, the fool and the jester were able to manipulate their voices and used a combination of languages and dialects mixed with meaningless words or sounds in a kind of reinvented, onomatopoeic language: the so-called glossolalia or grammelot. During his initiation, the shaman learns a secret language that is used to communicate with animal spirits and other inhabitants of the spirit world. Another important aspect of the fool, the bouffon and the jester is physical impairment such as lameness or blindness. According to the traditional interpretation, these physical impairments are exactly the reason why they became what they are since they are not able to do other types of jobs. However, we must not forget that these kinds of physical impairments have deeper symbolic significance: limping or other forms of ambulatory arrhythmias are linked to the ritualistic journey to the Afterlife;27 in many cultures—for instance in the Germanic culture, in the Japanese tradition, in Native American legends—an irregular walk is interpreted as a power that facilitates transmigration to the world of the dead, a characteristic practice of the shaman.28 We can wonder if these deformations pushed people to become bouffons, fools, or jesters, or if, conversely, these deformations were the conditio sine qua non for becoming a bouffon, fool, or jester. Lecoq’s answer is clear: the deformed body is an essential attribute. This means that the bouffon has special powers; she is able to “fly” like the spirit-journeying shaman, to observe society from on high. This power gifts her with vast, almost arcane, knowledge. Even though it seems that there are strong similarities between the shaman and the bouffon, a radical difference separates them: the shaman brings vision about the afterlife

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

27

Figure 2.1 Pax Americana, Bouffon performance by Giovanni Fusetti. Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, MFA class 2008. Photo: Terrence McNally.

or spirit world, while the bouffon brings visions of the very world in which we live. Nevertheless, the bouffon has seen that which the spectators do not want to see. Therefore, the gaze of the spectators is not a gaze of compassion for a deformed person, but a gaze of terror: she could say something that they do not want to hear. THE PEDAGOGY OF THE BOUFFON, AS DESCRIBED BY GIOVANNI FUSETTI If, with the clown, the actor’s work is to accept what is happening inside her, with the bouffon, the actor needs to accept that we can laugh at anything. She must accept everything that is part of our human heritage, even the most horrible events, like Nazism, and accept that we can laugh at them. We are human, and, therefore, we are also all that humanity has done. This seems easy to say but embodying a sadistic character can create many problems for the conscience. And yet, spectators appreciate when someone dares to explore such territories. Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar in 1992 for playing a serial killer. This seems paradoxical; how is it possible to celebrate someone who embodied a psychopath? It means that he touched something deep within us, something we have trouble speaking about. The bouffon notably explores these kinds of shadows that we find so difficult to acknowledge.

28

Chapter 2

Unlike the clown, the bouffon feels good, very good. She is curious and everything she sees interests and excites her. If the clown finds herself on the edge of an inner ravine, the bouffon is like a trampolinist who is aroused by everything she sees. Unlike the clown, the bouffon needs a story; she is an excellent imitator. From this point of view, the bouffon is a narrative convention: what matters is what she says. The bouffon is monotonous, she is always excited and that’s all, so she needs a story. The clown carries within herself a complex tragic dimension, she carries her story within her. But this does not mean that the bouffon falls into the category of fictional characters in Aristotelian drama. In the bouffon, there is no unity of time, no unity of character, no linear development of the narrative. The bouffon incorporates everything, jumping from one character to another, from one contradiction to another. Everything is interesting, but there are different levels of interest: Putin is more interesting than a chair. In working with the bouffon, once you find the [deformed] body, the scavenging eye, and the state of excitement, it is necessary to take a moment for research and writing. The bouffon must know the subject she aims to ridicule very well, otherwise she is too quickly drained. The bouffon sees where there is energy and then takes pleasure in the opposite energy. The bouffon looks for opposites, for the grotesque, which comes from “grotta” (cave) derived from the Greek “kryptè,” that which is hidden, that which is chthonic. So, as I said, the bouffon excites herself, she enjoys imitating and so she seems close to the world of children, to the joy of playing, of pretending “I’ll be this and you be . . . ” In this way, the bouffon establishes a convention: she is 100% bouffon and, at the same time, she is 100% the character she is imitating. We can perceive a similarity to Brecht’s idea of distancing [Verfremdungseffekt]. And like Brecht, the bouffon wields the power of social critique without passing any moral judgement, allowing the spectators to become aware of their own inconsistencies. The bouffon, in their excitement, which we could also describe as a state of arousal stems from their direct descendancy from the Greek Satyrs and fertility rituals charging them with a strong, sexual energy, where playing the game becomes an act of pleasure. It is important to underline that even if the bouffon stages terrible themes, she does not judge them, she uses them for the pleasure of playing, which renders the situation even more cruel. It is like when children imitate their parents by merely imitating domestic violence without judging it. Therefore, in working with the bouffon, we begin by imitating the kids who are imitating the parents. Then we imitate the politicians. And then we go on, covering all the themes that are considered delicate or taboo. I begin teaching the bouffon by exploring two elements: the mimetic body and the joy of playing. Acting, in terms of the bouffon, should be considered a form of play. The mimetic body is what Lecoq called “mimodynamique,” the ability to imitate all the dynamics of reality: I see a table and I become the table, I see yellow and I become the dynamic of yellow. The joy of acting is this ability to take pleasure in imitating everything like a child. On top of that, we add this gaze that eats everything: the bouffon’s eye sees everything and knows everything.

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

Unlike the clown, who sees everything, but knows nothing, not understanding why she fails. If the clown’s gaze is directed inward, in the sense of being very receptive, the gaze of the bouffon is directed towards the audience, it looks into the audience. The bouffon sees everything, takes it all in, and inflates. In French, bouffer can be translated as bingeing or eating too much. In Italian, the word bouffon comes from buffo or buffa, which is associated with the notion of a prank or a joke. The word buffa has origins in the concept of blowing or puffing up, buffare in old Italian. Buffa is like the wind that blows in vain. Something buffo (something funny) is something inflated. Therefore, the bouffon eats reality and swells up. Here we can again notice the difference between the clown and the bouffon. The clown works with the notion of stripping down, while the bouffon works with the notion of swelling up, of becoming deformed from taking in too much. I explain the concept of body deformation to the students from two points of view. The first is of psychological significance. In the human body, all that is not expressed remains impressed: it becomes physical structure, or, in more theatrical terms, it becomes a character, which literally means engraved. For example, greed is a force that affects not only a person’s decisions and actions, but also a person’s body. Greed transforms and bends the body. And this makes the character grotesque. The second explanation I give is the idea of eating too much, bouffer in French and abbuffarsi in Italian. The deformation of the body is an important moment in working with the bouffon. Students imagine a deformed body and then try to apply it to their own bodies by adding prostheses, humps, or by hiding certain parts. The deformation becomes a sort of full-body mask that the student applies to her own body. Unlike the clown, whose physicality comes from the exaggeration of her own non-neutrality, here the physicality is a corporeal mask. If the red nose is the smallest mask, the bouffon, conversely, wears the biggest mask, so big that it covers the entire body. So the bouffon takes everything in and then shits everything out. It is a work that is essentially political because it deals with the spectators as members of a community, with specific roles and rules. This also explains why the bouffon moves in gangs. Lecoq uses the term band for a group of bouffons. If the clown is fundamentally alone, the bouffon is at her best as part of a gang. The bouffon is like a ferocious and hungry animal, and her preferred prey are human contradictions, hypocrisies, and inconsistencies. The bouffon’s gang must be dangerous. The spectators must think, “Please don’t give her something delicate.” But the bouffons actually deal with extremely delicate themes: abortion, human trafficking, bioethics, landmines. They see that a government performs acts of charity and then sells weapons; they see the nationalists shouting against immigrants during the day and then going with African or Asian sex workers at night. The bouffons enjoy people’s contradictions. It is also a dynamic of movement: they work with opposites, high and low. They put societal dilemmas on display and then let the spectators decide what to do. The worst thing for a bouffon is to meet the neutral mask: there is nothing to amplify, nothing to ridicule.

29

30

Chapter 2

Lecoq, in his journey, typically approached the bouffon either right after tragedy or just before. He could not decide whether to consider the bouffon as a preparation for tragedy or as a conclusion to it. Lecoq liked to highlight the passage from the sacred to the profane, as in ancient Greece with the satires that followed the tragedies. But, unlike Lecoq, I see the bouffon as the end of the journey (instead of the clown, where the actor must put herself on stage). The bouffon is a very old character; before the clown existed there was the bouffon. They were born with the Greek tragedies; they participated in the birth of Western theatre. This sacred-profane, high-low binomial has been reinforced by monotheistic religion. In other cultures, this vertical vision of the world is less present. The divine (the sacred) exists in all directions; there is no diabolical underground, as in the Christian world. With the clear direction of a vertical axis, at the top of which lies the sacred, the bouffon can easily search for the opposite and desecrate the divine. In Lecoq’s analysis of space, he explains that tragedy develops a vertical relationship to the sky, while the bouffon comes from the opposite: the nadir. However, the figure of the desecrator is not a European prerogative. In other societies, there is the trickster.29 But the trickster is slightly different from the European bouffon. The trickster knows the social rules but does the opposite. The trickster wants to disrupt, but with virtuous intentions. There is a kind of morality. The bouffon, on the other hand, does not protect anyone. The bouffon wants to poke a stick between the wheels just to see what happens. Sometimes the audience gets offended and she is delighted: she wants to offend as much as possible. The bouffon, in my opinion, is the most difficult character to perform. A meticulous observer, the bouffon must be able to imitate any kind of human behaviour. In other words, the bouffon must be able to perform in any theatrical style. The bouffon becomes a total actor, one who needs to possess tremendous skills. In order to create a moving and incisive satire, the bouffon must be able to utilise all the different styles: grotesque, melodrama, tragedy, pantomime, psychological realism, clown, commedia dell’arte, theatre of the absurd, a bit of everything thrown into the pot . . . I would like to conclude by highlighting two important aspects. The first is that the clown and the bouffon are both tied to tragedy: the clown carries the tragic dimension within herself, while the bouffon needs tragedy in order to ridicule it. The second aspect is a consequence of the first: with the clown, the audience laughs at her, at her stupidity, but in the case of the bouffon, it is the bouffon who laughs at the audience.30

LAUGHTER TODAY In conclusion to this chapter, it is fair to ask ourselves: what is the place of laughter in our society and what roles do clowns and bouffons play today? The sixteenth century decree to ban the fools and bouffons from noble courts is a key moment that transformed our perception of laughter, the act that

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

31

caused laughter to lose its mocking and dangerous quality and to become civilised, tending towards irony. And perhaps this civilised laughter finds its way into Bergson’s study, where laughter is perceived as a social regulator. In fact, Bergson’s study is emptied of any disturbing or dangerous conception of laughter. In his study, laughter is an apparatus that on the one hand prevents humans from becoming mechanical but on the other hand imposes amalgamation; a person cannot stand outside the social community, for her simple presence outside the community threatens the community. It is precisely for this reason that Lecoq’s work has been extremely important. The laughter that Lecoq’s clown provokes is an expression of the desire for freedom. When Giovanni Fusetti speaks about the clown’s stupidity and the fact that the clown frees us from our fear of being stupid in front of other people, this can also be construed as allowing us the possibility that we can stop trying to seem intelligent and perfect. We have the right to be imperfect and incompetent. The clown that plunges into her own tragedy and strips herself naked on stage, is simply claiming the right to exist the way she is, without being obliged to submit to the rules imposed by society. The clown, therefore, provides us with a glimmer of freedom. Naturally, this desire for freedom conflicts with a reality that requires us to play the role of civilised and rational human beings. This is the tragic dimension of laughter. As for the bouffon, after the decree banning this controversial character, it seemed she had disappeared. In reality, we should not look for her in today’s noble courts, but in the new courts of power, such as television. For instance, in Italy today, Mario Crozza embodies elements of the bouffon: he ridicules all those who fight to gain access to power, and he does so through a television program. Another media bouffon is Sacha Baron Cohen, better known as Borat or Brüno, who uses both film and television to highlight society’s hypocrisies. We would like to end this chapter by relating a personal story that helps to explain the need to reappropriate the heritage of the bouffon. Leading a workshop on comedy recently in Palestine and, specifically, commedia dell’arte, we were surprised that none of the participants were attempting to use commedia dell’arte to speak about Palestinian reality, about the occupation, about what they had to endure. Instead, the actors tried to be funny without making reference to the reality in which they lived. The work remained artificial and flat. After some days, we realised that the reality of the Palestinian people is that they must constantly control themselves—what they do, what they say. Israeli soldiers are everywhere, and it is enough for a Palestinian to answer an Israeli soldier in an inappropriate way for him or her to find him- or herself in trouble. Therefore, Palestinians cannot speak directly. They must always control themselves. A form of constant censorship hangs over their daily life. And this censorship was also present in the work with the masks. So, we used

32

Chapter 2

something from the world of the bouffon: reversed morality.31 Suddenly, the actors found a way to speak about their own reality in corrosive, cruel and hilarious ways. An element of the tradition of the bouffon afforded them the opportunity to laugh about this reality dominated by occupation: they could laugh at the Israelis and at themselves. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amateis, Margherita. “Ai confini dell’umano: Selvaggi, Folli, Orsi. Tradizioni amerindiane ed europee medievali.” In Uomini e orsi: Morfologia del selvaggio, edited by Enrico Comba and Daniele Omezzano. Torino: Accademia University Press, 2015. Aristophanes. The Clouds. Translated by William James Hickie. London: Henry G. Bohne, 1853; Project Gutenberg, 2013. Accessed March 29, 2022. https:​//​www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/2562​/2562​-h​/2562​-h​.htm. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. Grove Press: New York, 1958. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1911; Project Gutenberg, 2002. Accessed March 29, 2022. http:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/4352​ /4352​-h​/4352​-h​.htm. Boso, Carlo. Interview with Davide Giovanzana at the A.I.D.A.S. (Académie International Des Arts du Spectacle), Paris, September 5, 2007. Byland, Pierre. Interview with Davide Giovanzana. Burlesk Center, Locarno, August 25, 2008. Callow, Phillip. Chekhov: The Hidden Ground. Edited by Ivan R. Dee; Chicago, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Fusetti, Giovanni. Interview with Davide Giovanzana. International Bouffon Workshop, Teatteri Metamorfoosi, Helsinki, June 10, 2015. Guénoun, Denis. Actions et Acteurs, Raison du drame sur scene. Paris: Bélin;2005. Ghelderode, Michel de. L’école des bouffons. Espace Nord, 2018. Ginzburg, Carlo. Storia Notturna, una decifrazione del sabba. Milano: Adelphi, 1989. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. New York: Norton, 1974. Lecoq, Jacques. Le Corps poétique. Arles: Acte-Sud, 1999. Morreall, John. “Philosophy of Humor.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed March 29, 2022. https:​//​ plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/humor​/. Nietzsche, Friederich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by William August Haussmann. Fritzsch 1872; Project Gutenberg, 2016. Accessed March 29, 2022. https:​//​www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/51356​/51356​-h​/51356​-h​.htm. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Vols. 5 and 6 of Plato in Twelve Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925.

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

33

Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Vol. 3 of Plato in Twelve Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1925. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Vlastos, Gregory. “Socratic Irony.” The Classical Quarterly vol. 37, No. 1 (1987), 79–96. Wright, Barton. Clowns of the Hopi: Tradition Keepers and Delight Makers. Walnut, CA: Kiva Publishing, 2004.

NOTES 1. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, section 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1911; Project Gutenberg, 2002), accessed March 29, 2022, http:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/4352​ /4352​-h​/4352​-h​.htm 2. Jacques Lecoq, 1921–1999, was a French theatre pedagogue best known for his teaching methods in physical theatre. His pedagogy is characterised by an attitude of constant research. In fact, during his career he constantly explored new theatrical territories and experimented with new forms of the body’s expressivity. 3. When dealing with comedy we (the authors of the chapter) face a dilemma regarding terminology. We need to distinguish between comedy as something funny, something that makes people laugh, and comedy as the genre or the form in which it appears. The latter aspect of comedy has been considered by many philosophers before Bergson, and usually it has been opposed to tragedy. Bergson instead focused on the mechanism that makes someone laugh: the experience of something funny. In this sense, his approach combines phenomenological and structuralist approaches. This overlapping of meanings of the term “comedy” pushed us to use different words (humor, laughter) in order to differentiate between the two sets of implications. 4. Plato. The Republic, trans. Harold N. Fowler, vols. 5 and 6 of Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925), 223d. 5. Totò, (1898–1967), whose full name was Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi De Curtis di Bisanzio, was also named “the prince of laughter.” He was an Italian actor, comedian, writer, poet, singer and lyricist, and was commonly referred to as the most popular Italian performer of all time, best known for his funny and often cynical stage presence, and for many successful films shot from the 1940s to the 1960s, all still regularly aired on TV. He also worked with many iconic Italian film directors in dramatic/poetic roles. 6. Phillip Callow, Chekhov, The Hidden Ground (Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 1998). 7. The traditional structure of the commedia dell’arte scenario confirms this idea of tragedy as the backbone of comedy. In fact, in commedia scenarios, the protagonists undergo terrible experiences that seem bound to lead to catastrophic endings. The presence of a deus ex machina transforms the tragedy into a comedy. A similar

34

Chapter 2

scheme is used by Molière, and by Shakespeare to the point that even today it is not clear if the play Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy or a comedy. 8. Plato. The Republic, trans. Harold N. Fowler, vols. 5 and 6 of Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925), Book 10. 9. For further reading on the ambivalence of Plato’s text, see Gregory Vlastos, “Socratic Irony,” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 37, No. 1 (1987), 79–96. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,1994). 11. Denis Guénoun, Actions et Acteurs, Raison du drame sur scène (Paris: Bélin, 2005). 12. Giovanni Fusetti was a teacher alongside Jacques Lecoq (1997–1999) at the Lecoq School in Paris. Fusetti then opened his own school in Padova and then in Firenze, where he teaches the Lecoq pedagogy. 13. Jacques Lecoq considered the two years of the course he offered as a voyage or journey, and we will use the term voyage each time we refer to Lecoq’s pedagogy. The notion of the voyage is not only applied to the student’s experience during their two-year education with Lecoq, but also to the development of the Lecoq pedagogy itself. In fact, Lecoq did not consider his school to be a rigid institution. He saw it rather as a laboratory for experimenting with new forms, for questioning how to do theatre, for observing life. His pedagogy was in constant evolution. From his initial point of departure—commedia dell’arte and research on the mask—over a period of twenty years of research he developed a complex and stimulating pedagogy focusing on analysis of the body and movement. 14. Pierre Byland followed Lecoq’s classes from 1959 to 1962, and from 1964 to 1976 he taught at the Lecoq School. He is a renowned clown, performing all over the world as a clown duo with Philippe Gaulier. He teaches clowning at international workshops and at his Burlesk Center in Cavigliano, Switzerland. 15. Pierre Byland, interview with Davide Giovanzana at the Burlesk Center, Locarno, August 25, 2008. 16. Carlo Boso, interview with Davide Giovanzana at A.I.D.A.S. (Académie International Des Arts du Spectacle), Paris, September 5, 2007. Boso is an actor, theatre director and pedagogue. He graduated from the Piccolo Teatro di Milano under the guidance of Giorgio Strehler, where he specialised in commedia dell’arte, and became famous throughout the world directing commedia dell’arte shows. Nowadays he leads the AIDAS theatre school in Paris, with a strong focus on commedia dell’arte. 17. Giorgio Strehler (1921–1997) was an important theatre director who deeply influenced the European theatre scene. His production of Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters in 1947 was not only the longest running play in Italian theatre, but also a manifesto for the ascendancy of the theatre director figure over the playwright. 18. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974). 19. Friederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William August Haussmann (Fritzsch, 1872; Project Gutenberg, 2016), accessed March 27, 2022, https:​//​www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/51356​/51356​-h​/51356​-h​.htm.

The Two Laughters of Lecoq

35

20. Nietzsche’s discourse on tragedy is, in reality, an attack on Socratic thinking. However, Nietzsche’s discourse attacks also the Aristotelian model of drama, which is built around the notion of action. 21. The neutral mask is a pedagogical mask developed by Lecoq in collaboration with Amleto Sartori. In the pedagogy of Lecoq, this mask has a special place, not only because it is introduced at the beginning of the pedagogical journey, but also because it is the foundation of Lecoq’s theatrical work. For him, if the actor is not able to find this neutrality, he or she will always be a slave to his or her body’s habits. Metaphorically speaking, the neutral mask is like creating a blank page on which the actor can start writing. 22. Giovanni Fusetti, interview with Davide Giovanzana during the international bouffon workshop organised by Teatteri Metamorfoosi, Helsinki, June 10, 2015. 23. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). 24. This notion of being an outsider creates passionate discussions among the teachers of Lecoq’s pedagogy. Who is the bouffon—a homeless person? A foreigner? An alien? A disabled person? Giovanni Fusetti indicates that this ongoing discussion on the nature of the bouffon demonstrates that it is, in any case, a creature that stands outside the norms, outside the social realm, outside of ethics—someone who is detached. 25. Lecoq subsequently developed three types of bouffons as a result of his research: the mysterious, the grotesque and the fantastic. The mysterious attacks religion, the grotesque deals with our everyday life and the fantastic is concerned with technology and scientific experimentation. 26. Many researchers have tried to connect the text of Ghelderode with Antonin Artaud. In fact, a few years earlier, in 1938, Antonin Artaud published The Theatre and Its Double, where he also presents the notion of cruelty. But Artaud’s cruelty is directed towards the actor who undertakes a difficult work for the purpose of transcendental research. The cruelty presented by Ghelderode seems to be directed towards the observation of human beings. 27. Carlo Ginzburg, Storia Notturna, una decifrazione del sabba (Milano: Adelphi, 1989). 28. Numerous myths associated with shamanistic practices invite us to acknowledge the distinctly human characteristic of symmetrical walking. Lameness or deformity seem to be necessary attributes for entering into the presence of the divine, due to the fact that it is an experience that goes beyond human limits. The human being is characterised by an upright bipedal stature. That which alters this perception that humans have about themselves becomes particularly suitable for expressing something that goes beyond human limits. It is a symbolic transformation of the human, corporeal experience. This semi-human therefore seems to be a mediator between the human world and the world of spirits or gods. For further reading see Margherita Amateis, “Ai confini dell’umano: Selvaggi, Folli, Orsi. Tradizioni amerindiane ed europee medievali,” in Uomini e orsi: morfologia del selvaggio, eds. Enrico Comba and Daniele Omezzano (Torino: Accademia University Press, 2015).

36

Chapter 2

29. Barton Wright points out that the figure of the trickster is popular in North American mythologies. The Koyemshis (the famous clown-fool rituals belonging to the Zuni society) embody the children of a mythical hero who fathered them by having an incestuous relationship with his sister. They wear masks and behave like bouffons. Sometimes they speak and act in reverse. They also have divinatory and magical powers. They perturb, transgress and subvert, and they laugh about it. They express the contradictory nature of society. It would be possible to claim that by questioning the fundamentals of society (and thus reaffirming and reinforcing them) they accomplish a vital function. Barton Wright, Clowns of the Hopi: Tradition Keepers and Delight Makers (Walnut CA: Kiva Publishing, 2004). 30. Giovanni Fusetti, interview with Davide Giovanzana during the international bouffon workshop organised by Teatteri Metamorfoosi, Helsinki, June 10, 2015. 31. Reverse morality is a mechanism of the bouffon based on the reversal of values. Instead of judging a situation as we would normally, the norms are changed. For instance, when a woman discovers her husband with a lover, instead of getting angry because he is cheating on her, she gets angry because he is dressed badly and does not even offer flowers to his lover.

Chapter 3

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy Fred Dalmasso

“The world fits him [the comic figure] like a glove.” —Walter Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence”1

After adapting his romanopéra L’Echarpe rouge (1979) and writing The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts (1984), French philosopher Alain Badiou turned to comedy.2 His Ahmed cycle is composed of Ahmed le subtil: Farce en trois actes, written in 1984 and staged for the first time in 1994; Ahmed the Philosopher followed by Ahmed se fâche: Comédie en quatre mouvements, both written and staged in 1995; Les Citrouilles, written and staged in 1996, and Ahmed revient, written and staged in 2018.3 Written by Badiou at the same time as Ahmed le subtil, “Rhapsody for the Theatre” is a collage of brief notes or pamphlets that read like a fragmented commentary on the art of theatre but develops the premise of a reflection on the relationship between theatre, philosophy and politics through the dialectics of the theatrical State, the ethics of play and the subject-spectator. In the preface to his translation of “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” Bruno Bosteels remarks that “one of the most intriguing aspects of this treatise is the way in which it moves between philosophy and theatre to the point of opening up a space of indiscernibility between the two.”4 He also points out that some of the dialogue between “Me” and the “Empiricist” in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” could well be part of the Ahmed cycle.5 The reverse is also true as some scenes from the comedies Ahmed se fâche or Les Citrouilles would not be out of place among Badiou’s theoretical writings on theatre. Finally, Badiou’s most recent (third) volume of Being and Event: The immanence of Truths, includes numerous 37

38

Chapter 3

“theatrical interludes” in the form of entire sequences extracted from Ahmed the Philosopher.6 Throughout his work, Badiou juxtaposes philosophy and theatre, but he refrains from explicitly establishing connections between the two. This is perhaps an invitation to readers to dialectically address the juncture, but there is also in Badiou a determination to prevent suturing philosophy to art, which he considers, along with love, mathematics and politics, to be one of philosophy’s conditions but not a philosophical discourse in itself.7 While for Badiou dialectics always means one divides into two, I propose instead to navigate and at times, bridge the gap between philosophy and theatre by exploring how the use of the mask in the staging of his comedies rehearses some of his most recent philosophical concepts.8 Ahmed the Philosopher stands out compared to the other plays of the Ahmed cycle because of its format and its content as it looks like an exhaustive program for a course in philosophy.9 In the play’s preface, Badiou explains the play’s subtitle as “34 short plays for children and everyone else” by stating that “[t]o equip children with all the resources of language and thought, to do so with laughter, is yet another way of tricking the powers that be.”10 To an extent, all the plays of the Ahmed cycle combine didactics and comedy. For Badiou, “comedy reveals the world of the rich and the powerful from the violent, ironic and critical perspective of the oppressed and the poor.”11 He goes as far as declaring that “comedy is nothing other than the incomparable present of equality, even . . . of communism” and explains that “comedy fulfils its political function (in the final analysis, the people against the State) [in] the form of the intrigue.”12 In the Ahmed cycle, in order to adapt what Badiou sees as “the classic combinatory” of comedy, from Plautus’s Roman plays to Molière’s comedies—the play’s intrigue combined with “the intrigues of the poor, of the young, of women against fathers, the rich, and the old”—Badiou undertakes what he calls a hypertranslation.13 As pointed out by Kenneth Reinhard, this process might combine formal restructuration, universalisation, conceptual displacement and contemporisation of the original dramatic material.14 While Ahmed le subtil is adapted from Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin, Ahmed the Philosopher departs from Molière’s plot. It retains some of the characters of Ahmed le subtil but leaves a lot to improvisation if not in terms of text at least in terms of movement. For example, in sequence 1, titled “Nothing,” the stage instructions state, “Ahmed’s improvisations on nothing. He tries to make himself look as narrow and as shrunken as possible, as if he were disappearing on stage.”15 The sequel to Ahmed the Philosopher, Ahmed se fâche, is a play-within-a-play that stages performances of Ahmed the Philosopher with interruptions by audience members (notably a theatre critic), rebellions from Ahmed’s understudies and interventions, among others, from the theatre director and even from the theatre’s fire officer. Based

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

39

on Aristophanes’s The Frogs, the fourth comedy of the Ahmed cycle, Les Citrouilles, is in the same vein and consists of a collage of more or less distorted quotes from Brecht, Claudel and Pirandello.16 To an extent, Les Citrouilles is close to saturation in terms of dramatic mise-en-abîme with Ahmed visiting a theatrical equivalent of Dante’s inferno desperately asking canonical characters and dead playwrights where he can find Molière’s character Scapin, only to be told at the end: “Scapin? But you are Scapin! . . . Scapin, but he is in the wood of your mask!”17 In an interview with Chantal Boiron, Badiou explains that apart from the first play, Ahmed le subtil, the rest of the cycle has been written for a predetermined theatrical situation, with a group of actors, a director and a specific theatre configuration based on the Commedia dell’Arte.18 However, throughout the Ahmed cycle, only the actor playing Ahmed wears a half-mask, one especially created for the original production by Erhard Stiefel and inspired by Commedia dell’Arte but not clearly identifiable as one of its traditional stock characters. The other characters form what could be considered a commedia-inspired typical cross section of contemporary French society: for example, “the stupid racist, Moustache; the bourgeois congresswoman, Madame Pompestan; the gabby and pretentious intellectual, Rhubarb; a young hooligan from the housing project, Camille.”19 Badiou builds upon an already mediated adaptation of commedia characters and scenarios found in Molière. The “original” Brighella mask is passed on to Scapin in Molière and so to Badiou’s Ahmed—an even more diluted version of “the ghost of” Brighella. Throughout the Ahmed cycle—particularly in Ahmed se fâche but also in the most recent play Ahmed revient—Badiou questions the art of the theatre. Along with a reflection on acting and spectating, the constant questioning of the different roles in the plays in turn enables a questioning of the different roles people play in society. As a non-caricatural character, Ahmed is paradoxically perceived by the caricatural characters in the plays as a caricatural character himself—for example, by the extreme-right sympathiser Moustache, but also by the centrist Pompestan. This mirrors how the “Arab” living in France might be perceived—a categorisation Badiou wants to address by shifting this alleged racialised identity to a more sociopolitical identity based on the specific socioeconomic category of the migrant-worker. In the Ahmed cycle but also in his older plays L’Écharpe rouge and Incident at Antioch, Badiou presents in fact the migrant-worker as a possible support for collective political subjectivisation. In L’Écharpe rouge, the success of the emancipatory movement in the city lies within the ability of the unionised workers and the students to embrace the migrant-workers’ cause. In Incident at Antioch, Badiou also pins the hope for change upon a figure of the migrant-worker, which comes to embody the struggle for emancipation.20

40

Chapter 3

However, Badiou does not invite the audience to cathartically embrace the cause of the migrant-worker but to organise around the idea the migrantworker comes to represent. Badiou’s plays proclaim that politics—which for him, has the sole objective of the demise of the State—can only occur as such if a collective gathers around the idea that because of neoliberalism’s current hold on the world, we are ultimately all migrant-workers. Badiou remarks that the masked figure of the migrant in his comedies is universal and as such has the potential to fend off institutional discrimination: Why Ahmed? Why an Algerian? . . . If I had been a US citizen, he would have been Mexican. . . . and if I was Italian, he might have simply been Sicilian or Sardinian, Calabrian or even Neapolitan? In any case, it would always be the story of a proletarian from the South, one whom the well-off people in the North depend upon for their economic production and lifestyle, one whose freedom has to be constantly wrung from resentful and fearful scapegoaters. Hence the need for the proletarian’s resilience, intelligence, tenacious vitality and ultimately linguistic and social virtuosity.21

As in his first two plays, in the comedies of the Ahmed cycle, Badiou points to political subjectivisation as a process that unfolds from the migrant-worker’s standpoint. However, by representing the migrant-worker on stage, Badiou incurs the risk of contributing to the sometimes caricatural portrayal of migrants as either victims or potential terrorists in the arts and the media. This is where a commedia-inspired half-mask proves very useful to Badiou as it provides a way to somehow elude representation. To an extent, rather than accentuating satire, the mask here simplifies the portrayal of the character with the aim of clarifying the situation Ahmed finds himself in. In this chapter, I will argue that rather than an escalation of representation, the mask worn by the actor playing Ahmed is precisely a withdrawal from representation. I will focus first on how Ahmed’s mask in Badiou’s Molièresque comedies contributes to the materialisation of Badiou’s theatre-idea of politics by explaining how for him, comedy amounts to a dialectical disentanglement of a given socioeconomic situation. Considering comedy from the perspective of Badiou’s fragmentary and elusive theory of theatre will then lead on to analysing the Ahmed cycle as a draft blueprint for his theory of subjectivisation and the commedia-inspired mask as a placeholder for the inexist[a]nt subject of politics.

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

41

MATERIALITY OF THE STAGE VS. THEATRICALITY OF THE STATE I would argue that when applied to the comedies of the Ahmed cycle, Badiou’s dramatic theory developed in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” anticipates his definition of materialist dialectics—“there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths,” theatre-truths.22 His practice of theatre and especially his adaptation of Molière and Commedia dell’Arte components pulls his reflection on theatre towards the materiality of masks, props and bodies on stage as attested, for example, by the stage direction in sequence 11 of Ahmed the Philosopher titled “The Big and the Little”: “A whole improvised game in which Ahmed measures with his stick the exact height of Rhubarb’s ass.”23 While Badiou declares in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” that “[all] theatre is a theatre of Ideas” and develops the concept of theatre-idea in Handbook of Inaesthetics, in his article “Théâtre et Philosophie,” Badiou does not use the term theatre-idea but the syntagm vérité-théâtre (theatre-truth) to designate the same notion: “Theatre produces in itself, and by itself, a singular and irreducible effect of truth. There is a theatre-truth, which cannot occur, except on the stage.”24 This seems to be a move away from a theatre of Ideas in Plato’s sense to reassert theatre as a material thinking process—an immanent thinking-through of the possibility that theatre can deliver some truths. For Badiou, truths are an integral part of materialist dialectics—which Badiou opposes to democratic materialism that is only concerned with bodies and languages. As practical components of his theory of theatre, the comedies of the Ahmed cycle attest that truths have to be embodied to appear, even if there seems to be a tension between the bawdy interactions of Ahmed with the other characters and the notion that theatre might produce truths clarifying complex socioeconomic situations. Despite the fact that Badiou draws heavily from French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in his theory of theatre and calls the theatre text in its latent state a theatre poem, for Badiou, a theatre performance functions in the opposite way to a poem. In Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé, the poem captured the disappearance of the truth revealed a posteriori by the event, while a theatre performance forces the truths that theatre might be capable of producing to appear.25 Badiou’s theory of the event in Being and Event adopts Mallarmé’s method of subtraction, while his theory of theatre pertains more to the Mallarméan notion of déliaison (an unbinding process). Jacques Rancière stresses that “ultimately only two arts are required in Badiou’s system of the arts: the poem as affirmation, as inscription of a disappearance, and theatre as the site wherein this affirmation turns into mobilization.”26 L’Echarpe rouge and Incident at Antioch adhere more to the poem, with the inscription in both plays of the vanishing traces of what Badiou calls

42

Chapter 3

the Red Years—in other words, the Marxist emancipatory politics sequence culminating at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. However, the Ahmed cycle, albeit launched at the same time as the writing of Incident at Antioch in 1984, is a departure from the nostalgia of the idea of a specific type of political emancipation towards the mobilisation of theatre in all its materiality to affirm the possibility of reviving the idea of emancipatory politics around the comic figure of Ahmed, the migrant-worker.27 I would argue that because of the use of the mask and improvisations, the commedia-inspired plays written by Badiou are more in line with his philosophical system than his choral political tragedies. As will be analysed, not only does the mask support an ethics of play that rehearses Badiou’s theory of the subject, but improvisations also point to the importance of chance in his theory of the event and his definition of politics. However, with the character Ahmed, Badiou’s theatre is confronted with the difficulty of representing a political subject, the migrant-worker living in France, whose presence on the political scene is negated. According to Olivier Neveux, the play’s subtitle Scapin 84 alludes to the “Talbot 1984” event.28 In Peut-on penser la politique?, Badiou explains that what happened at the Talbot car factory was the sudden emergence of a so-far silent minority, the migrant-workers, who claimed their rights and disturbed the traditional opposition between the State and the unions. The voicing of the outcasts’ demands challenged the hold that the State and unions had upon the situation.29 According to Neveux, because of its date and its aim, the comedy Ahmed le subtil shows fidelity to the Talbot event, in which migrant-workers held the floor.30 Badiou writes in La Distance politique that “the hatred of immigrants was established massively, consensually, at the level of the state, from the moment when we began, in our representations of the world, to omit the workers, the figure of the workers.”31 This is precisely the reason Badiou turns to adapting the Molièresque figure of comedy, the valet Scapin, to represent the migrant-worker as standing in for all workers. To an extent, Badiou’s Ahmed cycle is an attempt to challenge the distinction of workers into different categories by staging Ahmed as eluding any social categorisation based on prejudice and thus rendering any pinpointing of the migrant impossible. Moreover, while Badiou uses the intrigue of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin as a blueprint for Ahmed le Subtil, for his other comedies he only retains the idea of a Scapin-inspired character that eludes social categories. This seems to be more in line with Commedia dell’Arte than Molière not only because Ahmed wears a mask but because the commedia character of the first zanni—the origin of Brighella and his various forms, but also of Molière’s Scapin—has traditionally operated as a cunning servant but also in multiple “roles” such as a soldier, thief, proprietor, henchman and so forth.32 In Badiou’s comedies, the masked character Ahmed

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

43

denounces as illusory (and discriminatory) any defined role (migrant-worker or even migrant) within a fixed political system. Like the first zanni, Ahmed could ultimately be anyone and as stated in Ahmed se fâche: “[E]veryone has the possibility of meeting one circumstance in life when he can discover his interior Ahmed.”33 Whilst the comic figure of Ahmed is anchored in the historical context of the 1984 strikes, it is through the materiality of the wooden mask on stage that it remains an eternal figure of dissent and protest against the fixed order of what Badiou calls the theatrical State. For Badiou, the art of theatre is irrevocably tied to the State. In “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” he rhetorically asks, “What does the theatre [in general] talk about if not the state of the State, the state of society, the state of the revolution, the state of consciousness relative to the State, to society, to the revolution, to politics?”34 However, while theatre merely duplicates the state of the situation, Theatre (capital T) “represents the representation” and reveals the state of the situation for what it is: a representation of reality orchestrated by the State.35 It exposes how the State organises the way a given socioeconomic situation is communicated and perceived—the State’s exclusive statement about that situation. For Badiou, whilst Theatre (capital T) challenges the State and its imposed reading or representation of the situation, theatre (lowercase t) refers to any theatrical enterprise that duplicates the institutionally consensual views of a given socioeconomic situation. Ultimately, theatre (lowercase t) supports the State by ensuring that the assignation of places in society (including the non-place assigned to the migrant-worker)—in other words, the state of things according to the State—remains unquestioned. In order to achieve this, theatre (lowercase t) does not reveal the state of the situation as an imposed, fabricated representation but as a natural order. It is this regimented order of representation that in the case of the Ahmed cycle comedy comes to challenge. Ahmed transgresses the assignation of places in society and disrupts the way civic life (or rather its illusion) unfolds in the imaginary suburban setting of Sarges-les-Corneilles. Joining the dots between “Rhapsody for the Theatre” and Logics of Worlds, I would argue that theatre (lowercase t) pertains to what Badiou defines in Logics of Worlds as democratic materialism, that is, to the axiom “there are only bodies and languages,” as opposed to Theatre (capital T), which would abide by the materialist dialectic’s axiom “there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.”36 In “A Theatre of Operations,” Badiou remarks that as a combination of bodies and languages, theatre might also include other components such as images or screens that present “new dimensions of the body (violence, nudity, sex, imaged deformations, etc.) or of language (soundscapes of all types, mixes of languages, music, etc.).”37 He describes the mere spectacularisation of bodies and languages as ideological demands that “reflect contemporary subjectivities rather than presenting a genuine movement for their transformation.”38

44

Chapter 3

For example, focusing on the fragile life of bodies and proclaiming the rights of the living does not necessarily provide a way to safeguard these bodies nor a solution to eradicate the violence they endure. Therefore, beyond the theatricality of bodies or languages, Badiou calls for a didactic element that would “be integrated within a larger vision of the challenges of the contemporary epoch.”39 As a diagonal character (a term that will be discussed shortly) in the Ahmed cycle, Ahmed attempts to disentangle bodies and languages from possible subreptitious ideological demands imposed on the audience by didactically reconfiguring their combination, for example in the sequence “The Subject (1)” by physically improvising on René Descartes’s motto larvatus prodeo (I come forward wearing a mask) before translating it into Arabic and starting again. Transposing this in the terms of “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” it is fair to say that the ideological demands of theatre (lowercase t) cement the state of the situation imposed by the State and are the signposts of the democratic materialism the State proclaims, whereas Theatre’s (capital T) materialist dialectics questions that illusory representation. In this respect, Badiou—who in L’Eloge du théâtre presents himself as mainly a comic playwright—distinguishes between tragedy and comedy: “Tragedy is the melancholic assumption of the markers of the State’s power, while comedy is their joyful deposition.”40 COMEDY AS AN UNBINDING PROCESS For Badiou, Theatre amounts to a disentanglement of situation (what is really happening) and state of the situation (what we are led to believe is happening). In Handbook of Inaesthetics, he argues that “theatre is an experiment— simultaneously textual and material—in simplification. Theatre separates what is mixed and confused, and this separation guides the truths of which theatre is capable.”41 This is in direct relation to his reading of Mallarmé and his appropriation of the Mallarméan concept of déliaison (unbinding). In Being and Event, Badiou stresses that Mallarmé deplored the usurpation of language for creating a money-driven illusion of reality and that his poetry reveals that what is considered to be reality is merely the result of false relations that employ language for commercial tasks alone.42 Similarly, Badiou’s theory of theatre rejects what is given as reality by the powers-that-be (the state of the situation) as a result of false relations and categorisations, and asserts that it is the role of Theatre to disentangle them. Prior to writing comedies, Badiou created the blueprint for the Ahmed cycle in “Rhapsody for the Theatre”:

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

45

The latent eternity of the text of comedy sketches a repertoire of functions . . . the old fogy of the Father, the Lover, the Parasite, the Shrew, the swanky Soldier, the Pedant, the Miser, and so forth: the whole “there is” of generic social signification. . . . The effect of temporal orientation [the disentangling] results from the fact that the functions and occupations enter into a rapport with what we might call a diagonal character, who is less a function than the zero point in which all functions are reflected as such. It is a question of the subtle slave, of the treacherous servant, charged with dissolving before our eyes the fixed connection of meanings, by means of an infinite social knowledge. A modern comedy should tell us where we are in terms of what is socially serious and in terms of its dissolution.43

Badiou mentions Ahmed le Subtil, unpublished at the time, where he “had recourse to the figure of the Arab worker to occupy this place of the diagonal.”44 With a combination of caricatural characters and a masked Ahmed that eludes representation, the Ahmed cycle provides a perfect illustration of this disentangling, but I would argue that it is only when Ahmed is portrayed with the half-mask among caricatural characters that the diagonal dialectics operates fully. With Theatre (capital T), the seeming immutability of the situation that the audience believe themselves to be in—in other words the representation of “what there is” they are made to believe in—is exposed as an arbitrary assemblage. For example, in Ahmed revient, Ahmed urges the audience to reconsider the situation they believe themselves to be in by declaring, I come here, on stage, not to act, but to ask you, dear spectators, to grant me asylum. The favour I ask of you is very simple, it is within everyone’s reach. I am going to pretend to act in front of you and if the police arrive, you, you will pretend to think that I am an actor simply doing his job in front of you while you are doing yours, that is to spectacularise the actor who acts.45

It is not simply a question of exposing theatre’s artifice here; the escalation of the theatrical illusion triggered by the character Ahmed also stretches the structure of the representation imposed by the State. Disbelief is encouraged rather than suspended, but only to a degree, since Didier Galas, the actor wearing the mask of Ahmed, is not speaking in his own name, but in the name of Ahmed. However, the audience is asked to consciously “spectacularise the actor who acts” and thus actively reinforce the illusion of theatre were it to be ruptured by the sudden intrusion of the police State. This offers an inverted mirror image of citizens who might in “real life” be complicit in enabling the police State to exist in the first place, and who might as silent witnesses spectacularise the sans-papiers (those without legal documents) threatened with being arrested by the police and deported. Through Galas/Ahmed’s voice, Badiou demonstrates here that spectators who are able to partake in a

46

Chapter 3

theatrical illusion might perhaps as easily be able to dismantle the artifice of the socioeconomic situation imposed by the State. Instead of accepting the role assigned by the State to the sans-papiers and to the police forces, spectators might indeed start questioning immigration laws and hostile environments nurtured by the State. In Ahmed revient and in the other comedies of the Ahmed cycle, the mask is the catalyst of this va-et-vient between theatre’s illusion and the illusionary state of the situation. This is taken to another level in sequence 10 of Ahmed the Philosopher titled “The Subject (1)” where the use of the mask enables an incessant game of hide-and-seek: AHMED: . . . can a mask be masked? I who am truly masked . . . can I, right here, in front of you, mask the fact I’m wearing a mask? (Improvisation on the mask of the mask.) It’s conclusive! In order to mask the mask, the best thing to do is to take it off. My bare face isn’t what’s under the mask, it’s the mask that’s been masked from the outset. You can imagine the complication! I come forward toward you masked by my face, and when I put on the mask, in reality I’m unmasking myself!46

In the same way that the mask unmasks the actor, Theatre (capital T) aims to unmask the state of the situation instituted by the State. In Badiou’s “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” the actor has to embody the tension between the representation orchestrated by the State and Theatre’s representation of that representation. This dialectical posture is what Badiou calls the ethics of play—and play here seems also to mean the way a door plays on its hinges. In fact, the place occupied by the actor mirrors the place assigned by Badiou to the subjective instance in his Theory of the Subject, as a placeholder forcing the gap between “what there is” and “what is given as what there is,” between situation and state of situation. For Badiou, there are two modalities of the subject: the first takes the form of continuous adjustments within the old world, of local adaptations of the new subject to the objects and relations of that world. The second deals with closures imposed by the world. . . . The first modality is an opening: it continually opens up a new possible closest to the possibilities of the old world. The second modality . . . is a point. In the first case, the subject presents itself as an infinite negotiation with the world, whose structures it stretches and opens. In the second case, it presents itself . . . as the obligatory forcing of the possible.47

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

47

For Badiou, in the same way the term “subject” does not refer to a substance but a process, to abide by the ethics of play, acting has to be not only interstitial, but also intangible; it is not about impersonating characters but characterising actions. In Ahmed the Philosopher, this approach is evidenced in the stage directions by the extensive use of directed improvisation involving the character Ahmed. For Badiou, Theatre (capital T) “does not exist except in the act itself.”48 Moreover, the actor abiding by the ethics of play is “charged with dissolving before our eyes the fixed connection of meanings” and has to point to the out-of-joint nature of a world where “nothing coincides with itself.”49 In Ahmed’s words that echo Badiou’s, the gap made visible between situation and state of the situation is the structural fissuring through which an event might come to disrupt the situation: “Something is bound to happen! Can’t you feel it? The world has lost its balance, it is not exactly in place. People are weird.”50 The ethics of play, with play referring here both to playfulness and leeway, reveals that the articulation of the different elements within the situation is forced and forged. In the Ahmed cycle, the half-mask reveals an ineluctable interstice between character and actor, enabling a dialectical tension between the idea of a migrant-worker as representative of all emancipatory struggles and this idea’s embodiment or materialisation in line with the ethics of play. I would argue that it is the combined dialectical playfulness of the comic mask, the commedia-inspired improvisations, and the ethics of play, that reveals that state of the situation and situation do not coincide. Abiding by the ethics of play makes an opening possible for what was unpresented or irrepresentable within the state of the situation to come to the fore. Badiou describes the ethics of play as an ethical availability that is directed against all substantialism, against all fixed conceptions of the roles, the people, or the representations. The actor exhibits onstage the evaporation of every stable essence. The decisiveness of the bodily and vocal gestures in which he or she presents himself or herself serves above all to establish, in delight and surprise, that nothing coincides with itself.51

For Badiou, Theatre (capital T) “presents differences as objectless transparencies.”52 There are no grounds for differences, they just appear as such in action. This is what Badiou means when he writes that “theatre [lowercase t] proposes to us a signification of supposed substances, and Theatre [capital T], a procedure exhibiting generic humanity, that is to say, indiscernible differences that take place on stage for the first time.”53 Ahmed is not a predetermined representation of a migrant-worker but the idea embodied through the mask that the figure of the migrant-worker could be the catalyst for collective emancipation. When the actor abides by the ethics of play, acting becomes ethical not by erasing all differences but by pointing out the arbitrary nature of

48

Chapter 3

any marker of difference. The comedy mask in the Ahmed cycle is precisely an arbitrary marker of difference. In the Ahmed cycle comedies, Ahmed is only differentiated from the other characters by a half-mask that materialises his elusive multiplicity. For Badiou, there is “a cogito of the actor. . . . I am not where one thinks that I am, being there where I think that one thinks that the other is.”54 The imperative for the subject as well as for the actor is to be nonsubstantial, deprived of essence to avoid categorisation and to thus point to the irrepresentable—what is unaccounted for by the theatrical State. Badiou states in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” that the ethics of play forces the actor to occupy a place on the verge of the void.55 In the theory of the event, the subject occupies a place on the verge of the void and somehow signposts the void that the event has come through.56 Against any preconceived ideas of society’s roles and representations, the ethics of play ascribe a place to the actor which is similar to that of a subjective instance, as the actor operates within the gap between the state of the situation and Theatre’s representation of the state of the situation. However, it is important to note that the actor is not a subject but rather a marker of the subjective—the embodied possibility for a political subjectivisation process to unfold. The actor has to present a “diagonal character, who is less a function than the zero point in which all functions are reflected as such.”57 To an extent, in the Ahmed cycle, the masked Ahmed is the vanishing point of all the other characters’ perspectives. The visions of society the different caricatural characters embody lose their apparent coherence when in contact with Ahmed. In the sequence titled “The Nation,” Ahmed confronts the right-wing députée Madame Pompestan’s views on French nationality: MADAME POMPESTAN. I say “yea” to French law. The people, through my representative mediation, vote for the sovereign law that says who is who, who is entitled to what, who isn’t entitled to what, and who’s entitled to nothing, or even to less than nothing. The law that separates, on the one hand, the official and legal and the lawful worker whom Edouard Pompestan welcomes with open arms onto his factory floor. And, on the other hand, the illegal, the undocumented immigrant, the surplus worker, the shady character, the guy who’s been smuggled in from who knows where. ‌‌ AHMED. Whom the police welcome with open clubs into their detention centers. The law . . . your yes, I guess, means that someone from here isn’t from here unless the law from here tells him he’s here? But, if he’s here, the law can’t say that he isn’t here! Or else your yes, I guess, isn’t a yes but a no. You say “yes” to no. You say “yes” to someone from here being told that he isn’t from here. The “no” comes before the “yes,” in your “yes” to the law from here. Since this law and all the damn cops behind it run like a pack of dogs after people from here, yapping that they aren’t from here!58

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

49

In this scene, like a homothetic centre point, Ahmed turns Pompestan’s words against her to the point where the law of the land she proclaims ends up contradicting itself. I would argue that the masked character in the comedies of the Ahmed cycle embodies the two modalities of the subject defined above: as it not only stretches and opens the structure of the representation imposed by the State by challenging the institutionalised discrimination of the migrant-worker but also points to “the obligatory forcing of the possible”—the articulation of emancipatory politics upon the figure of the migrant-worker. This is the second modality of the subject, a point I will turn to in the following section. THE COMEDY MASK AS AN ONTOLOGICAL MARKER OF CHANGE Unlike for the other characters in the Ahmed cycle, the portrayal of Ahmed cannot contribute to consolidating the representation of what is given as a sociopolitical reality by the State. Ahmed cannot merely embody what the powers-that-be categorise as the “Arab” living in France. While exaggerating the traits of other characters—whose prejudicial discourse and attitudes in the plays unfortunately often do not seem so very caricatural compared to their real-life counterparts—is a resort of comedy, within Badiou’s system this forced characterisation is not possible in the case of Ahmed. Ahmed cannot but inexist within the caricatural mode of representation of the Ahmed cycle. In this respect, the half-mask could be seen as a marker of Ahmed’s inexistence as a subject of politics within the representation orchestrated by the State. While the other characters are all marked by excess, Ahmed’s character is marked by a recess thereof. Consequently, Ahmed might be considered as a paradigm for what Badiou defines as subject or subjective multiplicity in the sense that, in the recess of representation, Ahmed presents subjectivisation as a process that is by definition incomplete. The ethics of play at work through the use of the mask precisely points to the possibility that a subjectivisation process can occur. For Badiou “every subject stands at a crossing between a lack of being and a destruction, a repetition and an interruption, a placement and an excess.”59 In the Ahmed cycle, the masked character Ahmed is not only marked by a lack of characterisation, he also reproduces the emancipatory figure of the Molièresque comedy valet who interrupts the social order by refusing to remain in his place, and thus potentially makes the audience reflect upon the system in place and their places within it. This is what Ahmed also asserts in Ahmed se fâche when directly addressing the audience:

50

Chapter 3

Thus, solitary, on the world’s stage, I come forward wearing a mask. I look at you. Since without you, I am incomplete. And you too, without me, without Ahmed, without what Ahmed represents for you, without what would really and truly happen to you were you named Ahmed—what you would likely avoid were it to occur; without your inner Ahmed you are incomplete, mutilated, kept at distance from your own free potential.60

The masked Ahmed points to the incomplete subject, which can only become whole when supplemented by the audience’s engagement, but which also provides the audience with the knowledge that political subjectivisation starts from a lack—a recess, a realisation that something is amiss—and is an infinite process. In the terms of Badiou’s theory of incorporation, I would argue that Ahmed’s mask provides an incision in the world around which the incorporation with a subjectivisable body can happen. In other words, the audience can rally around the idea of the migrant-worker representing all workers, precisely because the half-mask points to a plurality of elusive Ahmeds while enabling the audience’s identification with their cause. This is how Badiou defines incorporation in Second Manifesto for Philosophy: “a truth process is the construction of a new body that appears gradually in the world as all the multiples having an authentic affinity with a primordial statement are drawn together around the latter.”61 In the Ahmed cycle, rather than a social reality, with his half-mask, Ahmed is in fact presented as an idea—a primordial statement—the idea that can rally and trigger a collective subjectivisation process. This is what Ahmed declares in theatrical terms in Ahmed se fâche: Who am I? Xanthias or Scapin? Sganarelle and Harlequin? Figaro? I am Ahmed. Do you think I am going to die? Never here, in any case. . . . Because I am, here, the immortal body of successive truths. . . . Theatre, with Ahmed, will eternally take place. . . . Eternity of Xanthias . . . and of Scapin . . . and of Harlequin . . . (this must be accompanied with improvisations on the canonical figures of comedy). Eternity of Ahmed, active scion of all these masks, of all these sacred bodies.62

As a reactivation of the comic resourceful troublemaker, Ahmed can help elucidate the socioeconomic situation by fending off the State’s attempts to represent the situation via an array of complex, arbitrary categorisations, forced compartmentalisations, rigid frameworks, and peremptory statements forming a state of the situation that guarantees the perennity of the established order—and in that case, institutionalised racism. As a wedge forced between situation and state of the situation, the ethics of play allows Theatre to point out that there is more to a situation than what the state of the situation might lead us to believe, that everything in a situation cannot be categorised, delimited, controlled, and that there are elements of the situation that might

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

51

refuse the place they have been assigned or that might not even be accounted for. These elements can be catalysts to consider a situation anew in view of loosening the grip of authority on the way a socio-economic situation is represented. It is therefore in the interests of the powers-that-be to ensure these elements do not disrupt the assignment of places within the established order. Badiou’s Theatre (capital T) allows one to experience the existence of what inexists within a given political situation, of what inexists for the State but could bring about its collapse. In Badiou’s comedy cycle, the masked Ahmed is determined to make authority figures take him into account in the suburban town where he lives, and where they at best ignore him or want him deported. As mentioned above, the comedy mask worn exclusively by Ahmed marks his non-belonging to the Ahmed cycle’s caricatural system of representation. The use of the half-mask could be interpreted as a means of materially addressing the inexistence of Ahmed within the representation orchestrated by the State. At the same time, the mask provides a support, a hiatus, a trace upon which the process of collective incorporation into a subjectivisable body can occur. This is only possible if the mask is an opening onto the void, that is, if the actor wearing the mask abides by the ethics of play and leaves the mask hollow and the impersonation process elusive and intangible. I would argue that, contra a theatre of presence and departing from a theatre of immanence, Badiou’s theory of theatre and philosophy lays the groundwork for a theatre of inexist[a]nce that takes form in the comedies of the Ahmed cycle. Despite the fact that Badiou claims to be “opposed to the totality of Derrida’s conceptions,” he derives the notion of inexistance from Derrida’s notion of différance, including the incision of the letter “a” to signify along with Derrida “the subversion of every realm . . . threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything in us that might yet desire a realm” in other words in the present case, a theatrical State.63 For Badiou, inexistance is a materialist “worldly way of non-existing” and he concedes to Derrida that “[you] must have a language of flight. You can only organise a monstration of the non-existent if you use a language that can stand non-existing.”64 I would argue that the half-mask is precisely a language that can stand non-existing. This is the reason why in the comedies of the Ahmed cycle, the half-mask worn by the actor playing Ahmed challenges the state of the situation by pointing to what inexists, what is not taken into account within society: the migrant-workers (Ahmed’s parents in the plays, especially his mother Fatima) and by extension young people of mainly North African and Central African origins relegated to Parisian suburbs. Bosteels remarks that what Badiou calls the state of a situation is nothing other than a defence mechanism against the perils of the void.65 He explains that the foreclosure of the void “is the very operation that allows the smooth functioning of the established order of things—when everyone does what comes naturally

52

Chapter 3

because the state of the situation in effect appears to be second nature.”66 In other words, to maintain order, the State imposes a representation that seals the situation by multiplying the connections of the elements within it by multiplying subsets, categories, minorities, and thus assigning a place to everything and everyone and ensuring that everything and everyone stays in its place—including those without a place. A dense mesh is cast over the State’s representation of the socioeconomic order so as to conceal the cracks but also to prevent the unexpected from occurring out of the blue, or more precisely out of the void. Developed in Being and Event, which was written and published at approximately the same time as “Rhapsody for the Theatre” and Ahmed le Subtil, Badiou’s ontological system, drawing from Georg Cantor’s set theory, provides the link between Badiou’s theatre dialectics and his theory of inexist[a]nce developed in Logics of Worlds. Set theory provides Badiou with an ontological discourse as he deduces from set theory that being is multiple and that the One does not exist. In Badiou’s words, “There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple ‘without-one’—every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples—is the law of being. The only stopping point is the void.”67 The “evaporation of every stable essence” that the actor has to display—according to the definition of acting in “Rhapsody for the Theatre”—points to this inconsistency of being due to its pure multiplicity not founded upon the one, but upon the void.68 For Badiou, being is a pure multiple without oneness. This is what Ahmed explores in Ahmed the Philosopher by questioning the audience: But but but. But. But one what, if the name Ahmed doesn’t make one, since it’s the name of several, and even of many? Of numerous everyones. Let’s examine the thing. Let’s examine the one. I’m examining myself. . . . (Ahmed to the audience, looking ferocious.) Examine yourself too. You bunch of many ones! You’re only everyones! No kidding! One thinks one is many, and one is only a heap of ones, a lumping together of every one!69

He concludes after much deliberation and physical improvisation including picking his own nose with his own stick to attempt in vain to assert his singularity that “One is never one. One is always too many. . . . That’s how it is.”70 In set theory, there are only sets and nothing exists outside of a set. Because the elements of a set are not units but other sets, being is not a multiple of stable and absolute units but a multiple of multiples. In Ahmed the Philosopher, Badiou also gives an example of how the number of subsets or multiples that can be created from the elements of a given set always exceeds the number of these elements. The sequence titled “Mathematics” stages Ahmed directing two understudies in order to empirically demonstrate that the number eight

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

53

is contained in the number three. At first, Ahmed’s understudies mock what Ahmed is trying to explain: First Understudy: In three there’s eight? Well, in that case, in me there’s what I ate. Oysters on a plate. Plus their pearls. This gentleman is dishonouring Ahmed with his ridiculous song and dance. Second Understudy: I understand everything! He’s an imbecile too. (In what follows, Ahmed organizes the reconfigurations on the stage in such a way that all the subsets become visible). Ahmed: You’ll see if they are eight in three.71

By arranging the elements that are parts of three, the possible combinations of Ahmed, the First Understudy (Ahmed 2) and the Second Understudy (Ahmed 3) amount to eight. With A for Ahmed, the eight groupings are as follows: A1, A2, A3, A1+A2+A3, A1+A2, A2+A3, A3+A1 and most importantly, no Ahmed at all. This scene materially demonstrates that representation always exceeds presentation since there are always more ways to group the elements of the set together than there are elements in that set. Since a multiple can always be part of another multiple, being is said to be inconsistent and opposed to the consistency of what surrounds us—the consistency of a situation when hermetically sealed by an overpowering institutionalised discourse about that situation.72 For Badiou, ontology has to go beyond the apparent consistency of situations to reach the inconsistency of being as multiple. For this ontology in movement, the sole conceivable halting point of being in its rootless and roaming infinity is the void or empty set Ø. This is based on the fact that, in set theory, while no elements belong to the empty set Ø, the empty set Ø is included in every other set. As such the empty set Ø serves as a basis for any other set. The empty set Ø can be described as the placeholder for the void. Any situation comprises an empty set that makes it unstable and thus prone to change. It is this instability that the powers-that-be aim to redress by enacting a state of the situation where the empty set—the possibility for change, for the unaccounted-for to occur—is carefully ignored. In the Ahmed cycle, not only the mask represents the multiple Ahmeds, but it also serves as a placeholder for the unaccounted-for Ahmeds, the “inexisting” Ahmed. The half-mask represents the empty set, and it also supports the idea of the inconsistency of being as opposed to the consistency of appearing. In the historical context of Ahmed le subtil described above, it is when migrant-workers are not recognised as workers, but first and foremost as part of the category of immigrants, that their workers’ rights are denied. Badiou considers parliamentary politics as a tragically flawed representational system since what he considers to be true politics has to elude any categorisation dictated by the State and rise from the system’s foreclosed void. In theory, the State, political parties, or unions cannot represent all the elements they

54

Chapter 3

are supposed to represent as a set containing these elements, because of their intrinsic inability to make provision for the empty set (the void), or unpresented group, which they nevertheless contain. In practice, the Talbot event illustrates perfectly the failure of the workers’ union to represent all of the workers it claims to stand for, since migrant-workers are not accounted for, while the elements of this subgroup—if subgroup there is—lay claim to the same rights as all the other workers. Badiou comments upon the Talbot event thus: “Politics starts when the aim is not to represent the victims—a system of representation the old Marxist doctrine remained tied to—but to be faithful to the events where the victims declare themselves.”73 Badiou calls for the victims to bypass the representation orchestrated by the State and come out of the void. In Badiou’s Ahmed cycle, whilst Ahmed is described as an Algerian worker who has had “altercations with the police state, the judiciary, not to say, the penitentiary,” he is never presented as a victim.74 This is expressed by Ahmed le subtil’s subtitle, Scapin 84, and made explicit at the end of the fourth play in the Ahmed cycle, Les Citrouilles, when, staring at Ahmed, another character declares, “There is no more immortal Scapin except you, today, here and now. The immortal Scapin passes into the mortal Ahmed.”75 Like Scapin before him, Ahmed has the power to disrupt the oppressive categorisation of the state of the situation orchestrated by the State. For Badiou, as a placeholder for emancipation, only the comic figure of the migrant-worker in the process of becoming a political subject can shatter the illusion of the alleged natural order of things. I would argue that as a marker of inexist[a]nce, it is the mask that reveals the situation’s underlying void and thus points to the possibility that a truth can come to the fore and irremediably change the situation. In “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” Badiou declares that “the ethics of play is that of an escape.”76 I would argue that the mask in the comedies of the Ahmed cycle supports the ethics of play by enabling an ontological void—if only through the interstice between the mask and the actor’s face—to come to the fore. As explained earlier, Badiou stresses that the ethics of play is only possible from the edge of the void, in other words, at the threshold of the absence of an object to imitate. The seeming paradox of the role of the actor as defined by Badiou is the requirement that the actor must stand firm in this equivocal position. To an extent, the hypothesis of the mask as a threshold to the void is verified by Ahmed’s reference to its inner void in Ahmed se fâche: Everyone, if he welcomes the uprooting circumstance, can allow the clandestine Arab he is under the carapace of propriety to come to full light. Since the inner Arab of everyone is the inalterable possibility everyone has to become, suddenly, one day, a nomad conquering an inner desert.77

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

55

While these lines apparently call for a degree of introspection, somehow the introspective motion operates in reverse. Rather than a quest for a stable inner self, the interiorisation is exteriorised and opens onto the void, materialised here as an inner desert. I would argue that the mask provides a material interface for the void—that is, for the possibility of change—to come to the fore. This exteriorised interiorisation that is allowed by the mask representing Ahmed rehearses Badiou’s theory of the subject as deprived of substance, as objectless transparency. Rather than pointing to being as substance, as an inner self, the name Ahmed here comes to mark the nomadic point within an inner void grounding a subjectivisable body. Therefore, Badiou’s comedy announces his definition of the subject in Inaesthetics as “what chooses to persevere in this self-distance aroused by the revelation of the void” and echoes his definition of the spectator as “someone who exposes him or herself, in the gap of a representation, to the torment of a truth.”78 Spectators are turned inside out and exposed to the void and subjected to the torment of a gap, similar to that between the actor and the mask. This reading of the use of the mask is also in line with the shift in Badiou’s theory of the subject from a political subject identified as “We” or “I” to a subjective instance, which is precisely what is not supposed to exist and which bears the mark of the exception—that is, a subject whose affirmation takes the form of a hiatus, a void. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou explains that the subject resides in the “aside from,” the “except that,” the “but for,” through which the fragile scintillation of what has no place to be makes its incision in the unbroken phrasing of a world. “What has no place to be” should be taken in both possible senses: as that which, according to the transcendental law of the world (or of the appearing of beings), should not be; but also as that which subtracts itself (out of place) from the worldly localization of multiplicities, from the place of being, in other words, from being-there.79

Badiou’s theatre articulates the subject in such a manner that it follows the theoretical shift from a named subject to a subject marked by inexist[a]nce. This mirrors the paradox of the actor as defined by Badiou. As a placeholder for the void, the actor has to appear on stage while pointing to what subtracts itself. This is what is precisely enacted by the actor wearing the mask of Ahmed in the commedia-inspired staging of Badiou’s comedies. Written as a supplement to his theory of theatre, to an extent the Ahmed cycle puts Badiou’s dialectics of theatre to the test. Comedy is driven by an ethics of play that challenges the control of the theatrical State on how a situation is perceived, thus opening up the possibility for the subject-spectator to see beyond the State’s foreclosure of any possibility for change. Through a reflection upon the comic figure in Badiou’s Ahmed cycle, Theatre has been

56

Chapter 3

presented as a material space where truths can be ephemerally figured out. The mask used in the staging of the comedies of the Ahmed cycle has been analysed as the placeholder for the void through which theatre-truths could come to disrupt what is given as the natural order of things. More than a mere condition for philosophy, I would argue that Badiou’s practical engagement with theatre is at the core of his philosophical system because the five comedies of the Ahmed cycle unfold between his Theory of the Subject—and its notion of truth-induced subjects that did not address the fact that truths have to be embodied to appear—and his Logics of Worlds, which completes Badiou’s theory of the subject with the notion of incorporation. Theatre does not provide Badiou with a mere illustration but instead challenges Badiou’s theory of the subject by forcing truths to materialise—albeit in the form of traces. However, the primordial statement or evental trace upon which subjectivisation can unfold is precisely the mask that in Badiou’s comedies points to the idea of a migrant-worker embodying the transitory nature of truths and inviting the subject-spectator to hold a nomadic standpoint. Through the mask as object, theatre provides a materiality for the idea of the migrant-worker as a possible representative embodiment of collective emancipation that Badiou first mentioned in Incident at Antioch (1984), then explored in the Ahmed cycle, and finally conceptualised twenty-five years later as the theory of incorporation in his Second Manifesto for Philosophy. In the comedies of the Ahmed cycle, the mask marks the interstice and interplay between situation and state of the situation, representation and presentation, institutional order and emancipatory disorder. The theatre-truth materialising here is that the commedia-inspired character of the migrant-worker can embody the essence of emancipatory politics. Badiou’s comedies enable the manifestation of an ethics of play that relies upon the actor’s ability to open up new possibilities for the way an audience can perceive any given situation. This is particularly evident in the space left to improvisation in the stage directions. Comedy as defined by Badiou is particularly suited to enable an ethics of play that could be described—like the event—as “the becoming legal of chance,” ultimately leading to change.80 BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. Ahmed le subtil. Arles: Actes Sud, 1994. Badiou, Alain. Ahmed philosophe; Ahmed se fâche. Arles: Actes Sud, 1995. Badiou, Alain. Ahmed revient. Arles: Actes Sud, 2018. Badiou, Alain. Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else. Translated by Joseph Litvak. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

57

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London/New York: Continuum, 2006. Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2007. Badiou, Alain. Les Citrouilles. Arles: Actes Sud, 1996. Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso, 2010. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Badiou, Alain. The Immanence of Truths. Translated by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Badiou, Alain. The Incident at Antioch. Translated by Susan Spitzer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London/New York: Continuum, 2009. Badiou, Alain. Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Norman Madarasz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Badiou, Alain. “Matters of Appearance: Interview with Alain Badiou.” By Lauren Sedofsky. Art Forum 45, no. 3 (November 2006): 246–49. Badiou, Alain. “Un opérateur théâtral.” Interview with Alain Badiou by Chantal Boiron. Théâtre/public 129 (May–June 1996): 52–58. Badiou, Alain. Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1985. Badiou, Alain. Pocket Pantheon. Translated by David Macey. London/New York: Verso, 2009. Badiou, Alain. “Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise.” Translated by Bruno Bosteels. Theatre Survey 49, no. 2 (November 2008): 187–238. Badiou, Alain. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Translated by Louise Burchill. Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2011. Badiou, Alain. La Tétralogie d’Ahmed. Arles: Actes Sud, 2010. Badiou, Alain. “Théâtre et philosophie.” Frictions 2 (2000): 131–41. Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London/New York: Continuum, 2009. Badiou, Alain, and Elie During. “A Theatre of Operations.” In A Theater without Theater, edited by Manuel J Borja-Villel, Bernard Blistène and Yann Chateigné, 22–27. Barcelona: MACBA, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, volume 2, part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others. London: Harvard UP, 1999.  Bosteels, Bruno. Badiou and Politics. Durham NC/London: Duke University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982. Hallward, Peter. Badiou, A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Neveux, Olivier. “La déclaration d’État.” Actuel Marx 38, no. 2 (2005): 179–92.

58

Chapter 3

Preeshl, Artemis. “The Many Faces of Brighella.” In The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, 114–22, edited by Judith Chaffee and Oliver Crick. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Rancière, Jacques. “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics.” In Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, 218–31, edited by Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004. Riera, Gabriel. Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

NOTES 1. Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, volume 2, part 2, 1931–1934 (London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 590.  2. Badiou’s romanopéra L’Écharpe rouge (1979) was adapted for the stage in collaboration with the director Antoine Vitez, the composer Georges Aperghis and the scenographer Yannis Kokkos and premiered at the Opéra de Lyon in 1984. The play L’Incident d’Antioche, written by Badiou in 1984 and translated by Susan Spitzer in 2013, has not been staged to this day. Badiou’s dramatic texts also include an adaptation of Plato’s Republic (2012) and Le Second Procès de Socrate (2015). 3. To date, only one play of the Ahmed cycle is available in English: Ahmed Philosophe has been translated as Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else, trans. Joseph Litvak (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 4. Alain Badiou, “Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise,” trans. Bruno Bosteels, Theatre Survey 49, no. 2 (November 2008), 183. 5. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 183. 6. Alain Badiou, The Immanence of Truths, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). 7. Badiou discusses the notion of suture at length in Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 61–67. See also Gabriel Riera’s exploration of this Badiouan notion in “On Wounds, Sutures, and Stitches (Points): A Relation to the Fourth Type?” in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. G. Riera, (State University of New York Press: 2005), 72–85. 8. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou stipulates that “[i]n concrete, militant philosophy, . . . there is only one law of the dialectic: One divides into two. Such is the principle of observable facts and of action.” Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 14. See also Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2007), 60. 9. The thirty-four sequences of Ahmed the Philosopher unfold as follows: “Nothing,” “The Event,” “Language,” “Place,” “Cause and Effect,” “Politics,” “The Multiple,” “Chance,” “Poetry,” “The Subject (1),” “The Big and the Little,” “Infinity,” “Time,” “Truth (1),” “The Nation,” “Death,” “The Subject (2),” “Morality,” “Society,” “God,” “Truth (2),” “Philosophy,” “Decision,” “The Same and the Other,” “The

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

59

Family,” “Terror,” “Purposiveness,” “Mathematics,” “Nature,” “The Idea,” “The Absurd,” “Repetition,” “Origin,” “Contradiction.” 10. Alain Badiou, Ahmed philosophe; Ahmed se fâche (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 7, my translation. 11. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, vii. 12. Alain Badiou, “A Theatre of Operations,” discussion between Alain Badiou and Elie During, in A Theater without Theater, eds. M. Borja-Villel, B. Blistène and Y. Chateigné (Barcelona: MACBA, 2008), 26. 13. Badiou, “A Theatre of Operations,” 26. 14. Both Badiou and Reinhard refer to Badiou’s adaptation of Plato’s Republic, but as remarked by Joseph Litvak, the term hypertranslation could also apply to the Ahmed cycle. See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (Verso Books, 2010), 229, note 1; Kenneth Reinhard, “Badiou’s Theater: A Laboratory for Thinking,” introduction to L’Incident d’Antioche / The Incident at Antioch, by Alain Badiou, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 33; and Ahmed the Philosopher, 13. 15. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 27. 16. In French, the title of Aristophanes’s play is Les Grenouilles, of which Badiou’s play Les Citrouilles is an approximate homonym. For his first two attempts as a playwright, Badiou also drew largely from the French theatre tradition: L’Écharpe rouge and Incident at Antioch are adaptations of Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin and La Ville. 17. Alain Badiou, Les Citrouilles (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996), 107, my translation. 18. Alain Badiou, “Un opérateur théâtral,” interview by Chantal Boiron, Théâtre/ public, 129 (May–June 1996), 54. 19. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, viii. 20. For example, in The Incident at Antioch, the character Mokhtar declares, “Around the dark-skinned worker the whole human race is configured like a body. The composition of its limbs must lift the heavy club as a symbol and bring it down with both hands on the fly of State.” Badiou, The Incident at Antioch, 46. 21. Alain Badiou, La Tétralogie d’Ahmed (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), 17, my translation. 22. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 4. 23. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 76. 24. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 206; Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 72; Alain Badiou, “Théâtre et philosophie,” Frictions, 2 (2000), 137, my translation. 25. Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 73. 26. Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics,” Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 225. 27. The use of a hyphen here is deliberate to acknowledge a socioeconomic condition and stay clear of identity politics. 28. Olivier Neveux, “La déclaration d’État,” Actuel Marx 38, no. 2 (2005), 185.

60

Chapter 3

29. Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 75. 30. Neveux, “La déclaration d’État,” 185. 31. As a result of the orchestrated failure to represent the workers within a new global economic system that emerged in the 1980s, the term “travailleur” (worker) was substituted by pseudo-political labels such as “immigré” (immigrant), “étranger” (foreigner), or “clandestine” (illegal immigrant). As far as France is concerned, this shift in the representation of labour forces can be traced back to the strike movement that culminated at the Talbot factory in 1984: one of Mitterrand’s first prime ministers, Pierre Mauroy, justified the repression of a strike at Renault-Flins in 1983 on the basis that the striking workers were “foreign to the social reality of France.” Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (University of Minnesota Press: 2003), 232. 32. See Artemis Preeshl, “The Many Faces of Brighella,” in The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, eds. Judith Chaffee and Oliver Crick (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 33. Badiou, Ahmed se fâche, 207, my translation. 34. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 206. 35. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 206. 36. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 4. 37. Badiou, “A Theatre of Operations,” 22. 38. Badiou, “A Theatre of Operations,” 22. 39. Badiou, “A Theatre of Operations,” 22. 40. Alain Badiou, “Images du temps présent” (Unpublished seminar transcribed by François Duvert, November 21, 2001), my translation. 41. Badiou, Inaesthetics, 73. 42. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2006), 192. 43. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 232. 44. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 233. 45. Badiou, Ahmed revient (Arles: Actes Sud, 2018), 33, my translation. 46. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 70. 47. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 82. 48. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 220. 49. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 232 and 221. 50. Badiou, Ahmed revient, 13, my translation. 51. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 221. 52. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 220. 53. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 220. 54. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 216. 55. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 220. 56. Badiou, Inaesthetics, 55. 57. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 232. 58. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 92–93. 59. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 139. 60. Badiou, Ahmed se fâche, 207, my translation.

The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

61

61. Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2011), 90. 62. Badiou, Ahmed se fâche, 213, my translation. 63. Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, trans. David Macey (London/New York: Verso, 2009); Alain Badiou, “Matters of Appearance,” interview by Lauren Sedofsky, Art Forum 45, no. 3 (Nov. 2006); Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 22. 64. Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, 125–44, and Logics of Worlds, 570–71. 65. Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham NC/London: Duke University Press, 2011), 160. 66. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, 161. 67. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward. (London: Verso, 2001), 25. 68. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 221. 69. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 56. 70. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 56. 71. Badiou, Ahmed the Philosopher, 166–67. 72. It is important to note here that for Badiou, being means being there. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 45. 73. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 75. 74. Alain Badiou, Ahmed le subtil (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994), 11, my translation. 75. Badiou, Les Citrouilles, 107, my translation. 76. Badiou, “Rhapsody,” 221. 77. Badiou, Ahmed se fâche, 207, my translation. 78. Badiou, Inaesthetics, 55, and “Rhapsody,” 198. The fact that representation in French also means theatre performance cannot be ignored. In Rhapsody for the Theatre, Badiou implicitly plays on the closeness between représentation and re-présentation. 79. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 45. 80. See G. Riera, ed., Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions (State University of New York Press: 2005), 12.

Chapter 4

The Body That Laughs and Cries Helmuth Plessner’s Keys to Anthropology and Theatre Xavier Escribano

AN AUTHOR TO BE REDISCOVERED Helmuth Plessner, considered one of the leading lights of twentieth-century philosophical anthropology, was born in 1892 in Wiesbaden, Germany, into an affluent family of partly Jewish descent. He first studied medicine in Freiburg and then zoology and philosophy in Heidelberg. In 1914, he went to Göttingen to study phenomenology under Husserl. He worked under Max Scheler in Cologne, where, after publishing Die Einheit der Sinne (The Unity of Senses; 1923) and Grenzen der Gemeinshaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radicalismus (The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism; 1924), he was appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy. He published his most acclaimed and decisive work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Levels of Organic Life and the Human) in 1928. During the Nazi regime, he sought refuge in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands, where he taught sociology at the invitation of his friend, the psychologist and phenomenologist F. J. J. Buytendijk. In 1946, he was awarded the chair in philosophy at the University of Groningen, before returning to Germany in 1951 as a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Göttingen, where he eventually became dean and rector magnificus (vice chancellor). He was also chairman of the German Association of Sociologists. In 1962, he was appointed for a one-year term as visiting professor at the New School for 63

64

Chapter 4

Social Research in New York City. In the final period of his academic career, from 1965 to 1972, he was a philosophy professor in Zurich, Switzerland. Plessner died in Göttingen at the age of ninety-two in 1985.1 There has been a rediscovery of Plessner’s work in recent decades, related to a significant interest in philosophical anthropology and a philosophic reflection on life and nature. This may explain the appearance, finally, in 2019, more than ninety years on from its original publication in German, of the English translation of Levels of Organic Life and the Human,2 considered one of the founding texts of twentieth-century philosophical anthropology.3 Plessner’s original reflections were for a long time overshadowed by the important works published by two contemporaries around the same time: Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time; 1927) and Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The Human Place in the Cosmos; 1928). In the preface to the second edition of his own work in 1965, Plessner details how the ontological and existential trend in philosophical thinking regarding the human being in the wake of Heidegger’s tome was one of the factors that had an inhibiting effect on the reception of Levels, a work that seemed to develop an ethos of the organic far removed from such premises.4 Furthermore, in the same preface, Plessner draws attention to a number of surprising parallels between his own ideas and the works of Jean-Paul Sartre (especially Sartre’s early period), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,5 although these authors do not appear to explicitly acknowledge the influence that reading Levels may have had on their own thinking. Besides the question of how Plessner’s work may have influenced Merleau-Ponty, there is certainly an interesting convergence of approaches by the two around the centrality awarded to corporeality and expressive activities in understanding what it is to be human. Although this chapter will not compare their ideas around body and expression,6 we will draw on some of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to better establish Plessner’s position and more clearly understand the originality of his contribution. The contrast between Plessner and Merleau-Ponty is even more significant if we consider that the latter is generally considered a benchmark in theorising on the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance, since Merleau-Ponty is rightly considered to have wrought a “paradigmatic shift in Western thinking about the role of the body in the constitution of experience” and is generally felt to have “(re)claimed the centrality of the lived body (Leib) and embodied experience as the very means and medium through which the world comes into being and is experienced.”7 Even so, although theoreticians such as Phillip B. Zarilli methodologically harness Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment to better understand the embodied work of the actor, it is worth recalling that the French philosopher did not dedicate any specific essay to theatre (as he did to painting, novels and even film8) and

The Body That Laughs and Cries

65

simply posited theatrical performance as an example in a number of different cases. This could be partly due to the privilege the directly or spontaneously expressive body has in Merleau-Ponty’s work compared to the situation of representation and the priority he awards to the immediacy of the body-world relationship, rather than any mediation involved in taking conscious possession or making instrumental use of the body. In Plessner’s case, on the other hand, we do find a specific essay, “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers” (“On the Anthropology of the Actor”), which we will cite below, and an extensive reflection on laughing and crying as expressive behaviours with special characteristics that is also absent in Merleau-Ponty, who focuses more on continuity between emotion, gesture and word.9 Taking all of this into consideration, in this chapter we will attempt to ascertain whether we can leverage Helmuth Plessner to land a better understanding of what it is that specifically sets laughing (and also, in a supplementary fashion, crying), as sparked by a comical situation, apart from other emotional expressive behaviours. We will ask what makes laughing a peculiar behaviour among expressive movements and why it is not possible to just include it along with emotional expressions like anger, joy, indignation and so on. We will question the need to laugh and cry—how is it possible that a rational being is unable to respond in another, more organised or better controlled way to certain situations? We will also query whether a phenomenology of the living body, as a dynamic centre of action, perception and expression can, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, satisfactorily give an account of the phenomenon of laughing or whether we should accept the existence of tension and a potential imbalance between the duality of being a body / having a body, as Plessner purports. Are the two postures incompatible or complementary? What happens or what reveals a comic performance vis-a-vis the actor and viewer? These considerations and questions will be approached through commentary on two of Plessner’s works, starting with the one that positions us in the context of performance from the outset and going back chronologically to examine the expressive behaviour of laughing and crying more specifically. It was in 1948, when teaching at Groningen University, that Plessner published Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers.10 The most telling aspect of this essay was not only that it paid unusual philosophical attention to the expressive behaviour of the theatre actor but the indispensable place it gave to the transformative protean art of the actor in the framework of an anthropological reflection tasked with giving an account of the specific conditions of human behaviour. The actor, as we will see further on, in his or her very origin, shines a light on a core aspect of human existence, the distancing of the human with respect to itself, underscored in the context of the dramatic arts by the split between person and character.

66

Chapter 4

Something similar happens with the phenomena of laughing and crying, both understood as expressive behaviours of a specific genre to which Plessner had dedicated his 1941 work Lachen und Weinen (Laughing and Crying),11 a treatise providing original insights into a form of expression that is disconcerting in itself, as we will see later on. As occurs with the expressive behaviour of the theatre actor, laughing and crying are particularly revealing of the heterogeneous mix of somatic, emotional and spiritual elements involved in the composition of the specifically human structure and, more particularly, the peculiar interaction humans have with their bodies, forced as they are to preserve the balance, as we will see, between the dual aspects of being a body and having a body. The actor’s behaviour, on the one hand, and laughing and crying, on the other, are hermeneutic keys for understanding a specific trait of human existence that consists of a form of decentring or delocation with respect to oneself and the world. Plessner dubbed this “excentric positionality” [exzentrische Positionalität]12 and described it as the way that humans are located both in the middle and at the same time at the periphery of their very existence, making their existence unique while also—as we will see—being able to compromise its unity. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ACTOR: THE SPLIT BETWEEN PERSON AND CHARACTER Firstly, in “Schauspielers,” Plessner stresses the importance of a specific trait of the theatre actor that sets the scenic arts apart from poetry and the visual arts: the actor does not embody his artistic work in a foreign material (whether the word, in the case of the poet; the canvas, in the case of the painter; the marble or bronze, in the case of the sculptor, and so forth) but rather the actor’s artistic material is himself, his very body. To put it baldly, the artistic incarnation occurs in the actor himself, working “with the material of his own existence.”13 To incarnate a character using the body requires making a “split” [Abspaltung] in the core of the actor’s very person, between the “actor’s incarnate person” [die verkörpernde Person des Schauspielers] and the “embodied character of the role” [die verkörperte Person der Rolle].14 On-stage, the embodied character of the role is overlaid on the actor’s incarnate person.15 In the artistic incarnation “humans separate from themselves, transform into others. They fake a different being.”16 The actor harnesses his own individuality, which disappears, to make another appear. Actors separate themselves from their very being and before the viewer’s eyes call into existence the interleaved image of the character, the meeting point between the

The Body That Laughs and Cries

67

visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary. What distinguishes this theatrical split from any pathological situation of personality confusion is the distancing the actor has over the visual incarnation. Thanks to this distancing and subsequent control, the actor does not succumb to the split, so what is decisive “is not the feeling but the actor’s visual intention, identified with a character in a certain situation but not limited to being it.”17 Plessner’s insistence on the idea of the actor maintaining distance and control over his own split at all times and the notion that, following the expression of feelings by a character, the actor’s “visual intention” should prevail over emotions is reminiscent of Denis Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien (Paradox of the Actor; 1830), a classic text that paradigmatically expresses this initial notion of theatrical incarnation. The great actor or comedian, in the Diderotian conception, is a cool, calm spectator of his own character, not linked to it by any emotional bond. It could be said that he embodies pain that does not hurt him and afflictions that do not personally affect him. The actor’s talent is not to feel, but to “scrupulously transmit the external signs of feeling.”18 Endowed with a great capacity for judgment and analysis, in complete possession of his movements and gestures, the Diderotian actor, a master of himself, “closes himself up in a large mannequin made of bones and acts as the soul.”19 The prototypical actor delineated in Paradox possesses the marvellous “art of imitating everything [l’art de tout imiter], . . . an equal aptitude for all sorts of characters and roles.”20 To be able to develop this protean talent, the actor must first mentally forge, as did Diderot and with the help of the imagination, an ideal model or “great spectre”21 of the character and, secondly, endeavour to attain or conform to the idea forged in his mind with his body: “What then,” Diderot asks, “is the truth of theatrical representation? It is the conformity of actions, speeches, figure; of voice, movement, gesture, with an ideal model imagined by the poet and frequently exaggerated by the comedian. This is the wonder of it all.”22 In this way, the number of mentally conjectured spectres—idealised or stylised images of the traits that define a character, attitude, or passion—to which the actor can lend his body is in principle open and unlimited, depending on his ability or artistic genius. The face of Garrick23—the prototypical actor of his time—turns into a real mask, which, in seconds, changes from the expression of one set of emotions to another without entailing any emotional involvement but rather only full control over his facial expressions at the service of the theatrical embodiment of a role. Although Diderot, and Plessner along with him, called upon us to admire the “transformative protean art of the actor,”24 it was not the artist’s theatrical achievement that acquired greater importance for the philosopher but the anthropological indication implied in this aptitude for metamorphosis: feigning a different being, conjuring it up before our eyes from itself, is only

68

Chapter 4

possible for a type of being who does not form a closed unit with itself. The analysis of the actor’s expressive behaviour culminates in an anthropological conclusion: “representation with the material of existence itself reveals a distancing of man with respect to himself.”25 Humans play a role in their daily lives too, putting into play a capacity for transformation that entails mastery over oneself. When engaging in an activity, whatever it may be, humans take a part of themselves that splits off from the totality of their being and use it as a means for performing a task, for being “someone” in front of others. They may even forget themselves and throw themselves fully into the role they are playing. Plessner considered that actors use themselves fully as a means but should always remain “on this side of the split,”26 behind the character they are embodying. They should not succumb to the split. Controlling the visual incarnation means having to maintain a distance with respect to the split. Actors only act within this distance: “the actor has to strive for the visual composition at whose disposal he puts the cadence of his voice, his stride, his gestures, his look. . . . The actor only is in so far as he has himself.”27 Even while recognising the specific features of stage behaviour, can it not be said, by virtue of everything stated above, that there is something of the actor in all humans? Plessner’s response is fully affirmative: man represents something before his peers; he lives sustaining an image and cannot exist if not as someone or as something. The way that the role of each one is more strictly or flexibly determined can hinge on historical and cultural factors, so that in many cases the role played follows a preestablished or predesigned pattern, while in modern societies, where the value of individualism or personal authenticity can prevail, the subject faces the task of representing or incarnating above all the role of being “oneself.”28 The role that each person plays is like the costume, the bearer of identity. A philosophical meditation on the actor reveals a central tenet of human existence, explaining why philosophical anthropology looks to the stage: “With respect to the theatrical action we understand human existence ultimately as the embodiment of a role that meets a more or less fixed design, which must consciously be maintained in representative situations.”29 In the same way that the “incarnate person” and “embodied character” do not fully coincide in the actor, the human cannot be reduced to any of the roles through which he transmits his existence; no image of him expresses himself thoroughly nor is it necessarily imposed, although neither can he dispense with its mediation: “Can the human abstain from this exhibition and representation, from this figuring, given that, despite everything, he is only capable of existing ‘as’ something and is only capable of living in a role?”30 Because of this unity contingent upon oneself, this marking of a distance with respect to oneself, the human cannot be, says Plessner, anything other than

The Body That Laughs and Cries

69

a “broken originality” [gebrochene Ursprünglichkeit],31 an expression that attempts to reveal the radicality of the split that skewers human existence, in such a way that “no one can know of himself whether it is still he who laughs and cries, thinks and make decisions, or this self that has already split off, the other that is in him, his counterimage or perhaps even antithesis.”32 Thanks to the split or distancing with respect to oneself, man gains freedom—since he has not been fixed to any image or role irretrievably defined by nature—but loses the full security of his animal nature. In other words, he cannot live completely absorbed in the here and now,33 in irreflexive unity with himself, without marking a distance with respect to himself and questioning his very life or identity. The human “not only lives and experiences, but also experiences himself experiencing.”34 It is true that all humans possess a body, a character and a number of qualities that appear to define them, but insofar as the subject can distance himself from himself and see himself from the outside, he assumes an “excentric position” with respect to himself. In so doing, he also becomes aware of the contingency of his unity as both a privilege and a weakness: a privilege because he is not enclosed or absorbed by a character; a weakness because he is unable to exist without sustaining an image (no matter how contingent, modest, or precarious). That is the typically human way of life: living in rupture and distance with respect to oneself, maintaining a contingent unity with oneself, “that special way of being which we have called excentric [exzentrische].”35 In conclusion, the analysis of the theatrical action leads Plessner to a reflection on the typical conditions of human existence, because its representation makes us especially aware of it, reveals it or makes it transparent to our gaze, as if it were an anthropological experiment. In this way, everything said about the actor and his art has methodological salience for understanding human nature, whose representational capability is boosted by the actor’s talent for incarnation: “Is not the actor,” asks Plessner, “revealing the human configuration in a particular sense?”36 Something similar occurs, as we will see below, with the phenomena of expression and very particularly with forms of expression unique in their genre: laughing and crying. THE BODY THAT LAUGHS AND CRIES Helmuth Plessner’s interest in laughing and crying, which he considered a specific genre of expressive behaviour, is similar to the philosophical attention paid to the actor’s behaviour. In both cases, the development of a theory of expression responds not to a direct interest in the aesthetics or theory of art,

70

Chapter 4

which are considered only obliquely, but serves to advance a theory on human nature. It is therefore a purely anthropological investigation. Plessner did not concern himself so much with the phenomenon of the comical as a trigger for laughter in the manner of Bergson37 as with laughing (and crying) in its empirical reality, that is, as a very particular form of expression whose specificity and rarity are especially revealing of the complex anthropological structure it implies. Indeed, the expressive behaviour of laughter is characterised by breaking out eruptively, running its course compulsively, and lacking definite symbolic form.38 In effect, although laughing and crying are similar to the unarticulated cry and movements of emotional expression (anger, joy, disappointment and so on), mimical gestural expressiveness has a symbolic capability that laughing and crying lack, since the latter are unstructured, indecipherable, and opaque expressive forms. While emotional expressive gestures embody a feeling in the same expressive form and make it transparent, laughing and crying, says Plessner, do not possess such inner transparency: Laughter and tears, on the other hand, are completely opaque. The gurgling, guttural bleating produced by diaphragm and respiration, a lump in the throat, jerky inhalation or the flow of tears, none of these can claim to be colored by or reflected in the frame of mind or motivated by a particular humor. For this reason, they cannot be simply understood as expressive movements. The fact that we are overpowered by them indicates that their function is somehow associated with an obvious interference in behavioural formation.39

In short, by describing this behavioural formation in a cursory fashion, it could be said that in the expressive behaviours of laughing and crying, we do not find the emotional/organic transparency of other emotional expressions; they are, rather, phenomena characterised by opacity and the rupture of the expressive relationship between body and soul.40 When one laughs or cries, one loses mastery over oneself in some sense and a bodily behaviour that appears to be autonomised is unleashed. Laughing and crying therefore express a surprising emancipation of the corporeal process with respect to the person, emphasising the potential for a disorganisation or rupture of the equilibrium between somatic, emotional and spiritual dimensions. Reading expressive movements as keys to understanding the way of being characteristically human moves Plessner’s work closer to the tenets of Erwin Straus. Another key ambassador of philosophical anthropology, Straus takes the singular physical condition of the human as the methodological starting point, on the presumption that “[h]uman physique reveals human nature.”41 Thus, expressive movements are variations of fundamental functions such as breathing, keeping upright, walking, looking and so on, with which the

The Body That Laughs and Cries

71

individual performs his being-in-the-world.42 Following the same inspiration, therefore, the expressive movement of laughing—a possible variation of basic functions such as breathing, gesticulating, or making sounds using the voice—is behaviour that conveys with peculiar eloquence a type of relationship with oneself and with events: “[l]aughing and crying are forms of human expression and statement, modes of conduct, kinds of behaviour.”43 Helmuth Plessner’s baseline when approaching the phenomena of laughing and crying as forms of behaviour that speak to our relationship with the world and with ourselves can be put in terms of an interrogation: The question reads: how are we to understand that a living creature of flesh and blood, which has speech and sign-making at its disposal—and thereby differs from animals—yet at the same time in its mimic expression documents its vital bondage and its kinship with animal nature? How is it possible that such a dual and intermediate creature can laugh and cry? How is it possible, in other words, what conditions must be given in order that such reactions can take place, reactions which, in the full sense at least, are reserved to man?44

The question is indeed interesting: if we can express ourselves meaningfully through language articulated in a disciplined fashion, including with emotional expressive movements to make a man’s inner meaning clear, what is the purpose of laughing when it convulsively interrupts regular life with rampant and shapeless outbursts which, far from expressing a meaning, seem to decompose or cryptically conceal it and reveal “automatism, both pushed and pushing, which shakes the laugher and makes him lose his breath.”45 If we reach back to the classical philosophical tradition, we could say that the search for the specific traits of humans generally seeks out indications of that which humans have in a more excellent, superior, or higher fashion than other living beings, such as, for example, articulated language and rationality. As we said earlier, Plessner considered laughing and crying, at least in their full meaning,46 as one among other human monopolies, together with specific factors like the gift of speech, the need for dress, the upright position, religious consciousness, the use of instruments and the sense of adornment. The paradoxical aspect of laughing and crying, compared to the other presumed monopolies is that while being characteristically human, they do not, however, especially point to the most sublime or elevated aspects of our nature and can rather be seen to be the opposite: “In itself, their eruptive, compulsive, and inarticulate character resists any connection with reason and mind and points in the direction of the subhuman, which is nourished by affective sources alone.”47 As we will see further on, the type of expressive movement in which laughter is deployed is motivated by a boundary situation whereby the individual experiences the inability to answer. This inability to

72

Chapter 4

give an answer leads to the characteristic disarticulation and lack of control of expressive movement. In any case, no matter how paradoxical their nature and characteristic form of manifestation, laughing and crying, as well as speaking and the other distinctive traits mentioned, must be understood under the formal condition of the excentric position, an anthropological plank that Plessner had already established in Levels. What does this human excentricity involve? Plessner states that “[t]he human, as the living thing placed in the center of its existence, knows this center, experiences it, and therefore is beyond it . . . being outside of itself turns the animal into a human.”48 Living beings, characterised by the play between interior and exterior, maintain a position in relation to the environment. Positionality is a general category defining the relation of a being with its surroundings49 and distinguishes the plant, animal and human. The animal’s positionality is centred: “[t]he animal is placed in the positional centre and is absorbed in it.”50 It is the centre of both perceptual stimuli and requests from the environment, and the centre of responsive perceptions and actions that answers them. What is characteristically and specifically human in this positionality is the fact that the human being is constitutively centred, in the middle of his life and his world, like the animal, and at the same time decentred, outside of his own centre, outside of himself. This decentred positionality is what Plessner called “excentric positionality”: “[t]he human, however, is subject to the law of excentricity, according to which his being in the here/now—that is, his absorption in what he experiences—no longer coincides with the point of his existence. Even in the execution of a thought, a feeling, a volition, the human stands apart from himself.”51 By virtue of his excentric positionality, the human not only has, like an animal, a central position from which to live and react but lives by maintaining a relationship with this centre. As Jos de Mul says, “the human life form distinguishes itself from that of the animal by also cultivating a relationship with this center . . . human beings are aware of their center of experience or being, and are as such, excentric.*”52 Pursuant to this excentricity, the human sees himself or considers himself from the outside, he distances himself from himself and at the end of the day is split because he both is and is not this centrally positioned self: “the human is a living thing that no longer stands only in itself but whose ‘standing in itself’ is the foundation of its standing. He is placed within his boundaries and therefore outside of these boundaries that confine him as a living thing. He not only lives and experiences, but also experiences himself experiencing.”53 One of the main upshots of this “decentring” or “excentric positionality” is the dual relationship the human maintains with his body:54

The Body That Laughs and Cries

73

The excentricity of the living being’s position [Lage], that is, of the irreducible dual aspect of its existence as physical body [Körper] and lived body [Leib], as thing among things at arbitrary points in the space-time continuum and as a system concentrically enclosing an absolute centre in a space and time of absolute directions, corresponds to the excentricity of that living being’s structure.55

This dual relationship or dual aspectivity of the relationship between the living being and its body can be summarised in the principle that the human not only is a body but has a body. The “is-body” would correspond to the central position, the lived body as the centre of action and perception with respect to the world, as a source of potential action and expression in its regard. The “has-body” pertains to marking a distance with respect to the body itself, the possibility of considering it from an external position and leveraging it in an instrumental sense, as a means of performing one action or another. Having a body means having it at our disposal in an attitude of objective distancing that is what makes its instrumental use possible. Maarten Coolen sums it up very aptly as follows: “Man is his living body (Leib), insofar as it serves him as a centre of his incarnated intentionality; and he has his body (Körper), insofar as it is a thing that locates him amidst of other things, or a thing he can use in action.” 56 Nor does Merleau-Ponty ignore this aspect in which the body is not only the originating centre of action but is in reality employed as an instrument in the service of an action. A reflection on the spatiality of one’s own body and motility, as discussed in Phenomenology of Perception, seems very appropriate at this point. The French phenomenologist distinguishes between “concrete” and “abstract movements”: unlike a “concrete movement,” which is the body’s response to a given situation, an “abstract movement” is the human ability to decouple the body voluntarily from any specific situation requiring a response or a particular behaviour in the here and now. The human being, through “abstract movement,” creates the situation itself stemming from its own initiative or spontaneity. It is to slide the body, as it were, into a virtual situation and for the body to behave in that situation according to the new meanings imaginatively projected there.57 The performance of abstract movements, in which distance is taken with regard to the use of the body itself, is common in everyday life and a necessary condition for the work of the actor: “The normal man and the actor do not mistake imaginary situations for reality, but extricate their real bodies from the living situation to make them breathe, speak and, if need be, weep in the realm of imagination.”58 Even so, this marking of a distance with regard to the body and its movements which is necessary for actors, is not especially emphasised by Merleau-Ponty, who is much more focused, as stated before, on describing the pre-reflexive body intentionality that opens us up and leads to the world in an immediate fashion.

74

Chapter 4

Thus Maarten Coolen states, “Using Plessner’s distinction, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology seems to show an inclination to overemphasize the living body [Leib] at the cost of the body as a thing [Körper].”59 From this Coolen suggests that a fundamental difference arises between Merleau-Ponty’s and Plessner’s understanding of human embodiment. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of human corporeality in Phenomenology of Perception, the body is exclusively described as being on the side of who is perceiving; it does not also turn up as a thing in the perceptual field into which the perceiving body is geared.60

The contrast between the “is-body” and the “has-body” can be illustrated, for example, with a couple of simple daily situations: for example, this afternoon I gave a class in which I discussed a topic of fascination to me for nearly two hours. I think I engaged the students because I saw gestures of attention and concentration to my words; however, while using my voice, gestures and face to express myself and to get my message across to my audience, my attention was focused on the topic and the students’ reactions, not my own expressiveness. In this case, my expressive body remained latent in my consciousness, without being directly and reflexively addressed. At the end of the class, however, I had scheduled a meeting with a student to have a serious talk regarding his academic performance and on the way to my office I pondered how I should arrange my expression. Should I keep a straight face of opaque seriousness throughout the meeting or offer a more relaxed, slightly smiling one from the start? By directing my attention to my face and thinking about it as a physical and visible reality I have at my disposal to communicate with other people, I was moving or transitioning from the is-body of immediate expression to the has-body of expression via a means or instrument. We have all on occasion experienced the difficulty of making an artificial or forced expression, which we endeavour to maintain consciously before others, seem natural or spontaneous. This experience reveals the characteristic tension between the is-body and the has-body. We therefore have our body at our disposal in two senses and according to Plessner it is not possible to dispense with either one or the other. Another simple example would be the contrast we can establish between our automatic and unconscious breathing, produced continuously without any voluntary control, and the moment when we become aware of its pace and voluntarily speed it up or slow it down, whether because we want to relax and concentrate on meditating or because it is part of the exercises provided in actor training.61 The consideration of the body itself as a physical reality that to some degree is at my disposal and which I can use with more facility or less does not entail a reduction of it to its scientific objectivisation but rather the marking of a distance with respect to the

The Body That Laughs and Cries

75

body itself, an explication of its intermediate, even instrumental, character, which also forms part of our experience as corporeal beings. Taking this into consideration therefore entails being faithful to the experience. Another possible illustration of the dialectics and even the tension between the “is-body” and the “has-body,” as Coolen sets forth in his discussion on the categories put into circulation by Plessner, can be found in the dialectics of ease and difficulty, familiarity and strangeness experienced with respect to one’s own body when acquiring any new skill: In acquiring a skill like skating, the body is both the body-subject which moves and the body-thing that is moved or has to be moved. . . . As the habitual living body I am, my body lets me be familiar with the world I live in; but I also experience my body, insofar as it is an instrument and mediates my immediate coping, as something that resists being absorbed in my body schema, as a thing that retains a certain alienness with respect to me.62

More specifically, in the context of actor training, Eugenio Barba, although making no explicit reference to Plessner’s anthropological categories, refers to the “is-body” and “has-body” as successive movements in the training of an actor’s body for the stage:63 the actor starts from the identification with his body and the skills he has culturally assumed (the inculturated body); he then passes through the acquisition of new skills, new conditionings, foreign to his culturally conditioned learning, for which he uses his body as if it were an instrument, discovering new possibilities of relating with it and using it expressively;64 finally, he recovers the initial identification, but integrates into the organic unit the whole repertoire of new expressive skills (accultured spontaneity). There is no doubt that, in Barba’s case, the I-body duality, that is, the marking of a distance with respect to culturally assumed skills, is not the goal pursued in actor training but a necessary intermediate state for new skill acquisition and new conditionings. However, this marking of methodological distance would be impossible were it not for the “is-body” and “has-body” duality. In short, in all the cases mentioned, the bodily existence of the human is presented in a dual fashion, balancing between being and having, without being able to be reduced to either one or the other, in a constant cross-link, tension and fragile equilibrium between the two. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, by referring to the acquisition of a new bodily skill, such as learning a dance, indicates that it is the body that understands the new movement.65 He thus emphasises that it is not an intellectual understanding that is then translated into bodily movements but rather there is an understanding at a pre-reflexive level that guides and directs the movements. But this, we could say, is the result of the acquisition of a bodily skill. What Merleau-Ponty does not say in his example is that this

76

Chapter 4

pre-reflexive understanding, this exercise achieved from motor intentionality, is often preceded by a process in which the difficulty to move as one wishes, the clumsiness of the very gestures, the failed attempts, entails an intense consciousness of the movements themselves and of the body parts involved, which involve marking a distance with respect to the body itself and its possibilities.66 Experiencing the body itself as a physical reality of particular characteristics, perceiving its bodily appearance, even its instrumental character, is common across many situations—not necessarily pathological ones—of everyday life. For Plessner, laughing and crying are clear examples of tension and imbalance between the dual aspect of being a body and having a body. Starting from the “is-body” / “has-body” duality that, as we have seen, Plessner linked to the human’s “excentric positionality,” the question arises of the need to balance the two dimensions and the difficulty in doing so. The incompleteness of the individual’s absorption by either the central or peripheral situation makes it necessary to find the right balance, requiring an overcoming of the characteristic split in the field of relating with the person’s own body. Our obligation must thus be balanced between the lived body with which we identify and the body we use as an instrument in our service.67 But this balance is not in any way guaranteed. Indeed, the radical potential of a loss of balance would be expressed precisely when humans find themselves in a boundary situation and are unable to respond to it properly. These are situations that cause laughter and crying. LAUGHING AND CRYING: REACTIONS TO A BOUNDARY SITUATION Laughing and crying are, effectively, reactions to a boundary situation. In regular existential circumstances, humans are guided and respond by virtue of the meaning afforded in each case, and by a minimum demand for rationality. When a boundary situation does not entail a direct threat to life in any of its dimensions but neither does it leave enough room for a meaningful response, the conditions arise for laughter, should the paralysation of the response arise from a misinterpretation of the contact points with the situation, or cause crying when the paralysing situation entails a denial of the relativity of existence. Laughing and crying are forms of forced, eruptive and opaque behaviour in situations where it is not possible to respond in any other way using language, action, or other expressive gestures. The two are closely related as reactions to a critical situation; they both express the limitation of human behaviour left open to a convulsive automatism over which there is no control, but they express the disorganisation of this behaviour in a dually antagonistic manner. Indeed, the difference between laughing and crying does not consist

The Body That Laughs and Cries

77

solely in the type of boundary situation they respond to. Laughter, we should recall, involves a plurality of superimposed or simultaneous meanings that make it impossible to balance the multiple possibilities of responses that are excluded.68 A good example would be the case of a professor who, in the midst of a transcendental explanation to his students, gets carried away with emotion or is simply distracted by the loftiness of his thoughts, loses balance and totters on the edge of the stage, making strange gestures to save himself from falling. This easily sparks a reaction of hilarity, since the seriousness and authority of his figure or function is superimposed on the absurdity of his gestures, and it is impossible to shed either one meaning or the other since they are superimposed at the same time in a misleading ambiguity. Crying involves a rupture in the normal relativity of existence, because of the absolute immediacy with which we feel affected by pain: consider, for example, the unexpected news of the death of a student due to the recent pandemic. Suddenly the memory of times when we exchanged a few words with them, in a light-hearted and inconsequential fashion, loses its relativity, becomes something absolute and fixed forever, since it is no longer possible to talk to them again, and this is absolutely serious and unacceptable for my finitude: there is nothing that can be said or done to change the situation.69 The type of boundary situation before which the behaviour is found determines one form of expression or the other—in one case, laughing, in the other case, crying. Plessner also details the distinctions between the meanings of the different forms of expression in the cases of laughing and crying: Openness, immediacy, eruptivity characterize laughter; closure, mediacy, gradualness characterize crying. These characteristics are not accidental. The laughing person is open to the world. In consciousness of our withdrawal and disengagement, which can frequently be combined with a feeling of superiority, we seek to know that we are one with others. Laughter succeeds completely only in company with those who laugh with us.70

For Plessner, the reason for laughing works more forcefully the more objective it seems and seems more objective the more closely others are linked by it. That is why laughing gains strength in the community: “the laughing person first becomes truly joyous in his laughter if others join in with him, that his laughter rings out and would be heard—for which exhalation is the appropriate means.”71 Crying is the opposite: In the act of inner capitulation which has a significance for crying at once evocative and constitutive, the individual becomes detached, in the sense of being isolated, from the situation of normal behaviour. Deeply moved, he implicates himself by this act in the anonymous “answer” of his body. Thus in weeping he cuts himself off from the world.72

78

Chapter 4

Unlike laughing, which can be communicated better the more objective its reason and whose expressive forms involves opening up to the world, crying involves the welling-up of tears which blur vision, sighing, which is accentuated by inhalation, as if in expression of estrangement from the world and isolation.73 . . . [T]he occasion of crying in the thwarting of behaviour through the negation of the relativity of existence has an effect which is the more pronounced, the more “subjectively” with the greater inner resonance, it takes possession of the individual. Here the fact that others are also moved must have an inhibitory effect on crying.74

In these boundary situations, where it is impossible to behave, the person relinquishes the response to the body, which answers by disconnecting from the whole, causing a rupture or capitulation of the soul-body unit and employing an organic automatism: “[t]he body, displaced from its relation to him, takes over the answer, no longer as an instrument of action, language, gesture or expressive movement, but as a body.”75 Plessner considers that laughing and crying do not constitute an answer by the body—as a physiological reaction to something repugnant would be, for example—but by the person,76 whose way of responding to the boundary situation is precisely the inability to offer an answer and who therefore relinquishes the spotlight to the body in order to handle the situation. He cannot answer but despite that, he does, even if it is via a capitulation. The human answers by abandoning himself to the anonymous automatism: “[t]he effective impossibility of finding a suitable expression and appropriate answer is at the same time the only suitable expression, the only appropriate answer.”77 It could be argued, with Plessner, that in laughter one answers the unanswerable because of the ambiguity of the comical situation, in its plurality of irreconcilable meanings. The person who cannot contain their laughter abandons their body to itself, relinquishing unity with it, reign over it. In this act of capitulation, in which the soul-body unit decomposes and leaves the body to fend for itself, however, he is affirmed as a person. In sinking below the level of his controlled corporeality, he demonstrates a characteristic feature of humanity: the ability to do something when one can no longer do anything.78 In so doing, the loss of control over oneself acquires special meaning—it is not a tremor that is simply suffered but a gesture, a reaction endowed with meaning. Furthermore, due to the emancipation of bodily processes, which appear to follow an automatic and uncontrollable course, humans lose the relationship with their physical existence, from which they seem to be split off and which, to some degree, is presented as foreign. This loss of mastery and interior

The Body That Laughs and Cries

79

balance is the manifestation of a situation characterised by the impossibility of providing an appropriate response by showing the very impossibility of answering. Even so, despite all their involuntary, automatic and somewhat disorganised components, laughing and crying continue to be, although in different ways, a person’s response to a situation that does not allow a way forward to the reasonable use of language or expressive gestures laden with emotional meaning.79 CONSEQUENCES IN THE WAKE OF LAUGHTER AND CRYING Throughout this chapter I have attempted to answer the questions or conundrums raised at the start. By way of summary, we could recall that what specifically characterises laughing and crying compared to other emotional expressions is, following Plessner’s logic, their lack of inner transparency. In other words, while the deployment of emotional behaviour is related to the characteristic expressions of anger, fear, or desperation, for example, laughing and crying involve the fragmentation of behaviour itself. Laughing and crying are imposed necessarily as the only relief valve in situations that permit no other type of response: one responds by revealing the impossibility of response. In this way, laughing and crying speak to the limits of rational understanding and organised response before the meaning of what is happening: when the meaning cannot be absorbed, because of a mistakenness of superimposed significances or sudden absence of relativity, reason is muted and behaviour collapses. Concluding also with the comparison or contrast established between Merleau-Ponty and Plessner throughout this chapter, I would here note that in Phenomenology of Perception, the cases of fragmentation of behaviour are usually associated with pathological situations. Merleau-Ponty does not address the Leib/Körper tension as a constituent element of the very experience of corporeality in his phenomenology of the lived body. So, without having to take up a direct contrast with Merleau-Ponty, Plessner’s notion expands the scope of a phenomenology of corporeality and makes it possible to give an account of phenomena where tension, imbalance or rupture are constituent parts and not the outcome of any trauma, accident or injury compromising the spontaneous unity of body and world. From the perspective of the anthropological reflection that has guided this chapter, the common aspect presented by, on the one hand, the stage behaviour of the actor and, on the other, the expressive behaviour of laughing (and crying), is the reality of a “split” or “internal distancing” which impacts the human’s way of being in the world. In the first case, it is the split or distance between person and character, while in the second the rupture occurs between

80

Chapter 4

the person and their body, in the form of loss of control and the surprising emancipation of the bodily process with respect to the person. Despite this initial similarity, they appear to be somewhat inverse situations: the actor who incarnates any character, including a character who falls “prey to a laughing fit,” maintains control over the split. It could be said that the actor’s behaviour is ordered or led from beyond the split and is in no way absorbed or mastered by the character, not even by the potential expressive convulsion of a “laughing character.” On the other hand, in the case of laughter in a common situation of daily life, its eruptive, involuntary and uncontrollable nature, as Helmuth Plessner said, leaves the subject at the mercy of the other side of the split, and this explains the feeling of shame or of being in a predicament that can follow an uncontrollable outbreak of hilarity. That is why we continue to be surprised by and admire the actor who laughs or cries on-stage in a credible fashion, as he exercises control over what, by definition, escapes any attempt at voluntary mastery. By doing so he also expresses a fundamental anthropological inclination or direction, that is, the human tendency to hijack those territories (the involuntary, the unconscious, the automatic, the anonymous, etc.) that in principle are situated outside of his agency and which circumscribe them to the sphere of passivity. For all those reasons, as shown on the pages above, there is no doubt that the behaviour of the actor and laughing and crying too are phenomena that are telling in view of the way they capture the specific conditions of human existence. This is precisely what motivated Plessner to pay them special attention at different points in his work. It could be argued that what laughing reveals is the hidden composition of the human, always at risk of decomposing or fragmenting. “[W]e are capable of breaking out into laughter,” says Plessner, “because of our brokenness.”80 Thus, in making others laugh, the actor in a comic performance reveals our human condition as divided beings, comprising a fragile unity of diverse elements (bodily, emotional, spiritual), where the balance between personal and impersonal can be broken, sometimes resoundingly. On such occasions, emerging from the impersonal background of our existence, an “earthly me” appears that in certain boundary situations, where one cannot answer in a coherent and organised fashion, it takes on the task of answering for us. The bodily response is opaque, cryptic and fragmented—in other words, strange, so that, in short, “our laughter is an embodiment of the estrangement from our body.”81 The experience of estrangement from the body itself in its autonomised behaviour forces us to recognise a deeper self that makes its appearance in a particularly revealing manner following the invitation of a comic performance. This possibility of being viewers of the performance and of recognising that its very ambiguity and instability constitutes, without doubt, a special occasion of self-knowledge that responds

The Body That Laughs and Cries

81

not only to the interests of philosophical anthropology but the need for self-understanding of all humankind. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barba, Eugenio. “The Fiction of Duality.” New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 20 (1989): 311–14. Coolen, Maarten. “Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body.” In Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, edited by Jos de Mul, 111–27. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Diderot, Denis. Paradoxe sur le Cómedien. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1929. Heinze, Martin. “Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology.” Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 16, no. 2 (2009): 117–28. Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reiner Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch. Herausgegegen von M. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Estética de lo performativo. Translated by Diana González Martín and David Martínez Perrucha. Madrid: Abada Editores, 2011. Gély, Raphaël. “La théâtralité originaire du corps. Réflexion Merleau-pontienne sur l’imaginaire, la perception et le movement.” In Représenter à l’époque contemporaine, edited by Isabelle Ost, Pierre Piret et Laurent Van Eynde, 161–82. Bruxelles: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2010. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’Invisible (suivi de notes de travail). Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Collin Smith. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002. Mul, Jos de. “Artificial by Nature. An Introduction to Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology.” In Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, edited by Jos de Mul, 11–37. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Plessner, Helmuth. “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers.” In Zwischen Philosophie und Gesellschaft. Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Vorträge, by Helmuth Plessner, 180–92. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1953. Plessner, Helmuth. Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour. Translated by J. S. Churchill and Marjorie Grene. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Plessner, Helmuth. “On Human Expression.” In Phenomenological Psychology, edited by Joseph J. Kockelmans, 47–54. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Plessner, Helmuth. Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Millay Hyat. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Pott, Heleen J. “On Humor and ‘Laughing’ Rats. The Importance of Plessner for Affective Neuroscience.” In Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, edited by Jos de Mul, 375–86. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

82

Chapter 4

Straus, Erwin. “The Sigh: An Introduction to a Theory of Expression.” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 14, no. 4 (1952): 674–95. Straus, Erwin. “The Upright Posture.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 26, nos. 1–4 (1952): 529–61. Wehrle, Maren. “Being a Body and Having a Body: The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2019), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11097​-019​-09610​-z. Zarilli, Phillip B. “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience.” Theatre Journal 56, no. 4 (2004): 653–66.

NOTES 1. Jos de Mul, “Artificial by Nature. An Introduction to Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology,” in Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, ed. Jos de Mul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 11–37. 2. Helmuth Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, translated by Millay Hyat (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). [Die Stufen des Organischen un der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1928)] 3. Understood as a philosophical reflection on the fundamental characteristics of the human lifeform. 4. Plessner, Levels, “Preface to the Second Edition (1965),” xx. 5. Martin Heinze notes, in this regard, that many of Plessner’s ideas were consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s approach in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Both authors knew each other’s respective works very well and, together with their mutual friend, Fredrik Buytendijk, drew from the same sources of biological anthropology as a cornerstone of their reflections on human beings. See Martin Heinze, “Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology,” Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 16, no. 2 (2009), 124. Effectively, the only quote of Plessner’s we could find in Phenomenology of Perception, in this case apropos of the notion of “Umweltintentionalität,” refers to the work on mimic expressions that Buytendijk and Plessner wrote together: Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks, Philosophischer Anzeiger, 1925. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and New York, 2002), 270. 6. As Maarten Coolen does more systematically in “Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body,” in Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, ed. Jos de Mul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 111–27. 7. Philip B. Zarilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004), 654. 8. See the essays contained in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996). 9. See especially Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (chapter on “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” 202–32).

The Body That Laughs and Cries

83

10. Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers,” in Zwischen Philosophie und Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Bern: Franke Verlag, 1953), 180–92. 11. Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen: Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens, in Gesammelte Schriften (GS) VII, ed. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Ströker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983): 201–387. We will always use the English translation: Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying. A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour, translated by J. S. Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 12. The German term “exzentrisch,” used by Plessner, is usually translated into English using one of two different forms, “excentric” or “eccentric,” depending on the author’s preference. We have gone with the former, “excentric,” not only to avoid associating it with the idea of strange or capricious behaviour, but because this translation emphasises the idea that the principle of Plessnerian excentricity is related to an ex-centric position (displaced, removed, at a distance from the centre), thanks to which the subject can distance itself from itself and see itself from the outside. It is also the criterion used in the 2019 translation of Levels of Organic Life and the Human. (If we change the translation from “eccentric” to “excentric” we will note it with an asterisk [*]). 13. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 183. 14. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 180. 15. In our text, following Helmuth Plessner, we will use the traditional understanding of modern theatre, linked to a dramatic text and several represented characters. It is worth noting, however, by way of supplementary annotation, that contemporary performance art, with its disassociation from a prior text and greater attention to the physicality of the actor, produces a questioning of the person/character structure such that the “superimposition” we speak of presents significant cracks. This situation translates, on the part of the viewer, into the phenomena of instability or “perspective multistability” as described by Erika Fischer-Lichte, for example, in Estética de lo performativo (The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic), Spanish translation by Diana González Martín and David Martínez Perrucha (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2011, 182). 16. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 181. 17. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 184. 18. Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le Cómedien (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1929), 38. 19. Diderot, Paradoxe, 108. 20. Diderot, Paradoxe, 32. 21. Diderot, Paradoxe, 71. 22. Diderot, Paradoxe, 44. 23. Diderot, Paradoxe, 56–57. 24. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 192. 25. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 183. 26. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 184. 27. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 185.

84

Chapter 4

28. Unlike the actor, who is open to the possibility of assuming a potentially unlimited multiplicity of roles or “personalities,” the non-actor assumes one role or another in social life as a means for developing or incarnating his individual singularity. 29. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 189. 30. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 188. 31. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 191. In accordance with Plessner’s concept of “broken originality,” some contemporaneous authors have spoken of the “original theatricality of the body.” See Raphaël Gély, “La théâtralité originaire du corps: Réflexion Merleau-pontienne sur l’imaginaire, la perception et le mouvement,” in Représenter à l’époque contemporaine, edited by Isabelle Ost (Brussels: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2010), 161–82. 32. Plessner, 277. 33. See Plessner, Levels, 268. 34. Plessner, Levels, 271. 35. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 191. 36. Plessner, “Schauspielers,” 186. 37. Plessner considers that the study of laughter conducted by Henri Bergson in his classic work Le rire, describes only its relationship with the phenomenon of the comic: “Admittedly, Bergson’s celebrated analysis, Le rire, approached the phenomenon with the same intent [to understand it with reference to the reaction of laughter]; the only objection to it is that it investigates laughter exclusively within the horizon of the comic, a restriction which, however, detracts nothing from the insights it does provide” (Plessner, Laughing and Crying), 81. 38. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 25. 39. Helmuth Plessner, “On Human Expression,” in Phenomenological Psychology, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 52. 40. In contrast to the interest shown by Plessner in the expressive behaviours of laughing and crying that, although being uncommon or marginal in their full deployment, strike him as very revealing from an anthropological perspective, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty focuses on the essential continuity—not the rupture—between emotion, gesture and word. The gestural body is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a power of natural expression” (211), an “open and indefinite power of giving significance” (226), a “general system of symbols for the world” (275). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Oxon/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002), 211, 226, 275, respectively. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, in contrast to Plessner, is interested in expressive behaviours where the gesture or body acts as the carrier or transporter of meaning, while Plessner is more interested in expressive behaviours that reveal the composition, complexity, or even the internal rupture (brokenness) and strangeness of the human being. 41. Erwin Straus, “The Upright Posture,” The Psychiatric Quarterly 26, nos. 1–4 (1952), 529–61. 42. Erwin Straus, “The Sigh: An Introduction to a Theory of Expression,” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 14, no. 4 (1952), 690. Erwin Straus devoted his attention, for example, to the sigh as an expressive variation of the breathing function, understood

The Body That Laughs and Cries

85

as a mode of relating to the world and not just in its strictly physiological sense: “A sigh occurs when the equilibrium between the individual and the world is disturbed, when pressure and resistance are increased. . . . The sigh appears to be a futile effort to throw off the burden” (“The Sigh,” 687). 43. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 27. 44. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 14. 45. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 72. 46. Today, in the wake of recent research in the field of neuroscience attributing the ability to laugh to even non-primate mammal brains, referring to laughing and crying as human monopolies might appear obsolete. However, despite Jaak Pankseep’s “Laughing Rats” and other examples, it can be argued that human laughter, in its full sense, as Plessner says, has qualitatively distinctive features. As Heleen J. Pott rightly shows, different types of laughter can be considered, meaning that the laughter we consider characteristically human does not simply coincide with the expressions of enjoyment or fun, which can also be found in other animal species, but is most specifically associated with a sense of humour and the characteristic experience of what is comical: Heleen J. Pott, “On Humor and ‘Laughing’ Rats. The importance of Plessner for Affective Neuroscience,” in Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, ed. Jos de Mul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 375–86. 47. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 72. 48. Plessner, Levels, 270, 272. 49. As Heinze says, the notion of “positionality” is a psychophysical-neutral category with which Plessner aspires to avoid the mind-body dualism and the split between biological and philosophical anthropology. The notion of “positionality” does not purport to define the essence of the human being but is a useful conceptual tool for making humans understandable to themselves. See Heinze, “Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology,” 119, 122. 50. Plessner, Levels, 277 51. Plessner, Levels, 277. Expressed concisely: “This position of being at once in the middle and on the periphery deserves the name of excentricity,*” Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 149. 52. Jos de Mul, “Artificial by Nature,” 16. 53. Plessner, Levels, 271. 54. Without referring to the Plessnerian categories of centring and decentring, the dual relationship of the human with his body or the dual aspect (Körper/Leib) revealing the experience of corporeality is a truism in the phenomenological tradition developed and discussed in depth in numerous texts by Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to cite just three representative examples. The physical or objective body (Körper) means the body considered as a material reality, with physical properties (colour, texture, shape) like other objects. This objective body can be studied and analysed from the outside, in the third person, with the view and perspective of the detached and the neutral knowledge of natural science, as in the case, for example, of anatomy, physiology, or neurology. Unlike the former, the living and lived body (Leib) refers to the body as it is experienced by the subject itself, as the centre of orientation around which the spatial dimensions of the world are organised,

86

Chapter 4

as the capacity of movement and of action or of relationship with other beings, as an organ of the senses and as a field of localisation of sensations. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reiner Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, herausgegegen von M. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 143–61. 55. Plessner, Levels, 273. 56. Maarten Coolen, “Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body,” in Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, ed. Jos de Mul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 114. See Maren Wehrle, “Being a body and having a body. The twofold temporality of embodied intentionality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2019), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11097​-019​-09610​-z. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 115, 119. 58. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 120. 59. Coolen, “Bodily Experience,” 116. 60. Coolen, “Bodily Experience,” 120. Coolen’s opinion could be qualified if we consider Merleau-Ponty’s work in The Visible and the Invisible (1964): here Merleau-Ponty insists on the toucher/touched viewer/viewed, and so on, double structure of corporeality, defining the body as “sensed” and “sentient” (179). In language that seems to approximate the thesis of the dual aspect of the body (being a body/ having a body) defended by Plessner, Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible: “[O]ur body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them” (180). And further on he speaks of the “double belongingness to the order of the ‘object’ and the order of the ‘subject’” (181). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible (suivi de notes de travail) (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 61. Phillip B. Zarilli provides a detailed description of “attentiveness to the breath” or “attentive breathing” in actor training, the martial arts and meditation. It undoubtedly involves a type of direct and thematic attention to bodily activity itself, entailing a certain conscious distancing with respect to such activity. See Zarilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model,” 662–64. 62. Maarten Coolen, “Bodily Experience,” 125. 63. Eugenio Barba, “The Fiction of Duality,” New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 20 (1989), 311–14. 64. “When the actor distances himself from his ‘spontaneity,’ he emphasizes the duality between himself and his vehicle, and passes artificially through the essential zones of the physical domain: how to remain in an erect position, how to move in space, how to direct and focus the eyes, how to discipline the movement of the limbs and the manipulatory muscles of the fingers, how to shape the emission of the voice, and how to articulate sentences.” Barba, “The Fiction of Duality,” 312. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 165. 66. Zarilli provides an excellent example when describing the difficulties students have in adopting the lion pose in the Indian martial art kalarippayattu, in which a beginner must learn how to assume the pose correctly, assuming postures that are “extrinsic,” in other words, that do not form part of his previously incorporated

The Body That Laughs and Cries

87

movements or skillsets. In a case like this, the appreciation is especially intense: see Zarilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model,” 658–59. 67. That idea of the need to uphold a balance between the is-body and the has-body is foreign, for example, to the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, who reveals how the corps sujet deploys the richness of bodily intentionality and denounces the trend to reduce the corps sujet to an objective body, but barely addresses the necessary persistence of the physical dimension of the body itself in the body schema. 68. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 156. 69. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 157. 70. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 146. 71. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 146. 72. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 147. 73. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 147. 74. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 147. 75. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 67. 76. The notion of “person” in Plessner derives naturally from the principles of “excentric positionality”: “It [the human being] has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself and this makes it an I.” See Plessner, Levels, 270. 77. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 66. 78. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 157. 79. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 66. 80. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 385. 81. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 138.

Chapter 5

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change Meg Mumford

Throughout his artistic career, Bertolt Brecht took great pleasure in attending and reflecting on comedic performance, ranging from the work of performers in fairground and circus contexts to the famous Bavarian popular comedian Karl Valentin and the silent-film star Charlie Chaplin. During his exile from Nazi Germany (1933–1941), Brecht particularly addressed the usefulness of these two comedians for developing the artistic strategies of dialectical epic theatre, strategies he used to show the ridiculous and changeable nature of oppressive social behaviour and structures. Brecht’s focus on “the comedy of society” and the treatment of social conditions as laughable, because unnecessary, has been characterised as evidence that the comic was in his case a way of looking at life as well as what he saw in the world around him.1 Humour achieved through incongruity and paradox was also a key facilitator of the critical distance so crucial to his theatre of disillusionment. Marc Silberman locates Brecht’s interest in “an intellectual, detached, and critical attitude” as a point of contact “with the Bergsonian sense of the comic.”2 In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), Bergson describes an “absence of feeling” as a usual accompaniment to laughter, and non-sentimental disinterested spectatorship as a condition for the appearance of the comic that appeals to intelligence.3 While the detached critical attitude of the Brechtian actor is certainly important to the demonstration of the comedy of the social world and the encouragement of an interrogative spectator, 89

90

Chapter 5

the critical attitude of Brecht’s actor and spectator is always informed by feeling.4 This may be one reason why, as Silberman observes, the comic in Brecht’s work more commonly elicits the “emotional registers of shock, astonishment and embarrassment” than laughter.5 While Bergson’s and Brecht’s association of the comic with a critical attitude is worthy of further investigation, in the following analysis I focus instead on a comparatively neglected point of connection between the philosopher and the theatre-maker: their mutual attention to human rigidity as a laughable element. Bergson describes such rigidity as “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.”6 This “peculiar inelasticity” finds its form in “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character” that is a possible sign of a separatist inclination to “swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates.” It is a manifestation of eccentricity that is anathema to sociability. Bergson conceives of laughter as a fear-inspiring “social gesture” that is an ideal corrective to the gesture of eccentric inelasticity.7 He also attributes the phenomenon of inelasticity to the inertia of matter.8 Intriguingly, in an early commentary on Valentin, Brecht foregrounds this comedian’s ability to draw out subtle pleasures from the “inertia of matter” and the “inadequacy of all things” as a feature of his power.9 Brecht’s interest in such inadequacy has been recognised in discussions of his relationship with Valentin and often with the caveat that he either did not share or moved away from Valentin’s worldview.10 For example, McDowell argues that Valentin maintained a cynical distrust of a universe that could not be rectified, a distrust embodied in his treatment of language, people, social systems and objects as unreliable and tending toward failure. McDowell characterises Valentin as sharing Brecht’s sense that the world was out of joint but not sharing Brecht’s vision of what it should become. He arrives at the conclusion that Valentin was in this sense apolitical. Brecht, by contrast, moved in the late 1920s to a Marxist-inspired position that the social world was a human construct that could be re-made: “You lie in the bed you have fashioned.”11 The following analysis builds upon previous recognition of Brecht’s attention to inelasticity by more closely addressing, firstly, how this attention manifested itself in his approach to bodies and character behaviour in the theatre, and, secondly, how it related to his views on what impeded and enabled life and progressive social change. In this chapter I address these issues by first outlining Brecht’s enjoyment of Valentin’s play with both oppositions and the inertia of matter. I then address Bergson’s theory of comic inelasticity and consider how Valentin engaged with the expression of inelasticity, especially in performances during the immediate aftermath of World War I as well as in the short film on which he and Brecht collaborated, Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop (1923). I also

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

91

consider examples of a similar approach to inelasticity in Brecht’s stagings, particularly his 1931 production of Man Equals Man and the productions between 1948 and 1951 of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, two plays to which he applied a comedy genre title.12 My analysis of Valentin’s and Brecht’s performance work is guided by Bergson’s attention to the expression of inelasticity in the form of bodily rigidity, automatic and insufficient habituated action and unsociability. Parts of the analysis consider points of convergence between, on the one hand, the dichotomy of supple life and inert matter that underpins Bergson’s comic theory, and, on the other hand, Brecht’s attention to the dichotomy of flux and stasis. BRECHT AND BERGSON ON (COMICAL) IMPEDIMENTS TO LIVELINESS AND PROGRESS Many have observed that Valentin’s play with oppositions and incongruity was a source of inspiration for Brecht’s foregrounding of contradictory behaviour and social relations in striking and enjoyable ways.13 Incongruity was a feature of Brecht’s work prior to his encounter with Marxism that he later adapted as a vehicle for his materialist dialectical vision (that is, his belief in the transformative power of opposition within thinking, culture, history and nature and its centrality to social development). According to this vision, concrete reality is not a static substance but comprises a contradictory and dynamic unity of inclusive opposites.14 In his appendices to the “Short Organon for the Theatre” (1949), a significant statement of the aesthetic principles of his theatre, Brecht speaks of features that make dialectics enjoyable, such as “the instability of all situations” and “the wit of contradictory circumstances,” and asserts that “all these involve enjoyment of the liveliness of people, things and processes.”15 Brecht himself presented Valentin’s mastery of socially significant opposition as formative for his theatre in one of the Messingkauf dialogue fragments that influenced the “Short Organon.” In the fragment, Brecht has a Dramaturg comment that the artist he learned most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played recalcitrant employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and made them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his assistant, a popular comedienne who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep voice.16

Here Brecht frames the thin, tall and gangly Valentin and his short female comedy partner Liesl Karlstadt, who often performed in drag, as using

92

Chapter 5

corporeal and character oppositions in ways that illuminate class struggle. However, in Brecht’s earliest sustained commentary on Valentin from 1922, the focus of the praise is not so much the wit of contradiction but the pleasure of Unzulänglichkeit (“inadequacy”): His performances have a very dry, interiorised sense of the comic during which you can smoke and drink and be shaken by an incessant inner laughter that has nothing benign about it. For we are dealing here with the inertia of matter and with the most subtle pleasures that can be drawn from it. We see the inadequacy of all things, including of ourselves.17

In order to explore this less well charted source of pleasure for Brecht, I turn to Bergson’s theory of the comic nature of mechanical inelasticity. Bergson presents laughable inelasticity as an imperfection that impedes life’s capacity to evolve and progress. He likens it to a “kind of absentmindedness on the part of life” that leads to phenomena such as circular series and corporeal rigidity: Were men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently, it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.18

For Bergson inelasticity is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living” that dampens the vitality of the living body, a vitality that belongs to the “soul which is shaping matter” that is expressed in gracefulness, suppleness, plasticity and “wide awake adaptability.”19 Bergson presents vitality as derived from what he characterises as the lighter and higher “principle of intellectual and moral life.” This vitality is dampened by the weight and resistance of the material side of the living body “which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft,” forcing the body to become “inert matter dumped down upon living energy.”20 Bergson’s theory of the comic aligns the binary of plasticity/inelasticity with an assertion of vital life over inert matter and of soul and intelligence over body (when the latter is forced to become matter). Such dualist assertions of soul over matter in Bergson’s analytical language have led to debates about whether Bergson advances an anti-materialistic form of vitalism.21 This life philosophy is divergent from the types of materialist thinking Brecht was

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

93

drawn to. In the following discussion I address briefly the issue of vitalism and Bergson’s approach to matter in order to show some points of connection between his and Brecht’s attention to impediments to the human capacity to create and change. Given the complexity of the debate about Bergson’s vitalism, I limit my discussion here to a summation of interpretations of Bergson’s approach to life and matter that are relevant to the issue of rigidity in Brecht’s work. To this end I draw particularly on analyses of how Bergson approaches the evolution of organisms in his text Creative Evolution (1907). Recent commentators on Bergson’s theorisation of evolution have noted how, unlike vitalism, he does not make a radical distinction between living and inert matter by invoking a vital force opposed to materiality.22 Rather, Bergson’s élan vital is not an immaterial force but the vitality of matter itself, its organisation, growth, unpredictability and creativity.23 DiFrisco characterises Bergson’s élan vital as “an impulsion responsible for the organisation of living things which is passed on and differentiates from generation to generation through the ‘germ-plasm’ common to species.”24 In Creative Evolution Bergson also shifts from vitalist dualism to a monist presentation of life and matter as two sides of cosmic duration. The latter is time conceived by Bergson as the indivisible movement of experience,25 as continuous heterogeneity, and as a “state of interpenetrating elements, a qualitative multiplicity of ‘stuff’ which endures.”26 Bergson presents nature as having a continuous hierarchy of durations, each with different intensities and dynamisms, different degrees “to which a system is affected by its past and develops towards the future.” Like life, matter exists in numerous states of intensity and is “a flux rather than a thing.”27 Ultimately Bergson recasts life and matter as different degrees of dynamism rather than different types of things. While Bergson places living things higher than nonliving matter in his hierarchy of durations, he presents progress as dependent on a balance between the two. Matter is accorded lower status as it is related to “descent” defined as “a progressive degradation of energy” evident in the disorder and entropy of an organisation.” Conversely, the vital impetus of life is the movement of “ascent” that raises potential energy and the production of organisation, thereby delaying the tendency of the physical world to entropic degradation.28 Organisation manifests as change without direction or plan and along multiple lines of evolution, with the living organism both shaping and being shaped by its environments.29 Bergson attributes the act of organising to life, while organisation as a certain arrangement of things is attributed to matter. If life is to progress through matter, a balance is required between life as the active impetus to creative change and matter as conservative structure. Too much creativity and the identity of an organisation may unravel, and too much structure and the organisation may cease to grow. Such stasis occurs

94

Chapter 5

when the “creative potential of humans is bound up in customs, traditions or laws.”30 In the essay on laughter, Bergson focuses on a force that counterbalances the conservative side of organisation and corrects matter’s tendency to lifeless inertia, which he views as an impediment to our capacity to be alert and adaptive and to participate in the “increasingly delicate adjustment of wills” that society strives for.31 In the case of human behaviour and social relations, he finds the impediment of mechanical inelasticity to be embodied in corporeal rigidity, automatism, insufficient habits of mind and body, absentmindedness and unsociability.32 This focus on laughter as a social corrective to the inelasticity of an eccentric individual seems to set the comic up as an oppressive force incompatible with a revolutionary social agenda. However, the object to be corrected is anything at the individual or collective level that inhibits creativity and change, such as rigid automatism and habit. As Michael North comments, comedy as envisaged in Bergson’s theory finds itself in the strange position of enforcing spontaneity.33 Bergson’s notion of evolution has points of both divergence from and compatibility with that of dialectical materialism. For example, while evolutionary change for Bergson unfolds without predictable direction, in the case of a dialectical perspective, change is the result of the dynamic, inclusive opposites of reality that cause individuals, society and nature to be in a state of flux, a play of opposites that can be grasped and potentially be altered consciously. However, there is overlap between Bergson’s and Brecht’s commitment to creative change, as well as in their shared understanding that humans are both shaped by the settings in which they dwell and have a capacity to create a relation to that environment.34 Their apprehension of reality as an ongoing flow of change is another point of similarity. This apprehension is, in Brecht’s case, reflected in his interest in the use by Heraclitus of the image of not being able to step into the same river twice to illustrate how “everything flows.” Brecht integrated versions of this image into his poems and plays on a number of occasions, one instance being Widow Begbick’s presentation of “A Song of the Flow of Things” in the 1931 Man Equals Man production. Here, and in Brecht’s fables in general, a sense is generated of how individuals change in the process of their reciprocal relations with changing material and social conditions.35 The philosopher and the poet-playwright also share an attention to impediments to the human capacity to create and change. This attention is even more pronounced in Valentin’s oeuvre, which contains numerous entropic narratives characterised by bodies, objects, sets and events tending towards disorder and decay. As I demonstrate in the next section, Bergson’s and Brecht’s attention to impediments was, in part, expressed in their mutual attention to “rigidity of body, mind and character.”

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

95

VALENTIN, BRECHT AND CORPOREAL RIGIDITY: MARIONETTES, WAX SCULPTURES AND MASKS One of the figures associated with inelasticity in Bergson’s theory of the comic is the marionette who is characterised as a lifeless automaton carrying out uniform movements and gestures with a stiffened body and an incapacity to master its fate.36 As a boy Valentin created theatre with his friends that drew on marionette theatre booklets, and one of the people who later designed sets for Valentin, Ludwig Greiner, had entertained troupes during World War I with a self-made puppet theatre. It was Greiner who was apparently responsible for Valentin’s decision to create works that played humorously with his very thin and tall body.37 In these pieces the comedian manipulated costume and prosthetics in a manner that created physical eccentricity and the sense of an emaciated body with insect qualities. For example, he wore tight-fitting clothing, elongated boots and a long prosthetic nose.38 In the first piece that played with this physicality, “I Am a Poor, Skinny Man” (c. 1906), Valentin performed under the stage name Skelettgiggerl (Skeleton-chuckle).39 Satirist and cabaret song author Kurt Tucholsky described Valentin as “[a] stick-thin, gangly fellow with spindly, pointy Don Quixote legs, sharp, knobbly knees.”40 Tucholsky’s description evokes a sense of a skeletal entity, the mechanics of its body on full display, with qualities akin to a stick or rod, a rigidity familiar also from marionettes. Greiner also contributed to Valentin’s development of a panopticon project—a short-lived museum of curios—by translating Valentin’s ideas into a set of watercolours. The envisaged panopticon was realised in 1934 in the cellar of Hotel Wagner during a period when Valentin withdrew from live performance after the rise of the Nazis. The museum displayed diverse objects including a rose that exuded the fragrance of petrol, and a series of grandiose wax figures provided by Emil Eduard Hammer, the sculptor who had put Munich on the map for unusually life-like waxworks. Some of the other items in the panopticon were humorous, such as the wax boy who operated an electric nose-picker.41 Similar collections of curios were presented at festival fairgrounds and these were a direct source of inspiration for many of Valentin’s pieces; such fairgrounds were also a significant part of Brecht’s youth in Bavarian Augsburg. Brecht’s and Valentin’s shared enthusiasm for fairground aesthetics is vividly captured in a photo that features Brecht in front of the fairground booth set for Valentin’s Oktoberfestschau (1920), a one-act spoof of fairground freak shows. The photo depicts a motley crew including Brecht pretending to play the clarinet, a tall thin Valentin playing a bass tuba while dressed as a typical member of the petite bourgeoisie—with steel-rimmed glasses, beard and bowler hat, Karlstadt in male drag as the

96

Chapter 5

master of ceremonies ringing the bell to start the show and a clown figure poised to beat a large drum.42 Hans Otto Münsterer has described the importance of the fairgrounds for Brecht and other members of their friendship group who took great pleasure in numerous aspects, including the clowns and other circus elements as well as the panopticon.43 Such performance events, showcasing eccentric bodies and physical capacities, contributed directly to Brecht’s development of an objectifying epic style of performance. Fairground aesthetics also fuelled Brecht’s interest in imagery of human bodies that suggests proximity to death or to the inanimate. This interest is expressed in Brecht’s reflections on The Red Raisin revue, a collaboration with Valentin that mixed cabaret and fairground performance. The event, performed straight after two evening performances of Brecht’s Drums in the Night at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, featured satirical and strange presentations from the actors in Drums as well as cabaret performers. Brecht was responsible for the first part of the event, The Landlord of Monstrosities, which involved the revelation of individual performers located in a semi-circle of curtained cabins. Once the curtain for each booth was drawn back by the conferencier with a schoolmasterly stick, the figures rolled out like automata to declaim and sing, then slid back into their respective cabins.44 A fragment

Figure 5.1 Brecht, Valentin and Karlstadt in front of the fairground set for Oktoberfestschau (1920). Photo by Knorr and Hirth. Reproduced by permission from Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Fotoarchiv 06/040.

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

97

that contains some of Brecht’s directorial ideas for the first part describes Brecht showing Valentin and Karlstadt “his living wax-figure cabinet,” and mentions wax figures with green light in glass cabinets, as well as how the figures start to speak when bank notes are stuffed in (presumably into a machine).45 Heißerer draws a fascinating connection between, on the one hand, Brecht’s attention to the money-fed automata, and on the other hand Brecht’s comments in a 1956 discussion with director Giorgio Strehler about how the actors should sing in The Threepenny Opera. During the discussion Brecht referred to the way Valentin “always impersonated someone who was just playing for the money, with a minimum of energy, so that he barely filled his obligation.”46 The sober minimalist performance produces a body that gravitates towards lifelessness via a diminution of energy. Here an eccentric tendency towards inertia suggests both a body fatigued by and resistant to the automatisation inflicted by exploitative repetitive labour. Valentin’s use of the whiteface make-up associated with the clown is a known source of inspiration for Brecht’s approach to acting. Aspects of whiteface were used by Brecht to theatrically show emotional and bodily states, including rigidity and paralysis, and their social causes. Brecht encouraged actors to focus on crafted comportment that displays how bodies and behaviour are moulded by social forces—a contrast to psychological realism that focused on facial expression of inner emotion, innate self and soul.47 Brecht was drawn to the work of Valentin, and to what he described as Chaplin’s impassive, apparently waxed-over face, ripped apart by a single expressive twitch,48 in part because these approaches provided a model of how “cheap psychologisms” and Mimik (“facial expression”) could be renounced.49 Brecht would later praise Chinese actors for the treatment of their “countenance as a blank sheet, to be inscribed by the gestus [socially significant comportment] of the body.”50 The tabula rasa approach presented characters as both open to social inscription and vulnerable to its potential oppressiveness. Brecht first used a form of whiteface for the soldiers in a lengthy battle scene in his 1924 staging of his adaptation The Life of Edward II of England. The battle is waged by King Edward against the killers of his lover, Gaveston. In the Messingkauf fragment where a Brecht persona hails “clown Valentin” as his most significant mentor, Brecht relays how he sought advice from Valentin, asking, “What are soldiers like in battle”?51 Here the fragment peters out, but Brecht’s oft-repeated story is captured by others who give similar accounts. Bernhard Reich claims the comedian replied, “Soldiers in a battle are scared. They’re as white as a sheet.”52 According to Brecht’s friend, Walter Benjamin, Brecht then added “They’re tired.” In the production the soldiers appeared with white faces that Benjamin reports was the result of a thick application of chalk.53 Rather than simply absorptive engagement

98

Chapter 5

with the soldiers’ plight, Brecht’s staging also opened up space for analytical reflection on the fear and fatigue of these servants of the crown. Here a deathly rigidity is the result of social subjugation. In the 1931 Man Equals Man, both whiteface and masks were applied. Set in a Kiplingesque British India and described by Tony Meech as “Brecht’s excursion into the mechanistic potential of the human being,”54 the play depicts the swift reassembly of the Irish docker Galy Gay who is transformed by three soldiers into the fighting machine Jeriah Jip. Brecht’s notes on the production indicate that four different masks were used to display the docker’s progression through social identity phases according to the pressures of his environment. It was in the third phase after Galy Gay had been shot that actor Peter Lorre painted Galy Gay’s face white, indicating that he had become a blank page prior to his reassembly as a soldier, as well as showing the strain induced by his fear of life.55 To indicate that the other soldiers had been reduced to fighting machines, Brecht gave them a type of grotesque make-up based on distortions of facial features and equipped them with outsized hands, stilts concealed by long trousers to give height, wire-coat hangers to give breadth, and costumes draped with weaponry.56 Here the use of stilts, which also contributed to rigidity and immobility, recalls Valentin’s frequent casting of eccentric sideshow figures such as the giant who played the Chimney Sweep in The Christmas Tree Board,57 a playlet that was performed in the same evening program as Brecht’s The Landlord of Monstrosities. In these instances of Brecht’s epic theatre, the application of white to the face not only enabled the necessary distance between actor and character necessary for the shock of recognition that can occur when the familiar is made strange but also the creation of tabula rasa imagery. While such imagery can signal human adaptability, in the case of the docker who becomes a soldier it also suggests susceptibility to a form of social conditioning that rigidifies. What the application of Bergson’s theory of inelasticity also brings into focus is the way Brecht drew upon aspects of the traditional clown’s face to express fatigue and fear (of both life and death) as forms of inertia that threaten change and evolution. Other devices used frequently and playfully by Valentin that suggested corporeal rigidity included mask-like features such as make-up, prostheses and hair and head pieces. Bergson notes that coverings of the body such as garments and the red nose created by a coating of vermilion, which he describes as examples of rigidity “applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness,” can give rise to the comic. Laughter can ensue when a character appears to be obviously in disguise, the surprisingly artificial covering no longer seamlessly connected with the individual.58 Valentin specialised in instances of obvious masquerade created by nose extensions, glasses (without glass), headwear like undersized

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

99

caps and oversized helmets. He also sported wigs, beards and moustaches that were repugnantly scraggly or bushy fakes just like those that appear in both Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop and Puntila. These outlandish elements were often contrasted with an impassive face and matter-of-fact, underplayed manner.59 Brecht would employ similar mask-like devices, as well as masks in the sense of material coverings, not only to show the actor’s critical distance from the character, but also to suggest a ridiculous paralysis of body and mind. In the various stagings of Puntila, prostheses were used comically in the case of characters with socioeconomic privilege to suggest a paralysis born of being parasitic on the lower classes and fixed in ways that selfishly benefit or imprison the self. In this comedy, the hard-drinking Finnish landlord, Puntila, causes havoc for his staff, for his upper-crust associates, for village fiancés, for his daughter Eva and mostly for his clever and agile chauffeur, Matti. When he is drunk, Puntila is relatively humane. When sober he is selfish and mean. Building on Hegel’s dialectical observation that the almighty master is actually dependent on the subservience of the servant whose work is a source of his freedom, the comedy demonstrates the exploitative nature of class-based society and finishes with an act of rebellion from Matti that points forward to revolutionary change. To indicate the parasitic nature of Puntila and his male upper-class entourage, Brecht called for physiognomic deformations created through prostheses, hair pieces and padding. For the 1949 production, the actor playing Puntila wore an unattractive bald head and used make-up to create dissipated and base characteristics. A few strands of hair were added to suggest an appearance like the brutal conqueror Ghengis Khan. One of the goals of the mask work was to overcome any tendency to receive the character as a naturally likeable person who just had a small number of nasty impulses when hungover. Another aim was to communicate how this ruler would like to get out of his own skin.60 In the 1952 production, the short and slight Curt Bois played Puntila with what appears to have been padding in the buttocks area, perhaps suggestive of, for example, too much leisurely sitting around.61 Brecht assigned grotesque masks—including bald pates atop misshapen heads, large noses, excessively long moustaches and beards, and thick brows—to other male members of the upper stratum who behaved in a pompous and silly way.62 Figures such as the Judge and Attaché sported monocles that suggested their pretention and lack of vision. These deformations, and the contrast built with all other characters who moved in an everyday manner, also built a picture of upper-class sterility,63 a lack of capacity to evolve and create. In a response to press reception of the more serious use of masks in his 1954 production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht illuminated his concern about the way liveliness is compromised by rigid schematic thinking

100

Chapter 5

that can be found in stereotypes and simplistic oppositions. Critical of the construction of a fixed schema by the press—“rich people—masks, poor— none”—he observed that masks were worn both by ruling-class characters and some of the soldiers and servants. Noting that the ruling class does display types of stiffness, he also observed that servants can look to some extent even more master-like than their masters. Even in their case there are these distortions, arising not from their control over themselves but from the strong tendency to let themselves be controlled. . . . The livelier things are the more oppositions there are too, the more differentiated the less schematic.64

Here Brecht demonstrates his interest in using the “inert matter” of the masks to expose rigidity as an outcome of a lack or excess of self-control that can be found across social classes. Brecht’s concern about the press reception can be connected with an earlier commentary of his on the production of Verfremdung (artistic “defamiliarisation,” “distantiation,” or “estrangement”) where he cautions against the portrayal of human behaviour that becomes schematic and lacks concreteness.65 Brecht regarded the concrete both as material phenomena and as realities or instances which are sociohistorically specific and maintain the flux of the real.66 Arguably Brecht’s use of masks to signal all those who perpetuate the exploitation and static nature of the ruling class does not itself entirely avoid the simplifications and rigid oppositions of schematic portrayal. As Brecht’s response to the press shows, one of the challenges of mask work was ensuring that the display of inelasticity did not become determinist, overwhelming a sense of changeability and liveliness. VALENTIN, BRECHT AND INELASTIC BEHAVIOUR: AUTOMATISM, HABIT AND UNSOCIABILITY When elaborating on comic inelasticity of mind and character, Bergson focuses on automatism, habit and unsociability. His concrete example of automatism, understood as unwilled or unconscious action, is the figure of a man running along the street who involuntarily falls due to an inadequacy, perhaps an inability to alter his pace or avoid an obstacle due to lack of elasticity, absentmindedness, or physical obstinacy. To exemplify inelasticity born of imprisonment within habit, Bergson refers to a person who goes about everyday routines with precision but no awareness that someone else has played a trick, like a man who dips his pen into the inkstand only to draw it out covered with mud, or one who sits down on what he expects to be a solid chair to then find himself sprawled on the floor. What is laughable here

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

101

is the continuation “like a machine in a straight line,” and the being caught in repetition67 that leads to insufficient action or inability to take action. When describing comic unsociability, Bergson refers to any individual “who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings.”68 Inattentive to themselves and others, such individuals fail to adapt to new social surroundings due to absentmindedness or an inability to modify habits. Bergson concludes that “[r]igidity, automatism, absentmindedness and unsociability are all inextricably intertwined.”69 Such entwinement is exemplified in Valentin’s portrayal of the Father in The Christmas Tree Stand (1922), a sketch that concluded The Red Raisin revue collaboration with Brecht. In this parody of a melodrama featuring an impoverished family, the unemployed Father is sent out by his wife to find a Christmas tree. He returns with what looks like the small branch of a tree as well as conspicuously artificial cotton wool for snow on his hat and coat shoulders. Unfortunately, he has forgotten the tree stand and his conversation with his wife about the stand reveals an obstinate tendency to read phenomena in a literal manner that impedes communication: MOTHER: This one doesn’t have a Christmas tree board with it. Have you lost it? I specifically said that you should get a tree with a board! FATHER: Yes, this one doesn’t have one. MOTHER: I can see that it doesn’t have one! FATHER: How can you see it, if there’s nothing there?!70 After exiting for the second time, the Father returns with two absurdly long planks which he saws up with considerable incompetence, smashing the ceiling lamp in the process. More chaos ensues after an exchange of gifts including a stolen item, the arrival of the giant Chimney Sweep who ultimately sits in the cake, the Father’s unsociable cycling round the room on a three-wheel bike, and the children’s screaming. Out of this pandemonium emerges the discovery that it is not Christmas after all but the middle of June, a summer month, and that the Father has absentmindedly forgotten to tear off the leaves of the calendar.71 Michael Wilson argues that the Father is not simply “an unwitting engineer of anarchy” but a representative of the Munich society who came to see the first performances of this sketch, of people stretched to the breaking point during the middle of postwar hyperinflation in Germany.72 This work and others throughout his career demonstrate Valentin’s capacity to critique the harsh unsociability of society itself. However, it is often observed that, unlike Brecht, Valentin presented the breakdown and failure at the level of objects, people and their social worlds as irrecoverable.73

102

Chapter 5

In Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop the comic focus is on improper engagement with technology, as well as an unsociability characterised by cruel indifference to others and ineffectual repeated actions.74 The plot of this short improvised film experiment revolves around the shenanigans of a barber (played by Valentin) and a hairdresser (played by the cabaret performer Blandine Ebinger) who apply old and new hairdressing tools and gadgets, as well as sadism and indifference, to their unsuspecting middle- and upper-class customers. The bored hairdresser amuses herself by activating electrical equipment that causes her to perform a quirky dance. She then manipulates levers causing the electrocution of a female customer whom she considers her rival for the affection of the vainglorious Professor Moras. She finishes proceedings by pressing the hairdresser’s chair so that her customer’s body is involuntarily moved up and down and ultimately tipped out so that the woman ends up crawling away on all fours. Meanwhile the barber with his Pinocchio nose sequentially takes a hammer, chisel, pair of pliers and enormous pincers to remove an object like a boil or wart from the chin of a well-to-do customer sporting long boots and wielding a riding crop (played by Liesl Karlstadt). He also mistakenly gives Professor Moras an eccentric haircut, shaving all of his hair off with the exception of a top-knot ponytail. While three customers with an assortment of strange primeval beards or sideburns wait with mounting frustration and unease, the barber prepares to shave a different male customer, accidentally decapitating him with a large knife. Unsure what to do, the barber puts the head on the floor; at a later point the head moves of its own accord across the surface. He then binds the head to its torso with a necktie-like bandage, and the reassembled man goes on to fight a duel with the Professor. The seated trio of customers often engage in synchronised and ineffective actions, such as waiting, smoking cigars, rising, cowering and eventually departing without the grooming they came for.75 One of the sources of humorous automatism in this surreal film is not only the display of machines controlling humans but also the display of humans as machine-like. The reassembled customer is shown to be a combination of parts without a fully functioning mind, whose control during the duel is even more compromised when the hairdresser pulls off his head from on high with a fishing rod in a marionette-like action. When, with his strange haircut, Professor Moras prepares for the duel he executes a humorous strongman routine that is designed to turn him into a fighting machine. In the training episode he undertakes squats, arm pumps and barbell lifts. In Valentin’s earlier work Oktoberfestschau, which features the fairground booth that appears in the photo with Brecht, Valentin presented an amusing muscle-man figure who lifts barbells with his thin spindly arms.76 Brecht appropriated and modified the use of the barbells for a scene in Man Equals Man where Galy Gay lifts a heavy weight to prove his credentials as member of the

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

103

Kilkoa Wrestling Club, and thereby demonstrates to the soldiers that they have chosen an ideal associate. McDowell argues that Brecht turns Valentin’s parody of the juxtaposition of extremes “into a full-length comedy of extreme metamorphosis.”77 Galy Gay’s erasure of his identity to become the successfully brutal soldier Jip illustrates the making of something akin to Foucault’s docile body, a body whose forces are increased but channelled into obedient and efficient productivity at the expense of resistant or progressive energy.78 Drawing on Bergson’s theory of the comic, Joel Schechter notes that Galy Gay shifts from being “too pliant and changeable to be the ‘human fighting machine’” to the inelastic Jip who performs a ballet with a cannon.79 The engagement with a machine-like human in the work of Bergson, Valentin and Brecht is in keeping with what North describes as the machine-age comedy that emerged during the early twentieth century and which was marked by attention to the confusion between categories of the mechanical and the living.80 In Brecht’s case it also demonstrates a concern that human malleability, the capacity to change and be changed, is paradoxically a potential cause of destructively rigid behaviour. Such malleability can result from insufficient consideration of the pros and cons of one’s swift adaptations—perhaps a form of Bergsonian inelasticity in the form of absentmindedness—but also from the pressure of socioeconomic forces that encourage an individual to conform in the interests of survival. Other features of inelasticity prominent in the Mysteries film, such as ineffectual repetitive action and sadistic unsociability, also featured in the Puntila stagings where they helped advance a class-based critique of upper-crust behaviour, sometimes at the expense of Brecht’s advocacy of human agency. Examples of ineffectual action included the tea-drinking manners of the Parson, Judge and Lawyer trio at the engagement party for Eva and Eino, the Attaché. In the 1949 production all three stirred their tea with a spoon before speaking,81 a comic foregrounding of their manners as empty repetitive constructs. In the 1951 production, prior to the party, Eino was depicted as seeking to impress Puntila with his suitability as a family member and fellow patriarch, moving in amusing Chaplinesque synchrony with his would-be benefactor when discussing his merits as a diplomat, stepping and making turns at the same time. However, this synchronised behaviour, part of Eino’s bid to ensure that his debts would be paid, proved unsuccessful. Later at the engagement party, where drunk Puntila decides Eino is an unworthy son-in-law who must be forcefully evicted from his house, Eino ridiculously abides by a ritual of polite farewell in a bid to maintain his social standing. As he bows before each of the trio of gentlemen, Puntila swiftly boots his backside from behind. It is only at the third bow that Eino decides it would be better to modify the ritual and exit rather than bow again.82 Here Brecht’s comic portrayal of Eino as a mindless character, locked within the posture of

104

Chapter 5

the diplomat until he is conditioned to respond otherwise, prioritises the demonstration of the socially determined nature of humans over their capacity to act as agents of social change. In the case of lower-class characters in the Puntila and other Berliner Ensemble stagings, Brecht also highlighted automatic or habituated behaviour that was socially shaped and a product or cause of social oppression. In the 1951 rehearsals of the intimate kitchen scene between the chauffeur Matti and the parlourmaid Fina, Matti began his courting by beckoning her to come to him with two light taps on his thigh, performed with the attitude “You won’t be summoned twice.” Fina was instructed to respond by walking across to him stiffly and with unintended steps, propelled by the forces of the patronising Casanova and possibly also by sexual desire, forces that she seemed unable to resist.83 This was one of the comic moments in their scene together that gently exposed the master-slave dynamic underpinning patriarchal gender relations. In Brecht’s stagings of his serious playtexts, he sometimes highlighted automatism in unexpectedly comic ways to estrange moments where the oppressed engage in habituated behaviour that perpetuates their own oppression. One example is the depiction of the peasant woman’s prayer in the 1949 production of Mother Courage and Her Children. Here the desperate woman agrees with her husband that they can do nothing to avert the attack by the Catholics on the neighbouring Protestant city of Halle during the Thirty Years War. Instead she encourages Courage’s daughter, Kattrin, to join her in prayer. Brecht wanted to show that praying was an ineffectual defensive behaviour that had become a deadly ritual. Rather than having the prayer performed with high drama, he instructed the young actress Carola Braunbock to give the prayer an unexpectedly hackneyed quality. She was to show how the woman knelt carefully, made herself comfortable with hands folded over her stomach and then chanted in an empty liturgical manner.84 The comic aspect this gave to her action highlighted a critical attitude to the action of prayer, exposing it as an understandable but destructive response that only exacerbated her and her fellow subordinates’ condition of alienation. From early in his career Brecht sought out those forms of comic performance that offered models for defamiliarising ridiculous social phenomena, for ensuring the wit of contradiction, and for making the “liveliness of people, things and processes” both evident and pleasurable. Comic incongruity, in particular, was a vehicle well-suited to shocking spectators out of their usual modes of viewing the world and for alerting them to the need and capacity for change. However, as Brecht’s early comments on Valentin highlight, he was also interested in the power of the comic for addressing inertia and inadequacy. What a closer examination of Brecht’s performance work in light of Bergson’s theory of comic inelasticity offers is a heightened awareness of Brecht’s engagement with impediments to the human capacity to change.

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

105

This concern is embodied in Valentin’s and Brecht’s treatment of marionette and waxwork imagery, their use of masks, prostheses, and wigs, and their foregrounding of habitual and unsocial behaviour. In Brecht’s theatre social forces of inertia include forms of discipline that produce the frightened or docile body of the soldier, class-based training that breeds stiff and sterile masters and compliant and kneeling servants, and a patriarchy that produces female automata. Occasionally Brecht’s theatre depicts psycho-biological forces of inertia such as fear of death or sexual desire. And occasionally his Marxist-inspired displays of inelasticity stray into a schematic determinism rather than portraying a dialectical materialist paradigm. While the application of Bergson’s theory illuminates both the extent and artistic manifestations of Brecht’s concern about forces of stasis within and between humans, it also illuminates some of the limits of Bergson’s theory. In particular it corrects his focus on the threat to life posed by the eccentric individual by attending to the threat posed by the machinery of society, a machinery that repeatedly moves living pliability in a deadly direction. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: NLB, 1973. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Dover, 2013. Bottomore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Brecht, Bertolt. Collected Plays, vol. 2, part 1. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Translated by Gerhard Nellhaus. London: Eyre Methuen, 1979. Brecht, Bertolt. Diaries, 1920–1922. Translated by John Willett. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Brecht, Bertolt. Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Edited by Werner Hecht et al. 30 vols. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988–2000. Brecht, Bertolt. Letters 1913–1956. Edited by John Willett. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York and London: Routledge and Methuen, 1990. Brecht, Bertolt. Journals. Edited by John Willett. Translated by Hugh Rorrison. London: Methuen, 1993. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Film and Radio. Edited and translated by Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2001. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks. Edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman. Translated by Charlotte Ryland, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Tom Kuhn and John Willett. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

106

Chapter 5

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. 3rd ed. Edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. Translated by Jack Davis, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Victoria Hill, Kristopher Imbrigotta, Marc Silberman and John Willett. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Brecht, Bertolt, and Erich Engel. Mysterien eines Friseursalons. In Bertolt Brecht Edition. Directed by Jan Schütte and Joachim Lang. DVD Arthaus: 2008. Brown, Steven D. “Bonga, Tromba and the Organizational Impetus: Evolution and Vitalism in Bergson.” Culture and Organisation 12, no. 4 (2006): 307–19. Calandra, Denis. “Karl Valentin and Bertolt Brecht.” The Drama Review 18, no. 1 (March 1974): 86–98. DiFrisco, James. “Élan Vital Revisited: Bergson and the Thermodynamic Paradigm.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 53, no. 1 (March 2015): 54–73. Double, Oliver, and Michael Wilson. “‘I Am a Poor, Skinny Man’: Persona and Physicality in the Work of Karl Valentin.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 28, no. 3 (2008): 213–21. Double, Oliver, and Michael Wilson. “Karl Valentin’s ‘Father and Son Discuss the War.’” Studies in Theatre and Performance 27, 1 (2007): 5–11. Double, Oliver, and Michael Wilson. “Karl Valentin’s Illogical Subversion: Stand-Up Comedy and Alienation Effect.” New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 3 (2004): 203–15. Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977. Hecht, Werner, ed. Materialien zu Brechts “Der kaukasische Kreidekreis.” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966. Heißerer, Dirk. “Die rote Zibebe: Auf den Spuren zweier Improvisationen von Bert Brecht und Karl Valentin. Mit einer unbekannten Regienotiz Brechts.” In Improvisationen in mehr als Zwei Bildern, Magazin für Literatur und Politik (2010): 10–92. Edited by Walter Delabar and Gregor Ackermann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2015. Horak, Jan-Christopher. “Laughing Until It Hurts. German Film Comedy and Karl Valentin.” In Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920. Edited by Paulo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, 202–28. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. McDowell, William Stuart. “Humour in the Work of Bertolt Brecht and the Clown Theatre of Karl Valentin.” PhD diss., University of California, 1994. McGowan, Moray. “Comedy and the Volksstück.” In Brecht in Perspective, edited by Graham Bartram and Anthony Waine, 63–82. London and New York: Longman, 1982. Mumford, Meg. “Gestic Masks in Brecht’s Theater: A Testimony to the Contradictions and Parameters of a Realist Aesthetic.” The Brecht Yearbook 26 (2001): 142–71. Mumford, Meg. “Verfremdung.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy, 1404–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mumford, Meg. Bertolt Brecht, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

107

Mumford, Meg. “Brecht’s Perspectives, Then and Now: Class, Gender and the Social Stakes of Performance.” In The Great European Stage Directors, vol. 2, edited by David Barnett, 157–81. London et al.: Methuen Drama, 2018. Münsterer, Hans Otto. Bert Brecht: Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1917–22. Zürich: Verlag der Arche, 1963. Münsterer, Hans Otto. The Young Brecht. Translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and Karen J. Leeder (London: Libris 1992). North, Michael. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Schulte, Michael. Karl Valentin: Eine Biographie. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1982. Silberman, Marc. “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy.” Social Research 79, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 169–88. Thomson, Peter, and Glendyr Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Valentin, Karl. Sämtliche Werke: Valentin fährt Straßenbahn, vol. 3. Edited by Helmut Bachmaier and Stefan Heinze. München: Piper Verlag, 2007. Valentin, Karl. Sämtliche Werke: Der Firmling, vol. 5. Edited by Manfred Faust, Stefan Henze and Andreas Hohenadl. München: Piper Verlag, 2007. Vaughan, Michael. “Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution.’” SubStance 36, no. 3 (2007): 7–24. Wilson, Michael. “It’s 1922 and at the Munich Kammerspiele Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt Perform Das Christbaumbrettl at Die rote Zibebe.” In Popular Performance. Edited by Adam Ainsworth, Oliver Double and Louise Peacock, 75–96. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Wood, Jesse C. “‘Und das Geistige, das sehen Sie, das ist nichts.’ Collisions with Hegel in Bertolt Brecht’s Early Materialism.” PhD Diss., Ohio State University, 2012.

NOTES 1. Moray McGowan, “Comedy and the Volksstück,” in Brecht in Perspective, edited by Graham Bartram and Anthony Waine (London and New York: Longman, 1982), 65; Marc Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 183. 2. Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 183, 185. 3. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Dover, 2013), 10. 4. Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 62–63. 5. Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 169. 6. Bergson, Laughter, 14. 7. Bergson, Laughter, 14, 20. 8. Bergson, Laughter, 25.

108

Chapter 5

9. Bertolt Brecht, “Karl Valentin,” in Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 21, edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), 101. The Werke will henceforth be referred to as BFA. 10. William Stuart McDowell, “Humour in the Work of Bertolt Brecht and the Clown Theatre of Karl Valentin” (PhD diss., University of California, 1994), 134–35, 218; Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 180. 11. McDowell, “Humour,” 134–35, 218, 293. McDowell translates “Unzulänglichkeit” as “unreliability” rather than “inadequacy.” Other commentators have reached the similar conclusion that comic failure of human action lies at the centre of Valentin’s work and that his protagonists are condemned to fail in every instance. See, for example, Manfred Faust, Stefan Henze and Andreas Hohenadl, “Nachwort,” in Karl Valentin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5 (München: Piper Verlag, 2007), 543, 546, 549. Valentin’s worldview has also been described as having proximity to absurdism due to its presentation of irreparable destruction of meaning and of spatio-temporal orientation. See Helmut Bachmaier and Stefan Heinze edited by, “Nachwort,” in Karl Valentin, Sämtliche Werke: Valentin fährt Straßenbahn, vol. 3 (München: Piper Verlag, 2007), 385. Arguing somewhat against the line that most of Valentin’s comedy was not political, Double and Wilson demonstrate that his work is a sustained if coded satire of the powerful. See Oliver Double and Michael Wilson, “Karl Valentin’s ‘Father and Son Discuss the War,’” Studies in Theatre and Performance 27, no. 1 (2007), 6. 12. See Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on the Comedy Man Equals Man,” 1931 in Brecht on Theatre, 3rd ed., edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 80. Brecht referred to Mr Puntila and His Man Matti as a Volksstück (“folk play”), a broad category of popular theatre that included a tradition of comedy for the people. As Silberman notes, while Brecht called some of his plays comedies, the appellations often changed when he revised the texts. See Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 170. 13. See for example: McDowell, “Humour,” 2, 13, 34; Oliver Double and Michael Wilson, “Karl Valentin’s Illogical Subversion: Stand-Up Comedy and Alienation Effect,” in New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 3 (2004), 206; Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 181. 14. Roy Edgley, “Dialectical Materialism,” and Roy Bhaskar, “Contradictions,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd ed., edited by Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 142–43, 109–10. 15. Bertolt Brecht, “Appendices to the Short Organon,” 1954 in Brecht on Theatre, edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman and translated by Jack Davis, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Victoria Hill, Kristopher Imbrigotta, Marc Silberman and John Willett. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 257. 16. Bertolt Brecht, “B30,” in Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman and translated by Charlotte Ryland, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Tom Kuhn and John Willett (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 59. 17. Bertolt Brecht, “Karl Valentin,” 1922, BFA, vol. 21, 101 as translated by Marc Silberman in “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 180.

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

109

18. Bergson, Laughter, 62–63. 19. Bergson, Laughter, 31, 25, 38–39, 118, 14. 20. Bergson, Laughter, 25, 39. 21. James DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 53, no. 1 (March 2015), 55; Michael Vaughan, “Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution,’” SubStance 36, no. 3 (2007): 15–16. 22. DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited: Bergson and the Thermodynamic Paradigm,” 56. Here DiFrisco refers to his agreement with recent philosophical work on Bergson and vitalism, including Keith Ansell-Pearson, Paul-Antoine Miquel and Michael Vaughan, “Responses to Evolution: Spencer’s Evolutionism, Bergsonism, and Contemporary Biology,” in The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science. The History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 353; Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Bergson’s Encounter with Biology,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10, no. 2 (2005), 66; and Vaughan, “Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution,’” 15–16. 23. Vaughan, “Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution,’” 16. 24. DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited,” 59. 25. Steven D. Brown, “Bonga, Tromba and the Organizational Impetus: Evolution and Vitalism in Bergson,” Culture and Organisation 12, no. 4 (2006), 316. 26. DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited: Bergson and the Thermodynamic Paradigm,” 62–63. 27. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: PUF, 1941), 187, cited in DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited: Bergson and the Thermodynamic Paradigm,” 62, 63. 28. DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited,” 63–64. 29. DiFrisco, “Élan Vital Revisited,” 59; Brown, “Bonga, Tromba and the Organizational Impetus,” 307. 30. Vaughan, “Henri Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution,’” 17–19. 31. Bergson, Laughter, 19. 32. Bergson, Laughter, 100, 19, 22, 89. 33. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16. 34. In a 1935 letter to Paul Peters who made an American adaptation of Brecht’s play The Mother, Brecht commented that he was careful not to make milieu too overwhelming because then the characters’ actions would be attributed to the milieu and the subjective factor in political behaviour would be lost sight of. See Brecht, Letters 1913–1956, edited by John Willett and translated by Ralph Manheim (New York and London: Routledge and Methuen, 1990), 215. In “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre,” also written in 1935, Brecht commented on both the externally determined and agential nature of people: “Human behaviour is shown as alterable, people as dependent on certain political and economic factors and at the same time capable of altering them.” See Brecht on Theatre, 124. In a dialogue with designer and dramaturg Peter Palitzsch during the rehearsals for Katzgraben in 1953, Brecht clarified his understanding that while social being determines the consciousness of humans, it is humans who create social being. See Brecht and Palitzsch, “Neuer Inhalt—Neue Form,” BFA, vol. 25, 485.

110

Chapter 5

35. Jesse C. Wood, “‘Und das Geistige, das sehen Sie, das ist nichts.’ Collisions with Hegel in Bertolt Brecht’s Early Materialism” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 148–49; Bertolt Brecht, Man Equals Man, in Collected Plays, vol. 2, part 1, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, translated by Gerhard Nellhaus (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), 39. 36. Bergson, Laughter, 29, 58. 37. Michael Schulte, Karl Valentin: Eine Biographie (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1982), 16, 28–30. 38. Double and Wilson, “Karl Valentin’s Illogical Subversion,” 205. 39. Oliver Double and Michael Wilson, “‘I Am a Poor, Skinny Man’: Persona and Physicality in the Work of Karl Valentin,” Studies in Theatre and Performance 28, no. 3 (2008), 215. 40. Tucholsky as quoted in Michael Schulte, Das Valentin Buch (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1984), 71, in Double and Wilson, “‘I Am a Poor, Skinny Man,’” 220. 41. Schulte, Karl Valentin: Eine Biographie, 160–63. Otto Münsterer, one of Brecht’s childhood friends, recalls that when Brecht began studying medicine in Munich, he was very enthused about a small booklet by Karl Valentin that featured, among other things, an electrical nose-picker for children that made use of the finger redundant. See Dirk Heißerer, “Die rote Zibebe: Auf den Spuren zweier Improvisationen von Bert Brecht und Karl Valentin. Mit einer unbekannten Regienotiz Brechts,” in Improvisationen in mehr als Zwei Bildern, in Magazin für Literatur und Politik, 49–50 (2010), 10–92, edited by Walter Delabar and Gregor Ackermann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2015. 42. See Heißerer, “Die rote Zibebe,” 67–72. 43. Hans Otto Münsterer, Bert Brecht: Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1917–22 (Zürich: Verlag der Arche, 1963), 118–19. In the English translation of Münsterer’s recollections the word Panoptikum is translated as “wax cabinet.” See Hans Otto Münsterer, The Young Brecht, edited and translated by Tom Kuhn and Karen J. Leeder (London: Libris 1992), 68. 44. Hans Otto Münsterer, Bert Brecht, 179. 45. Bertolt Brecht, BBA 424/77, c. 1922. (BBA is an abbreviation for BertoltBrecht-Archiv. This archive is part of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.) The feeding of notes into a machine recalls Münsterer’s commentary on an orchestrion in an Augsburg inn that made a big impression on Brecht and possibly influenced the approach to music in his productions: “When you put ten pfennigs in, a sentimental melody began to play, a painted scene lit up, and a foaming waterfall appeared with clouds creaking slowly back and forth.” See Hans Otto Münsterer, The Young Brecht, 65. 46. Bertolt Brecht and Giorgio Strehler, “Ein Gesprächsprotokoll,” in Brechts “Dreigroschenoper,” edited by Werner Hecht (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 141, in Heißerer, “Die rote Zibebe,” 73. For an English translation of what Brecht is reported to have said, see Denis Calandra, “Karl Valentin and Bertolt Brecht,” The Drama Review 18, no. 1 (March 1974), 96. 47. Bertolt Brecht, “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre,” 1935, Brecht on Theatre, 124.

Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity

111

48. Bertolt Brecht, Diaries, 1920–1922, translated by John Willett (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 140. 49. Bertolt Brecht, “Karl Valentin,” 102. 50. Bertolt Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, 152. 51. Brecht, “B30,” 59. 52. My translation of the comment in Bernhard Reich, Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit: Erinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzenten deutscher Theatergeschichte (East Berlin: Henschel, 1970), 261 in BFA 2, 401. 53. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), 115. 54. Tony Meech, “Brecht’s Early Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 74. 55. Brecht, “Notes on the Comedy Man Equals Man,” 84. 56. Brecht, “Notes on the Comedy Man Equals Man,” 80. 57. Michael Wilson, “It’s 1922 and at the Munich Kammerspiele Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt Perform Das Christbaumbrettl at Die rote Zibebe,” in Popular Performance, edited by Adam Ainsworth, Oliver Double and Louise Peacock (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 90; Joel Schechter, “Brecht’s Clowns: Man Is Man and After,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 92. 58. Bergson, Laughter, 31–33. 59. Double and Wilson, “Karl Valentin’s Illogical Subversion,” 209. 60. Bertolt Brecht, “Steckels zwei Puntilas,” 1951, BFA, vol. 24, 310; Egon Monk et al. rehearsal notes, BBA 1598/11, 14. 61. Meg Mumford, “Brecht’s Perspectives, Then and Now: Class, Gender and the Social Stakes of Performance,” in The Great European Stage Directors, vol. 2, edited by David Barnett (London: Methuen Drama, 2018), 162–63, 205. 62. Bertolt Brecht, “Die Masken,” 1951 BFA, vol. 24, 313. 63. See Anon, n.d., notes on the Zurich premiere, BBA 566/7. 64. Brecht as quoted in Joachim Tenschert, “Über die Verwendung von Masken,” in Materialien zu Brechts “Der kaukasische Kreidekreis,” edited by Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 107–8. For an English translation see Meg Mumford, “Gestic Masks in Brecht’s Theater: A Testimony to the Contradictions and Parameters of a Realist Aesthetic,” The Brecht Yearbook 26 (2001), 159. 65. Bertolt Brecht, “Hervorbringen des V-Effekts,” BFA, vol. 22, no. 1, 356. For an English translation see Bertolt Brecht, “On the Production of the V-effect,” Brecht on Theatre, 166. Here unkonkret is translated as “nonspecific.” Elsewhere I have used the translation “lacks concreteness.” For my translation and discussion of Brecht’s conceptualisation of the concrete, see Mumford, “Gestic Masks in Brecht’s Theater,” 148. With regard to Verfremdung, this term has been translated as “alienation.” As I have argued elsewhere, this translation is problematic as it suggests Brecht’s theatre mimics rather than subversively illuminates the hostilities of alienation under capitalism and the (blindingly) familiar nature of the status quo under this economic mode of production. See, for example, Meg Mumford, “Verfremdung,” in The Oxford

112

Chapter 5

Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1404–5. 66. Bertolt Brecht, “Praktisches zur Expressionismusdebatte,” 1938, BFA, vol. 22 no. 1, 422; Mumford, “Gestic Masks in Brecht’s Theater,” 148. 67. Bergson, Laughter, 13, 27, 64. 68. Bergson, Laughter, 92. 69. Bergson, Laughter, 92–93, 100. 70. Wilson, “It’s 1922,” 87. 71. Heißerer, “Die rote Zibebe,” 56–59; Wilson, “It’s 1922,” 84–91; Calandra, “Karl Valentin and Bertolt Brecht,” 91–92. 72. Wilson, “It’s 1922,” 85–86, 91. 73. Faust, Henze, and Hohenadl, “Nachwort,” 549; Schulte, Karl Valentin: Eine Biographie, 21, 45; McDowell, “Humour,” 134; Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” 180. 74. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Laughing Until It Hurts: German Film Comedy and Karl Valentin,” in Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920, edited by Paulo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 224, 226. 75. Bertolt Brecht and Erich Engel, Mysterien eines Friseursalons, in Bertolt Brecht Edition, directed by Jan Schütte and Joachim Lang (DVD Arthaus, 2008). 76. Valentin, Sämtliche Werke: Valentin fährt Straßenbahn, 29–30. 77. McDowell, “Humour,” 215. 78. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), 136–38. 79. Schechter, “Brecht’s Clowns: Man Is Man and After,” 95. 80. North, Machine-Age Comedy, 22. 81. Egon Monk et al., rehearsal notes, November 5, 1949, BBA 1598/95. 82. Rehearsal notes for Puntila by Brecht’s coworkers, September 3, 1951, BBA 1599/19. 83. Rehearsal notes for Puntila by Brecht’s coworkers, September 13, 1951, BBA 1599/34; Mumford, “Brecht’s Perspectives,” 173. 84. Bertolt Brecht, “Das Alter spielen,” 1949, BFA, vol. 25, 234.

Chapter 6

Happiness, Dead and Alive Object Theatre as Philosophy of the Encounter Carolyn Shapiro

The answer to the fundamental question, “What makes a happy life?” is that a “happy life” may not be, contrary to popular understanding, defined as feeling pleasure or satisfaction. A “happy life” might be a life in which we have successfully experienced “encounters.” As exemplified in the plays Happy Endings by Harry Holtzman for the French theatre company Label Brut,1 and Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, comic object theatre stages happiness as encounter or “happening.” In that it considers cause and effect, repetition, movement, and automation, my enquiry is both a philosophical and a psychoanalytical one. The etymology shared between “happen” and “happiness”2 is telling. “Happy” has come to mean both “having good fortune” and “feeling contented,” but as the plays Happy Endings and Happy Days illustrate, to be “happy” simply means that something, anything, will have “happened.” This notion of happiness, which I want to argue is key to object theatre and clowning, contends that “fortune” is not necessarily good fortune; it is the encounter (Tuché) with an event, good or bad, that may, or may not, take place. If fortune is not bestowed upon a person, he or she is hapless. A philosophy of the encounter has as its patron the Greek goddess Tyche, who capriciously dispenses good or ill fortune. In line with this notion of fortune, Aristotle locates happiness outside not only the individual’s feelings but even outside an individual’s life: we cannot deem someone “happy” until after they have died, as emphasised in J. L. Austin’s reading of Aristotle. The characters Winnie and Willie in Happy Days and Harry in Happy Endings do not experience happiness as a present moment but as something projected back from the 113

114

Chapter 6

future. In this sense, these characters await happiness on “credit,” as Alenka Zupančič has described the blind trust of the comic character’s faith in the possibility of encounter.3 This future-perfect construct can also be understood through the Lacanian topology of the Möbius strip,4 whereby “happiness” (encounter) and “haplessness” (automaton) move along different sides of one surface as joint articulations, overlapping one another. My starting point for theorising object theatre5 as a philosophy of the encounter is Jacques Lacan’s seminar, “Tuché and Automaton,”6 which conceives the relation—the “and”—between encounter and self-moving repetition. In this seminar Lacan borrows Aristotle’s terms tuché and automaton to explain the face-to-face encounter with the analysand’s original trauma.7 Lacan describes a generally “missed” encounter with the otherwise repressed traumatic event that might happen, albeit unexpectedly, through the therapeutic act of transference. Lacan’s pile-up of double negatives here is challenging: tuché and automaton cannot be taken as mere dialectical opposites. Even my own designation of “a philosophy of the encounter,” named as such because I am trying to name a philosophy of happiness, has elided the equal role that automaton plays in the relationship between the two terms. Zupančič builds upon Bergson’s essay Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic to explicate this relationship as one of dovetailed movement. Her focus on the movement between tuché and automaton is extremely helpful in drawing the parallels between comic performance and the Lacanian psychoanalytic setting: both are object-world scenarios in which movement itself takes a central position. She argues that the movement between tuché and automaton is not one of dialectical opposition; it is one and the same movement. Tuché can only happen amidst the incessant repetition of automaton, understood by Lacan as the “coming-back, the insistence of the signs.”8 The absentminded repetition of automaton provides the material, objectified possibility for the chance encounter that is tuché. Jean-Michel Rabaté elucidates: tuché is the happening that is “found” through “propitious repetition.”9 Lacan tells us, reading Aristotle, that this propitiousness could be “favourable” either as “eutuchia,” the “happy encounter,” or as “dystuchia,” the “unhappy encounter.”10 In the psychoanalytic context, they are both instances of the “happy encounter” in that they are equivalent therapeutic encounters that happen through the applied propitious practice of repetition. In his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960,11 Lacan points out that “[i]t’s odd that in almost all languages happiness offers itself in terms of a meeting—Τύχη [tuché]. . . . A kind of favorable divinity is involved” and that “‘[h]appiness’ is after all ‘happen.’”12 Lacan is particularly struck by Freud’s proposition that “concerning happiness . . . absolutely nothing is prepared for it” despite happiness being the primary goal.13 Thus, “happiness” can only “happen” when not expected. As I hope to elucidate here, this psychic predicament is

Happiness, Dead and Alive

115

inherently comic. As the comic actor Harry Holtzman has explained regarding his play Happy Endings, “The desire to mark the occasion, one of the piece’s meta-objectives, is already in the realm of the comic.”14 A philosophy of the encounter would embrace, I propose, not only the happening of the unexpected event within a general milieu of non-eventful repetition or haplessness, but also the trusting subject to whom something will happen not as an effect of expectation. Another aspect of a philosophy of the encounter is rooted in Aristotle’s notion of happiness as eudaimonia. In his essay “Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle,” J. L. Austin elaborates upon Aristotle’s philosophy of “happiness.” Best known for his series of lectures, How to Do Things with Words,15Austin proposed that language itself, not the intentional subject, is the site of performing action, “happily” or “unhappily.” But however well known Austin is for his location of happiness within the performative speech act, he is less well known for his work that lays the groundwork for this philosophy of language. In his essay on Aristotle’s Ethics16 written twenty years before the speech-act lectures, he proposes that a “happy” and therefore “good” (agathon) life is such from the hindsight of the end of one’s life, not from “feeling” happy through pleasure. Austin’s main priority is to debunk the interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of happiness put forward by H. A Pritchard. Austin is frustrated by what he sees as Pritchard’s blind spot—that is, Pritchard’s translation of the Greek word eudaimonia, as “a state of feeling pleasure.”17 Austin elaborates the etymology of eu-daimonia: a life being “prospered by a deity,”18 as well as Aristotle’s own attribution of a life being “happy” only upon death: “hence the saying ‘call no man εύδαίµων until he is dead’ . . . it would be silly to say ‘call no man pleased until he is dead.’”19 Eudaimonia for Aristotle “means a complete life of activity of a certain kind” (Austin’s emphasis) and is therefore related to “congratulations,” “achievement,” and “success.”20 Austin’s essay anticipates his speech-act theory in its critique of Pritchard’s metaphysical presumption that we feel and know happiness—what we would today refer to as “subjective well-being.”21 On the contrary, Austin proposes, via Aristotle, that “happiness” can only be “known” objectively, upon death. Austin’s philosophy of happiness will prove to be useful in understanding object theatre and its comic dimensions.22 The plays of Samuel Beckett provide dramatised examples of Austin’s definition of happiness as eudaimonia: a reading of Happy Days will show that “happiness” is most certainly interrelated with “happen.” The first act of Happy Days ends with Winnie’s declaration, “Oh, this is a happy day! This will have been another happy day! (Pause) After all. (Pause) So far.”23 Not for the first time does she qualify the happy day with the future perfect tense. She says something similar earlier in the act to Willie: “Ah well what a joy and perhaps awake, and perhaps taking all this in, some of all this, what a

116

Chapter 6

happy day for me . . . it will have been. (Pause) So far. (Pause).”24 Winnie’s sentence, modified twice—“perhaps”—in addition to her use of the future perfect tense—her happy day “will have been”—conjoined through the pause to the present tense that itself is merged with the past—“so far”—enunciates the admixture of temporal constructs gathered in the word “happy.” Happy Days pitches happiness beyond Winnie’s present moment on stage and outside of her present feelings. Beckett never allows his characters any happiness as pleasure or subjective well-being within the staged present moment.25 Winnie waits, at the mercy of her dramaturge, whether that dramaturge be Beckett the playwright, some larger force of Otherness within the internal world of the play or some existential force of the world outside of the play. As she waits for anything to happen, Winnie’s repetitive meanderings render her mechanical. She is immobilised by a mound of dirt that surrounds her from her waist down, suggesting an equivalence to the props surrounding her. Beckett’s script, equally devoted to the italicised stage directions as it is to delivering dialogue, marks the exterior directorial force that acts upon his characters. Winnie and Willie are objects, examples of the “things” Winnie accentuates: It’s things, Willie. (Pause. Normal voice.) In the bag, outside the bag. (Pause). Ah yes, things have their life, that is what I always say, things have their life. (Pause.) Take my looking-glass, it doesn’t need me.”26

Material objects “have their life.” Like the looking glass and other objects that can be moved (into or outside the bag), Winnie and Willie do their daily best to be moved by “happy chance,” “great mercies,” and helpful “boons,”27 waiting for a bigger outside force28 to send them object-signs. Everyday objects such as the looking glass are examples of the “endless metonymy of the Other” through which Winnie strives to gain her own meaningful constitution.29 Beckett’s characters, awaiting the (missed) boons of the Other, proceed with blind faith, providing the ground for the “comic subject,” as Zupančič contends: The comic subject believes in his or her metonymic object, and this belief always contains an element of naivety. In the course of comedy, this belief usually and frequently turns out to be unjustified (that is, without any ground in the object/Other), and hence “naïve.” . . . The paradox that constitutes the core of the comical is, rather, this: although the unshakeable faith in the Other turns out to be unjustified, or at least very much out of proportion, the comic subject is not simply a victim of his naivety; on the contrary, it is this naivety itself that ultimately makes it possible for him to come into his own.30

Happiness, Dead and Alive

117

The comic subject’s trust in the Other effects a positive coming into one’s own, achieved through the objectification of trust. Zupančič explains: “[T]rust always somehow precedes itself, [and] there is something objective or object-like about it.”31 This objectification of trust in the Other is the material language of the clown. Clowns speak through objectified gesture, understood by Jacques Lecoq as a “corresponding circuit, revealing to us an aspect of the other, as well as a part of ourselves.”32 The objectified circuit that is gesture grants the clown the flexibility of movement that corresponds to the (comic) subject’s naïve trust that allows the subject to come into her own. The clown stands in for the happy subject whose naivety might “make it possible . . . to find some . . . unexpected, ‘out-of-place’ satisfaction,”33 provided that the subject avoids being duped by his own delusion that he will not err, as Lacan counselled in his triple pun, “les non-dupes errant.”34 Relatedly, Lecoq noted that what emerged from his assignment to his students was that laughter was achieved not, as expected, by the intention to create laughter, but by the involuntary gesture of anguished defeat, when “the crest-fallen clown sat down, sheepishly.” Thus, continues Lecoq, the teaching-method of “the flop” was discovered.35 Lecoq’s paradigm of “the flop” [bide], which can also be understood as “la chute de blague” or “punch line,”36 physicalises the impact of the unexpected. We often see physical gestures of frustration in cartoon characters such as Homer Simpson, who bellows “D’OH!”37 when something terrible happens unexpectedly, even though his actions are the result of constantly repeating that same action.38 Homer is a clown, and we laugh at his stupid repetition and at his serialised reservoir of recovery. He keeps getting into similar disastrous situations over and over again, just as surprised every time. Homer’s repetition, of both his actions and his surprise, make him comic, a model for the flexibly happy subject who proceeds through error.39 We can put forward a proposition for an elasticity in the actions of the clown that enables him, and all of us, to reside “happily” within the propitiousness of what, due to external cause, may happen, unexpectedly, or what may not ever happen. The psychic energy invested in expectation is immense, and it can be measured through the physical actions of the comic figure. Freud investigates the movement from psychical to physical energy in the comic figure. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,40 he identifies expectation as the material of the comic. He offers two useful insights. First, that “expectation” involves psychic investment, or cathexes, and thus constitutes considerable “expenditure.”41 Second, that the psychic investment of expectation is imbricated with “motor preparations”:

118

Chapter 6

[in] a number of cases . . . motor preparations are what form the expression of expectation. . . . If I am expecting to catch a ball which is being thrown to me, I put my body into tensions which will enable it to meet the impact of the ball; and, should the ball when it is caught turn out to be too light, my superfluous movements make me comic to the spectators. I have let myself be enticed by my expectation into an exaggerated expenditure of movement.42

The expenditure of physical movements quantifies the psychic investment— the superfluousness is an index of the comic lack of success in intention itself. These movements have a momentum of their own that do not correlate to the heavy ball that is expected. Even, and especially, the most determined, concentrated intention, that is, the letting of oneself being “enticed by . . . [one’s] expectation,” gets met with a lack of success. The displacement of movement while trying to catch the ball signifies the causal misplacement of intended movement. Both the misplacement and the displacement make us laugh, and this laughter, as Freud notes, is a helpful relief in that it “discharges” the expended psychic energy of expectation.43 For Freud, laughter discharges the discomfort of over-invested energy that is a result of misplaced expectation. For Henri Bergson, whose essay Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic44 Freud is reading, expectation is comically thwarted by additional dynamics. Bergson discusses the “snowball effect,” in which an effect “grows by arithmetical progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it is unexpected.”45 A spiral reversibility of cause and effect, in, for example, a game or a children’s story, would also subvert expectation to elicit laughter.46 And finally, laughter can also, notes Bergson, be the result of expectation that encounters a void or suddenly ends in nothing.47 We can summarise these three configurations of the “lack of proportion between cause and effect”48 as follows: cause and unexpected effect; cause and reversible effect; and cause and no effect. Together, they point to an infelicity of expectation as psychic modality, a modality that will take on existential dimensions in Beckett’s plays, for example. But Bergson’s larger interest is what this lack of proportion between cause and effect indicates: “What we do laugh at is something that this lack of proportion may in certain cases disclose, namely a particular mechanical arrangement which it reveals to us . . . at the back of the series of effects and causes.”49 The “series of effects and causes” comprises the background for Bergson’s enquiry into laughter as the reaction to mechanisation. He proposes that laughter serves as a relief from the uncomfortable experience of seeing a character become a mechanical object. The comic character exhibits an “inelasticity” of mind through stubborn, absentminded insistences. The character falls because of too much physical momentum, or because of too

Happiness, Dead and Alive

119

much rigidity or habitual repetition. Or, the character lives his daily life with such mathematical precision that he is flummoxed when “the objects around him . . . have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag.”50 Other examples of this sort of funny rigid automatism include characters who force what they encounter into ready-made frameworks so that they are inflexible in a new situation;51 or whose traits, such as avarice in Molière’s characters, come so automatically that they are detached from the character’s emotions. The comic character imitates himself and is infinitely imitable.52 Bergson notes the difference between the tragic play and the comic play as indicated in a play’s title: whereas the title of a tragedy tends to be the proper name of the protagonist, which integrates the character’s individuality, the titles to comic plays, for example l’Avare and le Joueur, refer not to a specific individual but to a “ready-made frame into which we are to step.”53 These ready-made characters exert a gravitational pull on the other characters, “delight[ing] in dragging them down with [their] own weight and making them share in [their] tumbles.” Further, the ready-made central character plays the other characters “as if they were an instrument or . . . puppets.”54 The counterpoint to the ready-made frame is the mobile soul that defies the gravity exerted by the character-frame and the “needs of . . . the stupidly monotonous body” that “tease” the soul.55 Zupančič argues that Bergson’s enquiry only goes one way when it should be going two ways: the comic character, she proposes, conjoins the ready-made material frame and the abstracted universal spirit: “movement” includes mechanical tendencies and elasticity.56 Is not Bergson’s élan vital, she asks, also driven by, through, and within the obstinate repetition that perseveres through movement? This movement is not one of cause and effect but of cause and effect AND effect and cause, with “the mechanical and the living dovetailed into each other.”57 Furthermore, in comedy, Zupančič proposes, the human spirit as elevated by Bergson (and by the character of himself) is also and especially subject to the pull of gravity, reversing the logic of the danger effected by physical falling. It is this notion of the downfall of a universal (abstract) ideal that makes something comic.58 In the comic object theatre of Label Brut’s Happy Endings, the “clown with an American accent, Harry Holtzman” stages his own death by welcoming his audience to his funeral. He relates autobiographical stories that correspond to the everyday, “raw” objects occupying the stage59 (see figures 6.1 and 6.2). These objects, manipulated through a complex mise-en-scène, materialise the life story of Harry, the clown who takes up residence amidst the objects. These objects are often attached to ropes that pull or release other objects. The pulleys, props, and Harry himself all move through the force of gravity. But they also signify gravity, bearing rich philosophical connotations. Bergson and others before him help to understand gravity as falling,

120

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

particularly falling from “grace.”60 The flop of the crestfallen clown espoused by Lecoq joins this philosophical genealogy. Along with the white ropes that traverse the stage are objects that stand alone, such as a microwave oven, in which brownies are baking, two black waste bins, a bathtub, a chair, balloons attached to little bodies, and a projection screen. Harry has a grey beard suggesting that he is at the end of his life, joining the continuum of dead bearded men whose images are projected onto the screen (such as Allen Ginsburg, Freud, and Harry’s father, who, he recounts, died from a brain tumour). In his adopted language of French, Harry tells the story of how, when he was a child, he hid in his house from his family, shouting, “I’m Dead!” No one arrived to find him. Like Winnie and Willie, Harry expects and waits for a larger force that never arrives. Is Harry “dead” if no one responds to him announcing his own death? More to the point, is Harry alive when no one responds? Harry the clown fortunately has Mikey the Tech guy who runs onto the stage when called, giving Harry recognition and response.61 Mikey’s entrance as the intervening technical hand signifies the equivalence between Harry and the stage props. Harry becomes a prop (see figure 6.3), “fading” into the object-world.62 “I’m vraiment dead . . . À vous maintenant!” Harry exclaims, peppering his French with English emphases. His bilingual words objectify his relation to language as material otherness. His exclamations syntactically join the piñata filled with coloured petals that will scatter when ropes are pulled (see figure 6.4); and the bobbing balloon-headed figures moving their weighted bodies downstage when a fan blows them, accompanied by music of the Mexican Day of the Dead. Harry’s naked body, having emerged from his bathtub, painted black with white lines to look like a skeleton, stands parallel to a balloon-headed effigy (see figure 6.5). Happy Endings is melancholic in its

Happiness, Dead and Alive

121

Figure 6.2 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

incorporation of Harry’s effigy-body. The melancholic tone is enhanced by the invocation of two figures: that of Hamlet, when Harry asks “To be or not to be . . . ?” and Judy Garland, icon of gay melancholia, projected in a film clip in which she is singing voluptuously and yet plaintively, “Halleluyah, c’mon, get happy, get ready for the Judgement Day!” (see figure 6.6). Neither Hamlet nor Judy felt happy in themselves, and both melancholic figures can be read through a philosophy of happiness that places “getting happy” as the demand of the external other. The melancholia that percolates through Happy Endings gathers loss: the loss of lives; the loss of the subject as vital life; the loss of a happy “self”; and the loss of expected reward. Harry’s recounted life presents a philosophy of the encounter in which the clown, standing in for all subjects, flexibly affirms “an objective surplus of error which sticks to different protagonists

Figure 6.3 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

Figure 6.4 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

Happiness, Dead and Alive

123

Figure 6.5 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

Figure 6.6 Label Brut, Happy Endings (2019). Reproduced by permission from Harry Holtzman.

at different moments.”63 Label Brut’s dramaturgy of Harry’s “life” through les funérailles64 stages objects that move in relation to other objects on stage. Harry speaks in French that is interspersed with English exclamations, drawing attention to his relation to language that materialises the life/Happy

124

Chapter 6

Ending of “Harry Holtzman.” He is the clown who moves, hapless or happy, through “the frothy evolution proposed in the voyage from one object to the next.”65 Similarly, the subject in the Lacanian mise-en-scène moves in relation to another signifier, in syntactical relation to an object-network of signifiers. Likely to have embraced the comic clown-subject who “flops,” Lacan’s scenario also stages the unexpected yet fortuitous encounters in the object world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010. Austin, J. L. “Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Maria Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1961. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: A Play in One Act, Followed by Act without Words: A Mime for One Player. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979. Bergson, Henri. Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Quadrige, 1991. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999. Bradby, David, ed. Theatre of Movement and Gesture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacana against the Historicists. London and New York: Verso, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1905. Holtzman, Harry, Happy Endings, live performances, 21 April 2018–22 April 2018, Cirques Festival, Centre Dramatique National, Angers, Pays de la Loire, France. Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” Translated by Idris Parry. Times Literary Supplement. October 20, 1978. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981. Lacan, Jacques. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988. Mello, Alissa. “Compagnie Philippe Genty: On Directing and Collaboration.” Puppetry International 34 (Fall & Winter 2013).

Happiness, Dead and Alive

125

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium Text with Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Jacques Lacan. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Tarabochia, Alvise Sforza. “The Aphanisis of the Pirandellian Subject.” Italian Studies 68, no. 1 (March 2013): 123–37. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2008.

NOTES 1. Harry Holtzman, Happy Endings, live performances, 21 April 2018–22 April 2018, Cirques Festival, Centre Dramatique National, Angers, Pays de la Loire, France. 2. From the Middle English hap, meaning chance or fortune. 3. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2008), 86, and elsewhere. 4. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 54. 5. From the 1980s onwards, “object theatre” was widely understood as a particular theatrical tradition using a specific mode of performance. The World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts explains that “[i]n object theatre the untransformed ‘thing’ is explored, either in itself (to find its inherent movement/physical properties) or to use as a character/symbol in a story.” (“Object Theatre,” World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts, accessed April 3, 2022, https:​//​wepa​.unima​.org​/en​/object​-theatre​/.) One of the most well-known names associated with object theatre is the French director Philippe Genty, whose practice and philosophy stages “the co-presence of live human performers with puppets, objects, and raw materials,” as observed by Alissa Mello in her essay “Compagnie Philippe Genty: On Directing and Collaboration,” Puppetry International 34 (Fall & Winter 2013), 4. The difference between “giving life” and “movement/physical properties” may seem minimal, but I want to argue here that in fact, the difference is a substantial one with metaphysical implications. Object theatre, being a theatre based on co-present movement and not “life,” allows us to see an exteriority of cause that lies outside of consciousness, intention, and expectation, that is to say, outside of the phenomenological realm. 6. In Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981), 53–67. 7. As Lacan noted, his own use of the philosophical category of automaton is taken from Aristotle, who used this word in the context of movement: automate, meaning “self-moving.” Admittedly, I am only touching upon the long history of philosophical consideration of the automaton as part of the definition of cause, starting with Aristotle. A more expanded version of my chapter would take into full consideration Joan Copjec’s close analysis of cause, automaton, the Lacanian theorisation of pleasure and his intervention that happiness is “no longer defined as subjective, but as objective.”

126

Chapter 6

See Joan Copjec, “Cutting Up,” chapter 3 in her book Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 40. Here, Copjec reads Lacan’s radical revisioning of the construction of the subject as a philosophical intervention that recognises happiness as a primary site of negotiation. Notably, she also considers the relevant theories of Freud, Bergson’s essay on laughter, Beckett’s drama, and to a small extent, the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin, as they relate to the Lacanian proposition of the Subject. Also worthy of consideration is Sara Ahmed’s book The Promise of Happiness, in which she considers a similar constellation to the one I offer here (the performativity of happiness, happy objects, Austin, and in particular, “the apparent chanciness of happiness—the hap of what happens” and the “contingency of happiness [that] suggests that happiness involves a way of being directed.” See Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: 2010), 31; note 22, 236. 8. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 54. 9. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jacques Lacan (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 204. 10. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 80. 11. Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988). 12. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 13. 13. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 13. Lacan is referring here to Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. 14. Personal correspondence with Harry Holtzman, August 4, 2020. 15. Austin’s lectures on speech-act theory deem a linguistic utterance a “happy” performative if it accomplishes an act as a result of the same linguistic utterance. His philosophy of language actively pursues a radically non-metaphysical relation of the subject to language in which an action “happens” performatively through the utterance itself, not because of the subject’s intention. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Maria Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 16. J. L. Austin, “άγαθόν [Agathon] and εὐδαιμονία [Eudaimonia] in the Ethics of Aristotle,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 17. Austin is emphatic that Aristotle denotes “pleasure” not as eudaemonia but as ηδονή (edoni). Pleasure, or ηδονή, is still understood to be part of eudaemonia, but only in the sense that eudaemonia is prosperity “‘accompanied by pleasure or not without pleasure.’” See Austin, “άγαθόν [Agathon] and εὐδαιμονία [Eudaimonia] in the Ethics of Aristotle 8, n.2, and elsewhere. Many thanks to my colleague Maria Christoforidou for her help in translating the nuances of the Greek terms as used by Austin in this essay. 18. Austin, “άγαθόν [Agathon] and εὐδαιμονία [Eudaimonia] in the Ethics of Aristotle, 17. 19. Austin, “άγαθόν [Agathon] and εὐδαιμονία [Eudaimonia] in the Ethics of Aristotle, 17, citing Aristotle, I.x.i;18. 20. Austin, “άγαθόν [Agathon] and εὐδαιμονία [Eudaimonia] in the Ethics of Aristotle, 18.

Happiness, Dead and Alive

127

21. Similarly, according to the same deconstructive imperative, Alenka Zupančič reads against contemporary rhetorics of “happiness,” which insist upon “the rise of . . . a bio-morality . . . which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.” Zupančic, The Odd One In, 5. 22. Only “happy” when it can relate to “itself” as object, a happy life is not coincident with itself but merged into its death. Alenka Zupančič relates this Aristotelian objectification of a “happy life” to that of the comic subject: “Comedy is the moment in which substance, necessity, and essence all lose their immediate—and thus abstract—self-identity or coincidence with themselves . . . the substance becomes subject in the moment when, through a split in itself, it starts relating to itself. . . . Could we not say that in comedy, one moment of the substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance?” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 34. 23. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1961), 36. 24. Beckett, Happy Days, 26. 25. In speaking here of “the present moment being staged,” I am inferring a metaphysical comprehension of “happiness” as subjective feeling or personal knowledge. In Beckett’s play Endgame, for example, Hamm asks Clov, “Did you ever have an instant of happiness?” to which Clov replies, “Not to my knowledge.” And soon after this exchange, Hamm notes to Clov, “Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened. (Pause.) Do you know what’s happened? (Pause.) Clov!” Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London and Boston: 1958), 47. 26. Beckett, Happy Days, 40. 27. Beckett, Happy Days, 39–40. 28. That Beckett’s characters are always waiting for and naively expecting something to happen is remarked upon by Jacques Lecoq in the context of his theatre of movement and gesture. Lecoq recounts a story of Japanese Noh and Kabuki actors, the Kanze brothers, who in 1972 decided to perform their first play by a modern author and chose Samuel Beckett (who, for Lecoq, “holds a very important position in the theatre of movement and gesture”). When Lecoq asked the brothers why they chose to perform Waiting for Godot, they answered, “In Beckett’s theatre, it is just like Noh, you’re always waiting for something, be it to live or die.” See David Bradby, ed., Theatre of Movement and Gesture (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 128. 29. In her explication of the subject’s repetition of the originary repression of the signifying dyad, Zupančič explains that the subject lives through endless objectified attempts to repeat the original split or differentiation within herself, living through an endless signifying chain as another objectified signifier herself: “[W]hen the subject comes to exist, she exists only in the Other, through the signifying chain, which is to say as metonymic meanings(s) of the originally missing signifier. This is the level of interpretation (in analysis, as well as in general): since the subject emerges as pure difference in relation to her own being, she then strives to appropriate the latter by way of meaning constituted in the Other, and its endless metonymy. Interpretation

128

Chapter 6

leads us to and through different forms/meanings developed around the subject’s singular lack of being.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 166–67. 30. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 84. 31. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 86. 32. Bradby, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 206, 6. 33. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 84. 34. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 85. Zupančič is here citing Lacan’s pun, which phonetically sounds identical to “les noms du père.” I have added the notion of the “tripled” pun because les noms du père is also a homonym with “le non du père”— Lacan is also playing with the negative value attributable to the name of the father. 35. Bradby, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, 115. 36. Harry Holtzman, What’s App communication, August 4, 2020. 37. The exclamation “D’oh!,” defined as “[e]xpressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish” has recently been added to the Oxford Dictionary. Accessed April 4, 2022, https:​//​abcnews​.go​.com​/US​/story​?id​=93098​&page​=1. 38. Animated cartoon clown characters such as Homer Simpson, Scooby Doo, and Charlie Brown, because they are hand drawn and not physically real, can show more graphically the falling and the physicalised vocal reactions that can only go so far in a live clown performance. The earnest expectations of these clown-like characters always seem to propel them into physical misadventures that are always, as expressed by their falling, accompanied by such indexicalised exclamations as “AARGH!!!,” “D’OH!!!,” and “HUH? RUH RO,” but they are just as easily drawn to get up again after what repeatedly befalls them. I don’t think it is an accident that these three quintessentially physical clowns, Homer, Scooby Doo, and Charlie Brown are all male; the otherwise powerful maleness is the signifier that best shows the great extent of the deflation of expectation. 39. Zupančič expands upon the centrality of surprise and error as structural to the “(comic) subject”—noted as such in parenthesis because she is arguing that the comic subject is the subject, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis. In her discussion of comedy and its central core of “nonsense,” Zupančič tells us that “we really encounter nonsense only when and where a sense surprises us. What comedy repeats (repeats, not reveals, since revelation is not the business of comedy) in a thousand more or less ingenious ways is the very operation in which sense is produced in a genuinely erratic manner. Things makes sense in a very erratic manner. Or, to put it even more directly: sense itself is an error, a product of error; sense has the structure of an error.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 180–81. 40. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 8, trans. James Strachey (London: the Hogarth Press, 1905). 41. Freud, Jokes, 197–99. 42. Freud, Jokes, 197. 43. Freud, Jokes, 209. 44. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (København & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999).

Happiness, Dead and Alive

129

45. Henri Bergson, Laughter, 76. 46. Bergson, Laughter, 78. The effort made by a game player in a “[circular] fatal interaction of cause and effect, [that] merely results in bringing it back to the same spot” is the English translation of the French “engrenage fatal de causes et d’effets” (my emphasis, Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991 [1940] 63–64). 47. Bergson, Laughter, 80: “according to [Spencer], laughter is the indication of an effort which suddenly encounters a void. Kant had already said something of the kind: ‘Laughter is the result of an expectation which, of a sudden, ends in nothing.’” 48. Bergson, Laughter, 80. 49. Bergson, Laughter, 81. 50. Bergson, Laughter, 14; in the original French: “Seulement, les objets qui l’entourent ont été truqués par un mauvais plaisant.” Bergson, Le rire, 7. 51. Bergson presents the example of Don Quixote, whose mind is so locked into certain immovable romantic frameworks that whatever object he happens to encounter will mould itself upon the same, immovable idea that Quixote always has. He is rigid in his mindset and does not possess the capacity for dynamic thinking or the suppleness of spirit that ought to be the starting point, the very cause of his actions. Don Quixote is set on encountering a giant because a giant is what his formula for romantic adventure has already established as his opponent, though in fact, he may very well be encountering a windmill. See Bergson, Laughter, 164–65. 52. Bergson, 199, 128, and elsewhere. Bergson notes that in its imitatability, “character” is in and of itself comic, in that “by character [we mean] the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element that resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that which enables others to imitate us. Every comic character is a type.” Bergson, Laughter, 134. 53. Bergson, Laughter, 19. Although the English version of Bergson infers this act of “insertion” into the comic framework, it is clearer in the original French: “Mais le vice qui nous rendra comiques est au contraire celui qu’on nous apporte du dehors comme un cadre tout fait où nous nous insérerons.” Bergson, Le rire, 11. Bergson’s notions of “insertion” into a signifying framework becomes Roman Jakobson’s notion of the indexical pronoun in language, a fundamental structuralist inspiration for Lacan’s subject-in-language: the subject becomes subject by way of insertion into the Symbolic. 54. Bergson, Laughter, 19–20. 55. Here I paraphrase from the French “l’âme taquinée par les besoins du corps” (Bergson, Le rire), 38, 42, which I think is subtly mistranslated into English as the needs of the body “tantalizing” the soul in Bergson, Laughter, 50, 54. 56. As Zupančič explains, mechanical movement does not reveal the automaton as lacking in vitality but as conjoined to it, with both terms “generated by their common structural point in the first place.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 122, 114, 124–25. She is arguing that mechanical habit and pure fluid life are both “effects produced in this

130

Chapter 6

movement in which a life is referred back to itself, confronted (by means of imitation) with itself as seen from the outside.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 118. 57. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 114. 58. In the comic universe, Zupančič proposes, “the abstract and the concrete have switched places at the very outset.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 29. What she means by this proposition is that movement itself—normally attributed to physical movement of objects, dictated by the laws of gravity, moves: it moves both physical objects and abstract notions that are considered “universal,” and this movement is a complex one, characterisable as a Möbius strip, subject to reversal, turning back and forth. See her explanation of the way in which comic characters always rebound from physical falls and catastrophes, impervious to the physical reality of gravity but whose stumbling or downfall relates to something more abstract—that is, their own falsely elevated sense of self. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 28–30. 59. Label Brut, an object-theatre company in France founded in 2006, distinguishes itself in its “rawness”—the brut—of its chosen objects, diverging from preceding object theatre such as that of Philippe Genty. Label Brut stages everyday objects that are consciously unglamorous, banal, unrefined. It is a theatre of “l’objet détourné,” and we are invited to see the strings, the manipulators, and the stagehands, which we would not see in the slick “théâtre noir” of Genty in which the manipulators would have been blacked out and removed from the audience’s view. In this chapter, I want to argue that this “raw” quality of Label Brut lends itself to a Lacanian reading: the mise-en-scène of lowly objects and the expletive-laden script performed by the clown, Harry, contribute to exploring a psychical economy in which the subject is visibly staged in relation to everyday objects. 60. As Bergson expounds, “[A] soul . . . is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. The soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists.” Bergson, Laughter, 30. Similarly, Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay “On the Marionette Theatre” compares a human dancer to a marionette, foregrounding gravity as a kind of vehicle for ideal grace—which is difficult for humans to attain because self-consciousness usually overtakes it. His translator into English, Idris Parry, notes that Kleist is invoking, among other things, the story of the fall of man in Genesis, the fall here serving to signify both the consequence of the acquisition of knowledge as well as a shift in the centre of gravity in the body. See Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Idris Parry, TLS (October 20, 1978). 61. Harry’s shout, “I’m Dead!,” has its parallels in other exclamations in English in the otherwise French monologue, including “Oh my God!” and “Halleluyah!” 62. Here, I want to suggest that the conjoining of Harry, as clown, with his object world, alienates him from a subjectively felt happy life in that of necessity he has to become a subject because of the otherness of the objects surrounding him. This Lacanian notion of the subject’s alienated predicament as subject is known as “aphanisis” or “fading,” and is caused by the alienation when, inevitably, the subject takes up residence within language. Lacan presents the following explanation of “aphanisis”: “the subject appears first in the Other, in so far as the first signifier, the unary signifier,

Happiness, Dead and Alive

131

emerges in the field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier, which other signifier has as its effect the aphanisis of the subject. Hence the division of the subject—when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance. There is, then, one might say, a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance.” Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 218. For a helpful parallel to reading theatrical performance through Lacan’s notion of the fading of the subject, see Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, “The Aphanisis of the Pirandellian Subject, in Italian Studies 68, no. 1 (March 2013), 123–37. 63. Zupančič, The Odd One In, 92. 64. Translingual reading highlights the objectification of Harry’s funeral, which, in his adopted French, is translated as the less individualised les funérailles. 65. Harry Holtzman, What’s App communication, August 4, 2020. Henri Bergson similarly uses the metaphor of effervescent, yet scant, “froth” in the concluding paragraph of his essay Laughter: “Laughter . . . indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.” Laughter, 179.

Chapter 7

Living in the Doll House Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man Lisa Trahair

A QUESTION OF GENRE In Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Genre of Remarriage, Stanley Cavell makes the curious claim that the remarriage comedies about which he is philosophising do not only constitute “the principal group of Hollywood comedies after the advent of sound and therewith one definitive achievement

Figure 7.1 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). Mrs. Wellenmellon’s home for Hollywood starlets: the doll house. Screenshot captured by author.

133

134

Chapter 7

in the history of the art of film”1 but are “the worthy successors of the great comedies of the Hollywood silent era,” worthier, he goes on to assert, than the films of the Marx brothers or W.C. Fields.2 The contention that these remarriage comedies form a lineage with the films of Chaplin and Keaton is surprising because it is at odds with a contemporary orthodoxy that divides the corpus of film comedy into two genres: romantic comedy, which follows the conventions of classical Hollywood realism, of which remarriage comedies would be a cycle or subgenre; and comedian comedy, which, according to received wisdom, has as its core element a central comic protagonist and whose mode of enunciation always was and continues to be slapstick.3 It is still more curious that having made the claim Cavell makes almost no effort to justify it. What he does go on to say nevertheless takes us straight to the stakes of comedy at the most general level. Each instance of the remarriage comedy genre, he contends, combines imagination and perception, as night combines with day, in order that the couple together negotiate their “dreams and responsibilities.”4 He calls Chaplin’s City Lights “the sublimest realization” of this imperative in film. But Cavell also observes a degree of restraint in the remarriage comedies that isn’t found in the work of Chaplin and Keaton. In the case of The Awful Truth (1937), for example, Cavell congratulates the film’s director Leo McCarey for approaching “the verge at which the comic is no longer comic,” without ever “either losing the humor or letting the humor deny the humanity of its victims.”5 Remarriage comedies are in this respect different from the films of Chaplin and Keaton, which, he says, “cross the verge into pathos and anxiety, as if dissecting the animal who laughs, demonstrating the condition of laughter.”6 The question of how different genres of comedy and different filmmakers working within those genres combine imagination and perception in order to negotiate dreams and responsibilities at a social level, along with the question of whether and how “crossing the verge” denies the humanity of their films’ protagonists such that pathos and anxiety are shown to be the origin and end of what makes us laugh, are matters that will come into play over the course of this chapter. My initial question is whether Cavell’s claim that remarriage comedies are the rightful heirs of the slapstick tradition is justified by the critical stance he takes to the philosophy of film, and particularly to the concept of genre that he formulates. What becomes of the genre of comedian comedy, seemingly eclipsed by this claim regarding remarriage comedies, that was to issue from the twenties’ films? Further to pondering this problematic, my course will be to justify the inverse claim that what is most interesting about the Jerry Lewis film under examination in this chapter—The Ladies Man—is not its all-too-obvious participation in the genre of comedian comedy, which

Living in the Doll House

135

I nevertheless do not want to dismiss, but how it engages with some of the tenets of the genre of romantic comedy. GENRE AS MEDIUM After boldly proposing in his early work on cinema, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, that “genre is a medium,” Cavell returns to the topic in his introduction to Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage to provide a more deeply considered articulation of what calling genre a medium might mean. At first sight the theory of genre that Cavell propounds in Pursuits of Happiness seems to be a means of validating another somewhat contentious claim that despite the absence of the remarriage of the central couple, It Happened One Night is to be understood as giving birth to the remarriage genre, as the genre’s firstborn. Closer scrutiny reveals more than just a clever justification of this claim—rather, we find a formidable philosophy of genre that provides practical assurance of how films belonging to a genre (and genres themselves) are, ontologically speaking, quasi-organic vital entities, precisely because they renew themselves by understanding and thinking through their relation to their medium—which is to say, their genre—and therewith other films in their genre. Cavell’s understanding of genre as medium conceives of genre films as having something to say about both their particular contemporaneity and historicity and their capacity to speak to each other by taking into account a shared legacy.7 Films, in other words, have an individual inheritance and a common one, deriving respectively from their real conditions of existence on the one hand and the aesthetic criteria that pertain to their medium on the other, which includes both their filmic medium and the myth or story that the firstborn of the genre establishes. A film’s inheritances are also its responsibilities, so there is also the ethical dimension of the work to consider. A genre’s and a genre film’s inheritances require careful examination because Cavell considers these inheritances to come both from other arts (and media) and, in distinct and salient ways, from within the genre. In the remarriage comedy, for example, the genre’s most direct inheritances are Shakespearean romantic comedy (specifically, The Winter’s Tale) and the Ibsen play A Doll House, and less directly Old Comedy and New Comedy. From these forebears the remarriage genre inherits (from Shakespeare) both “preoccupations and discoveries” as well as the “precedent for the structure” of remarriage,8 and (from A Doll House) the idea of playtime coming to an end as the need for an education begins, and the transformation of a woman from “wife and mother” to “human being.”9

136

Chapter 7

The “argument” of the remarriage comedy genre in film also takes its concepts from the Ibsen play:10 A Doll House is a structure in which an apparently orderly life shatters into fragments which assemble with raging velocity an argument concerning the concepts of forgiveness, inhabitation, conversation, happiness, playtime, becoming human, fathers and husbands, brother and sister, education, scandal, fitness for teaching, honor, becoming strangers, the miracle of change and the metaphysics of marriage.11

The unaccomplished (and perhaps unaccomplishable) idea that closes the play becomes the “problematic to which the genre of remarriage constitutes a particular direction of response.”12 The starting point for the remarriage comedy film is the “miracle of miracles” that would bring the couple on the verge of splitting up back together again: “how the miracle of change may be brought about” so that “life together between a pair seeking divorce become[s] a marriage.”13 While some of Cavell’s claims for the identity of genre seem so specifically oriented to his enterprise of arguing that the remarriage genre arrives on the scene in the 1930s and is constituted (in the first instance) by the seven films that he argues are definitive of the genre, others of his claims are useful tools that make possible the conceptualisation of genre as well as the relations of films within genres. Thus, when he states that “a genre has no history, only a birth and a logic (or a biology),” his point initially seems only to serve his argument that It Happened One Night was not just the firstborn of the genre, but was born “complete”: “a genre emerges full-blown, in a particular instance first (or set of them if they are simultaneous) and then works out its consequences in further instances.”14 While clearly establishing the connection between the 1930s films and their “prehistory,” Cavell initially struggles to account for the films’ relation to each other.15 More broadly significant is Cavell’s reticence about conceiving genre films as clusters of objects with similar features or properties. Although on occasion Cavell insists on the existence of a “structure” in remarriage comedies and he clearly has more time for features than he does for properties, he also complains that thinking of a genre’s features as properties “underlies certain structuralist writings.”16 Features, he contends, can only be identified after the fact by the act of criticism. This means they have no status as aspects of the work that actively engage with the inheritances for which the genre is responsible. Genres, he admits, may well have features in common, but saying that they look like each other tells us nothing of their distinctiveness nor what is at stake in their connectedness. And failing to account for its generative quality deadens the genre.17

Living in the Doll House

137

Cavell surmises that a solution might be to provide an account of what it means that some films of a genre lack certain features while compensating for them with others. However, the problem here is that new features have the potential to be understood as mutually implicated in all the other features of all the other films in the genre.18 He also momentarily concedes that the distinctiveness of new members of a genre might be accounted for “by investigating [how] a particular set of features” makes the new member “more explicit than in its companions” such that “these exercises in explicitness reflect upon one another, looping back and forth among the members.”19 A genre would thus be understood as striving for “a state of absolute explicitness, of expressive saturation,” until the genre had “nothing further to generate.” Yet this approach is of limited value because “there is no way to know that the state of saturation, completeness of expression has been reached.”20 Cavell implies that considering “genre as medium” resolves these issues. He means to consider “narrative or dramatic genre” as something “like a medium in the visual arts or a form in music.”21 Instead of creating inventories of features, focus would be on how genre films “share the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition.” Each member would be “a study of these conditions” while “bearing the responsibility for the inheritance.” Instead of thinking about genre films along the lines of “family resemblance,” seeing how “they are what they are in view of each other” would open genres out to philosophical interpretation.22 Cavell’s inclination to call the genre’s shared story a myth makes interpretation not simply a study of repetition and difference, but of difference in repetition.23 Each film in a genre constructs and reconstructs the myth it inherits according to how it envisages its responsibilities so that the clauses of the myth (of remarriage) in effect become the responsibilities of individual films.24 Instead of a prespecified list of the features that are shared like properties of an object, key components of the myth become the exponents of a genre by manifesting themselves in individual films. Cavell calls these exponents clauses, provisions of a story, possibilities.25 Significantly, what myth gives to an individual member of a genre is provisional: it is arranged for the present purposes of the story such that there is no “definitive stipulation” of what precisely is inherited. The provisional nature of what a genre inherits from myth is, he argues, what makes it a medium rather than a structure. The preference for terms like claim, clause and provision not only emphasises their provisional nature but brings into sharp relief the active, narrative dimension of the films. The following condensed version of the clauses of the remarriage myth that Cavell identifies will provide a point of contrast to the myth I will later identify as the basis of comedian comedies. In remarriage comedies, a couple who have known each other “almost forever,” who discovered their sexuality together and have married in order to publicly

138

Chapter 7

legitimate and make social their private sharing, are experiencing “trouble in paradise.”26 Marriage has disappointed them, and in Cavell’s words “the disappointment seeks revenge” and the couple split up.27 The woman, in an effort to permanently quell her desire, takes up with another man, but a man who in no way meets the standard of the one she has broken with. Despite this, the quarrel, which Cavell calls “the conversation of love,” between the original pair continues.28 During this time, the woman does something to tempt the man back to her, makes some offering to him and in the process places an indirect claim on him. The man responds not by yielding to her wish or his temptation, but by taking note of it in order to seek a way to counter her claim with one of his own. This claim must also be indirect. It must take the form not of a command but of a wish, and the expression of this wish involves him putting his masculinity at stake by looking foolish. The man’s willingness to sacrifice his masculinity reawakens the woman’s desire for him more fully, or more truthfully, so that her next gift (which—interestingly—substitutes for a claim) will not be something trivial but entail her giving herself fully, and because of this unreservedness and directness will be recognised and accepted by the man. Once these undertakings have been completed, the couple forget their previous grievances with each other and enter into marriage once again, in this second instance not because they feel obliged to follow social convention, but because they have turned it into an authentic experience for themselves.29 The identification of provisions/clauses/possibilities nevertheless restricts the genre. The provisional nature of the inheritance, while not prescriptive, is dialectical. While Cavell allows that a complete inventory of specific conditions/inheritances/clauses/provisions does not always have to be present in a film identified as belonging to a genre, missing clauses must be compensated for. And while substitutions are permissible, it is imperative that either all the films end up with the same number of clauses or that each clause is accounted for. When one of the clauses/conditions is removed and substituted with another, the substitution must be deemed to be sufficient. A clause is neither just satisfied nor just unsatisfied but satisfied or unsatisfied in some way, in some aspect, say literally or abstractly or ironically or individually. . . . This [partial] satisfaction then changes the issue, which then must press on for further satisfaction, if the issue is still living.30

The straight negation (rather than the compensation) of a clause signals a different genre. Cavell thus qualifies his conception of the relation between myth and genre. Cavell argues that genres, like art movements, lose their pertinence when there is nothing else to be said about their elements or clauses and when there is no scope for further revision of the myth. Perhaps then it

Living in the Doll House

139

isn’t so much a question of explicitness and absolute saturation as an exhaustion of arguments and an attrition of relevance? As Cavell says, either “the myth . . . has died or we have died to it.”31 Undoubtedly the most striking point of Cavell’s theory of genre is the importance he places on the role of interpretation. In Pursuits of Happiness, the logic of the remarriage genre identified by Cavell is not to be found in any one of the films that comprise it, but in how the films of a genre relate to each other. It is the philosopher-interpreter then who interprets the clauses and provisions of the genre and who identifies its logic in order to determine its sequencing, which he continues to contend is how films follow each other in becoming increasingly explicit. This not only means that the philosopher/ theorist/critic is the person responsible for identifying a genre but that the interpretation of the films he or she provides will necessarily eclipse other interpretations. Practicality, in other words, is in this instance the solution to the unlimited sublative capacity of the dialectic. What can be gleaned from an examination of Cavell’s philosophy of genre is that the establishment of a lineage between films (such as we saw in evidence in Cavell’s claim that the remarriage comedies were the rightful heirs to the cinematic slapstick of the 1920s) is different from an assertion that they belong to the same genre. Furthermore, it is perfectly within the bounds of the logic of this philosophy that remarriage comedies can eclipse the genre of comedian comedy. But it is also the case that such logic does not prevent others from offering alternative interpretations for a corpus of films. To this end, I want to turn now to the eclipsed genre, that is, to comedian comedy, and to Jerry Lewis, not just with a view to considering The Ladies Man as a participant in this genre but to suggest that Lewis is a filmmaker who so understands the provisions of the genre—and indeed the stakes of those provisions—that the film can be understood as representing the point at which the genre, from a certain perspective, is saturated, where its provisions have been so explicitly recognised as to exhaust themselves in that recognition. Unlike Cavell, my interest lies not in defining and arguing for the logic of a genre as it unfolds among a specific cohort of films but in using Cavell’s general insights into the philosophy of genre to consider how adjacent genres also speak to each other in a single film and how a film creates itself by establishing a dialogue between genres.32 More specifically, my questions concern how we view Lewis’s film in view of romantic comedy, and in view of a recasting of ideas about getting married again in relation to ideas about getting married in the first place; the latter, arguably, being one of the inheritances of the genre of comedian comedy.

140

Chapter 7

COMEDIAN COMEDY In 1981, the same year as the publication of Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, Steve Seidman published his dissertation on comedian comedy.33 Although not comparable to Cavell’s thinking in its philosophical ambition or the scope that it offers for genre criticism to allow films to be considered philosophically, Seidman’s work warrants attention here because it identifies a group of cinematic comedies on the basis of criteria that can be considered “internal to the medium” of film.34 In claiming that comedian comedy exists as a film genre, Seidman observes that its distinguishing “feature”—Seidman is an unashamed structuralist—though barely provisional, amounts to a constitutive tension between the central comic performer and the fictional character he or she plays. Comedian comedies are films in which the central protagonist has already established himself or herself as a comic performer before becoming involved in film production.35 While this convention seems to be requisite, Seidman also provides (admittedly very minimal) scope for films of the genre to be “what they are in view of each other” when he concedes that Harold Lloyd is a comedian comic in spite of having had no previous experience in live entertainment.36 Interestingly this convention of central comic performer as established comedian is otherwise determinant for the genre. It impacts not just on the content of the story being told (as Cavell’s generic or “genre as medium” inheritances mostly do) but establishes a mode of enunciation that distinguishes the genre from other films identified with classical Hollywood realism, and indeed from the remarriage comedies that Cavell writes about. This “presold” status of the comic performer permits a contradiction that means that the central comedian must both maintain his or her status as an already recognizable comic performer and play a character who inhabits a fictional universe in which he or she confronts and resolves problems, thereby creating a productive tension between the diegetic and extra-diegetic, or the fictional and extra-fictional (as Seidman puts it), levels of the film.37 This tension gives the central protagonist a freedom to break with diegetic reality: while appearing to exist in a world for the most part bound by the conventions of classical Hollywood realism, this character, alone among the others in the film, has license to behave in ways that are not only improbable and implausible but also impossible.38 The behaviour of the comic protagonist thus stylises the diegesis and renders reality poetic. Like Cavell, Seidman conceives genre as responsive to myth, arguing that both genre and myth share the common purpose of confronting problems of human social existence.39 Seidman argues that the narratives of genre films are organised to resolve contradictions that remain irresolvable for culture and

Living in the Doll House

141

society.40 But unlike Cavell, who conceives the relation between myth and genre as the means of determining how films think, Seidman’s understanding of the relation between myth and genre tends toward ideological interpretation. Insofar as the mythic narratives that genres convey are intended for the purpose of entertainment, the social problems they present are, in Seidman’s words, wilfully distorted or stylised in order to relieve culture of the need to tackle them head on.41 Indeed, it is this distortion or stylisation that makes them entertaining, and in comedian comedy it is the operation of the comic (whether it be the slapstick mode of the film, the inclusion of jokes and gags, or the behaviour and function of the central protagonist) that is the source of this distortion.42 As Seidman sees it, the myth that the genre of comedian comedy embraces is not concerned with romance, but with the problem of behaviour, personality and identity.43 It concerns “the initiation of the individual into culture,” “how to behave in society,” “how to be accepted into the social realm,” how to achieve adulthood and how to evolve a coherent identity.44 The comic protagonist “draws on his performing talents”—that is, his ability to be funny, his comic repertoire—in order to stylise the problem of socialisation.45 One might even say that the genre’s subject—viewed from Seidman’s vantage—is the overcoming of abjectness, the abject being relative to the other pole of social integration. Seidman also conceives this comic repertoire as evidence of the protagonist’s creativity. On his view, this creativity both allows the protagonist to enter the social world in an imaginary way through fantasy and leads him to be judged by society as eccentric and hence different from and unassimilable into the broader cohort of his peers. Thus the contradiction that inheres in the myth is that what makes the protagonist desirable to the community, and even enables him to assume a place in the community in fantasy, exceeds the needs of the social—he always goes too far—and warrants either his transformation or his expulsion from the community. The contradiction or problem of individual identity and cultural sensibility is resolved either when the comic figure gives up his “creative” urges and assimilates to the broader social realm or is rejected by it.46 In Seidman’s words, Both resolutions stress the value of attaining a cultural identity at the expense of individual creativity. The comic figure must be divested of his creativity—his difference—for the good of the collective. If he is unable to do so, or refuses to do so, the myth posits that culture has no place for such an individual, and he is returned to the nether world of the outsider. The cultural assimilation of the comic figure permits the attainment of certain valued norms: responsible social position, sexuality, marriage, material goods and so forth. The resolution of the myth stresses that these norms are shared by others in the community

142

Chapter 7

as opposed to the imaginary attainment of them in the subjective world of the comic figure.47

What Seidman calls creativity, Cavell, we have seen, calls the combination of perception and imagination. Whereas for Seidman the behaviour of the comic protagonist stylises the diegesis to render reality poetic, in Cavell’s work the way in which the couple together combine perception and imagination speaks to their success in building a fantasy together, or playing together, or going on an adventure together, and is crucial to their ability to come back together as a couple, to remarry with a more developed consciousness of what a successful marriage requires. Cavell also considers this combining of imagination and perception as one of the primary freedoms and responsibilities of the genre. In Cavell’s treatment of the remarriage genre, the formal requirement becomes propositional at the level of myth, being effectuated as the fantasy/play/ adventure clause. It is significant too that in making play a requisite clause of the remarriage myth, the idea of it that operated in A Doll House as part of Nora’s imprisonment as a wife and mother in need of a proper education is transformed to become a functional component of the cinematic remarriage genre. What then to do with Seidman’s contention that this license is an aberration that society sometimes likes but cannot tolerate in the long term? Imagination and perception are similarly indispensable components of the genre of comedian comedy; their combination and distribution speak to the ethical dimension of negotiating freedoms and responsibilities. In City Lights, Chaplin’s homage to the art of pantomime and the poetics of the image he feared would be lost with the advent of the “talkie,” the extent to which the combination can be shared between the protagonists is put into question. In the beginning it is true that the limited perceptual capability of the blind girl makes it possible for her to imagine that the tramp, her benefactor, is a gentleman. With the restoration of her vision, the final scene, however, operates as a moral awakening that turns her dream—that she might one day find the person who has helped her—into a responsibility about whom to recognise and thank for her good fortune. At the same time, what she can now see refutes the tramp’s image of himself, despite his impoverished circumstances, as a gentleman. The issue remains unresolved, yet the class consciousness of the film insists on a splitting of perspectives and errs on the side of the man and the woman being unable to form a couple. The comicality of Buster Keaton’s cinema also derives from a distinctive combination of perception and imagination, one which incorporates an acute awareness of how the cinematic medium can bring perceptual reality to heel before the intersecting interests of the director and the protagonist: the modest wishes of an unexceptional protagonist and the most outrageously grandiose imaginings of a director who knows their satisfaction relies simultaneously

Living in the Doll House

143

on the cinematographic machine and rampantly fortuitous circumstances. So once again the combination of imagination and perception isn’t shared between the romantic couple. Even if the couple get caught up in what would otherwise be called an adventure and have to “play” together (as they can be seen to do for example in The Navigator), what they share is not a fantasy but a practical, commonly perceived reality. Indeed, it seems appropriate to say that the poetic rendering of reality results more from the unspoken compact between the protagonist and the director, the latter producing outrageous coincidences in causal reality so as to give it the quality of fantasy. The fantasy thereby subtends the whole film rather than belonging to the protagonist or the couple. Sherlock, Jr. provides a good example of how the cinematic medium allows the distinction between perception and the imagination to collapse in favour of desirable narrative outcomes. Keaton’s trajectory gags are his favored devices for orchestrating the two realms in tandem with each other.48 Keaton plays a film projectionist who aspires to be a detective, suggesting an ambition on his character’s part to move from the realm of the imagination to empirical reality. Ironically, such ambition is only fulfilled when he falls asleep on the job and dreams of being a hero; it is not something that he achieves in reality, where his chosen pathways just lead him to dead ends.49 The realm of the imagination offers itself to him as a solo retreat in which he achieves a level of mastery that reality denies him. In projecting himself into the cinematic story that unfurls on the screen before him, it is true that the Keaton character is at first thwarted in this realm as well and the first part of the sequence tells only of the futility of trying to adapt to circumstance. (He is first caught in the mechanism of montage, whereby a series of sinister spatial displacements confront him with one alien environment after another, each new shot specifically composed in such a way that every cut resituates him in the worst of all possible worlds.) But when he disguises himself as the eponymous detective and assumes his authority, the coordinates of the dream start to bend to his desire. “Sherlock” eludes his enemies and saves the kidnapped and about-to-be ravaged girl in the famous trajectory gag where he is ferried, first by Watson, and then on a driverless motorcycle, ceremoniously avoiding at every juncture along the way the perils that capricious nature directs at him.50 The film nevertheless ends not with Keaton getting the girl but with her getting him, and its penultimate shot instructively depicts his on-screen mentor/ideal ego seated next to his wife holding two babies on his lap, suggesting that Sherlock’s private aspirations to greatness will have to be abandoned to the grim reality of familial responsibilities. If both Keaton and Chaplin acknowledge the imagination by inducing a psychical image from the physical universe and in so doing reconceive the function of movement, stretching it to the point that it finds the metaphysical

144

Chapter 7

sphere on which it borders, in The Ladies Man, Jerry Lewis reflects on and extends the psychopathological underpinning of this cinematic venture. Lewis’s return to the trajectory thirty years hence thereby gives greater clarity to the anxiety of which Cavell writes. Consider the film’s opening gag. Instead of introducing the protagonist, Lewis diagnoses his illness. The bold black lettering of the “Welcome to Milltown” sign is followed by a parenthetical disclosure warning that the township is “a nervous little community,” an assessment substantiated by the jittery hand that scrawls the number of the town’s inhabitants on the little blackboard. This hesitation is immediately counteracted by the upward sweep of the camera providing evidence of the claim. The camera revels in the saturated technicolor hues of what is clearly a studio set: a remarkably empty, pristine, indeed, just washed, streetscape. The camera’s expository movement is all flourish: its excessive confidence readily attributable to the director Lewis, who is reputed to have embraced his own mastery of cinematic means by referring to himself as a “total filmmaker.” What he gives us to see are the striatic fibers of painted street curbs, their scarlet vibrance established to emphatically channel vehicular movement. And yet the only movement on this otherwise static canvas is the gentle cadence of a bespectacled elderly woman, soon to be introduced as Mrs. Ross, dressed in a drab, unmatched overcoat, fur stole, hat and gloves, handbag resting flaccidly over her wrist, her steps caught in the tension between a lifetime of determination, accumulated know-how and aging joints, her head rhythmically bobbing as she toddles along.51 An untimely salutation from another pedestrian shatters the serenity of the scene and sends both bodies into a spin that drives a shockwave through the entirety of the “nervous little community.” When Mrs. Ross shrieks and slaps onto the windowpane of the drug store, the soda jerk literally decompresses, spraying soda all over a customer who reels out the door, knocking over a bird cage as he does, and overexciting a huddle of dogs from the nextdoor shopfront. A fourth man spills his groceries from the sidewalk to the road, and as he scrambles to collect them is menaced by a Cadillac that thrusts toward him in the characteristically Lewisian staccato of leaps forward and abrupt arrests. As more people are pulled into the disturbance, the previously empty frame metamorphoses into an image of pandemonium. A bicyclist trying to resist being sucked into the vortex of chaos veers off course and takes the camera with him. His encounter with a telegraph pole causes the electrician perched atop to lose his grip, slip and rear-end himself on a fence spike. This puncturing is punctual: it completes the gag and delivers the camera to the location of a second sign, “Milltown Junior College,” and the audience to the place where Lewis’s character Herbert Herbert Heebert (who describes

Living in the Doll House

145

himself as “a he-bit with two her-bits in front of it”) is poised to graduate as valedictorian of his final year of school, and so the story “proper” begins. The trajectory gag that opens the prologue of The Ladies Man is a long way from the triumphant imagination celebrated in many of Keaton’s feature films. Lewis is not simply celebrating the cinematic flourish that we associate with Keaton’s montage but recognises its conceptual ramifications and develops them further. Far from demonstrating a prodigious negotiation of situations to form trajectories, Lewis retains nothing of the beauty that Keaton inscribes in his geometrification of space. Instead, he establishes a physical world whose “order” is always susceptible to being undone by the consequences of social interactions which constitute it. Lewis thus sets the scene for the hysterical dynamics of the story to come by creating a sequence in which aberrant movement is the means of connecting the otherwise wellordered elements of mise-en-scène. Instead of building a trajectory by vehicularising the protagonist’s body to connect distant locales and disparate spaces, movement is here conceived as nervous excitation, an index of the ill-health of the community; the trajectory is formed by the transmission of excitation from one apparently incidental object in the physical world to another. And whereas Keaton’s trajectories celebrate cinema’s capacity to push perceptual reality to the verge of the implausible and thus make fun of both the drive and the fulfillment of the wish that would satisfy it, Lewis’s opening trajectory in The Ladies Man does the opposite. Its focus is not the protagonist achieving his goal by the most direct route imaginable but a more reflexive pathologisation of the problem of desire. Herbert, we are about to see, incarnates the civic pathology to which we have just been introduced. He operates as a destructive influence on nearly every image of order contributed by perceptual reality. Called up from a sea of mortarboards in the school assembly hall to make his valedictory speech, he bursts into the picture like a jack-in-the-box, springing from the rows of unindividuated graduands, shrieking “Hahahah,” before leaping onto the stage and blurting to the audience “Hey, I’m very glad that you ch-chose-em,” thereby beginning and ending his truncated reflection in less than ten words (or syllables). No sooner has Herbert entered the picture, much like the stain that Žižek observes with respect to Chaplin’s tramp at the beginning of City Lights,52 than he is forced out of it, compelled to leave his hometown because his “girlfriend,” Faith, rejects him for another man. Here it is not a question of whether the couple share a fantasy—it appears they don’t even live in a common reality. In the third “gag” of The Ladies Man, Herbert looks for his “childhood sweetheart” to introduce her to his parents. A medium shot of Herbert looking at her from a distance is followed by a reverse long shot of a girl casually poised on a park bench as if she were waiting for someone. The

146

Chapter 7

missing eyeline-match suggests that she might not even know Herbert, an embarrassing possibility that is confirmed in the next shot when “Faith” turns her head away from the offscreen space that Herbert occupies, then turns back, not to acknowledge Herbert but because another, more regular looking guy has just entered the frame. Even though we don’t see his face, he cuts a strapping figure: dressed in a fraternity sweater, clearly a jock, and not unlike the type of man that Dean Martin played in the films that starred the comic duo—in short, a ladies’ man. Eschewing the conventions of continuity editing to adopt the free indirect mode and make palpable Herbert’s despair, the frozen point-of-view shot refuses to tilt up to register the faces of the couple as Faith stands to embrace the man. The couple’s decapitation is also Herbert’s (he is about to lose his head), in his encounter with “the Real” in the Lacanian sense of the term, that shows him unwilling to see, much less acknowledge, what is before his eyes. This acephalic shot amplifies the character’s exclusion from the social and makes that exclusion abstract and general rather than concrete and particular. Herbert’s rival is not a man but normative masculinity. His rejection comes not from the girl but more devastatingly from the indifference of heteronormativity to his existence as such. After this diagnostic prologue, Herbert moves to Hollywood to secure employment as a houseboy in a boarding house for aspiring female starlets. At this level the rest of the film stays true to its opening diagnosis, comprising a series of skits, or set pieces, delineating the various ways that the nervous disease that originated in Herbert’s hometown, and with which he too is unarguably afflicted, impacts on his capacity to do his job.

Figure 7.2 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). Faith. Screenshot captured by author.

Living in the Doll House

147

LEWIS AND COMEDIAN COMEDY Even though Seidman demonstrates interest in the specifics of identity and the way cultural identity comes at the cost of individual creativity, and even while he indicates patriarchy as one of four social issues that the genre of comedian comedy has dealt with over its period of existence,53 Seidman says nothing about masculinity. Yet it is arguable that masculinity is the social problem with which, with the possible but not absolute exception of Mae West, the genre of comedian comedy concerns itself, from Chaplin’s feminised little tramp in City Lights, to Buster Keaton’s Willie in Steamboat Bill, Jr. to Harold Lloyd’s hybrid of the affable boy next door with the go-getter (and including the Marx brothers as figures who cannot be accommodated into the economy of normative heterosexual relations), right through to Mike Myers as Austin Powers. The genre in fact is mostly about the gender of masculinity and mostly about the central comic performer’s relation to masculine norms. Significantly, the protagonists do not unequivocally embody the norms of their gender. Their comic strivings are frequently directed at embodying these norms, but their comic sovereignty equally results in their refusal or inability to embrace them (as we see on occasion with Charlie Chaplin and frequently with Jerry Lewis). Perhaps this is what Cavell means when he considers that the films of Chaplin and Keaton “cross the verge into pathos and anxiety” to “demonstrate the condition of laughter.”54 It is arguable that Lewis’s contribution to the genre is to make explicit the anxiety about masculinity that was once latent in the genre and that is reworked by the unconscious (whether by comedic mode or comic rendering) in order to have a say. In Lewis’s films, the anxiety about aberrant masculinity that manifests in the genre because its heroes are comic misfits is not just an individual shortcoming of the character that the film’s narrative works to come to terms with (if not resolve). Here it is more explicitly identified as a psychological pathology in need of a cure. The problem for the narrative—if not for the hero—is to find a way to avoid the fate, that is, the exclusion from society, that in accordance with Seidman’s conceptualisation of the genre’s myth other scenarios would consider befits his flawed character. Lewis’s capacity to give physical reality to the repressions on which normative masculinity is built has been noted by numerous film scholars and critics. Frank Krutnik for example has observed, “The early Lewis-figure was a glaring inversion of acceptable standards governing the body, maturity, and masculinity” and that through performance Lewis makes his body “a battleground upon which a range of competing ‘aberrances’ assault the protocols of 1950s masculinity,” thereby giving rise to a “hysterical ‘voicing’ of dysfunctional masculinity.”55 And Scott Bukatman writes of Lewis’s

148

Chapter 7

“struggle for self-control and for a stable position within socially constructed definitions of masculine behaviour and desire.”56 Lewis, he argues, takes on the persona of the female hysteric to demonstrate his ambivalence toward normative masculinity.57 The literature ties Lewis’s characters’ inept masculinity to the specific construction of the comic duo he formed with Dean Martin rather than see it as an “essential feature” of the genre. Bukatman recalls Lewis’s early intimation to his father of his “idea of making a team out of the handsomest guy in the world and a monkey” and observes the pair’s capacity to embody a “potent image of resolution: the two constructions of masculinity linked and united in a non-paradoxical vision of harmony.”58 And Krutnik notes that “Lewis’s excesses are measured against Dean Martin’s idealized and self-assured masculine presence.”59 Martin’s performance of idealised masculinity, Krutnik says, functions as a “container of the Lewis-figure’s aberrance.”60 These film theorists also see the splitting up of the comic pair as resulting in Lewis excessively obsessing about his protagonist’s ineptitude and vulnerability in the later films to the point of becoming their dominant theme.61 The Ladies Man gag where Herbert finds Faith with another man in fact resonates strongly with the distribution of masculinity in the Martin-Lewis duo. The pair’s nightclub act entailed Martin singing and Lewis getting laughs by acting like a baboon and disrupting Martin’s performance. In their films, Martin plays the suave sophisticated ladies’ man and Lewis his comical sidekick. Accordingly, the “Faith” sequence of The Ladies Man can be read as Lewis finally giving vent to his ambivalence about the division of labour and typecasting in his pairing with Martin. The aggressive and sadistic nature of Lewis’s comedy in his solo ventures begs to be interpreted as part of this reaction and lends itself to being understood as an example of a shaggy dog story, what Freud would call a nonsense joke, and without doubt one of the most hostile kinds of tendentious jokes.62 In Lewis’s case, the impetus for this commitment to nonsense jokes, to egotistical shaggy-dog type humour can in turn be diagnosed as deriving from the “failure” of another kind of comedy, whose prototype is the smutty joke, and whose success would have signaled the ascendancy of homoerotic relations over heterosexual ones and would see Martin and Lewis’s pairing as a substitute for the “married” couple.63 Hostile, aggressive and of a sexual nature, the smutty joke is the paradigmatic case for how the joke redefines the relations between the constituents of a group.64 While oriented toward an immediate and utilitarian kind of social transformation, the smutty joke’s aim is the exact opposite of the democracy of the sexes that Cavell understands remarriage comedies as endeavouring to affirm. On Freud’s view, the smutty joke is delivered on the basis of a woman’s repudiation of the sexual advances of a man who symbolically punishes

Living in the Doll House

149

her by making her the butt of the joke. The woman’s rejection of the man compels him to try to save face by securing some kind of affirmation from another man who has witnessed his failure, which he does by making a joke at her expense. The tendentiousness of the joke is inherently antisocial in its impulse, yet its purpose is also the establishment of a new (in this instance, exclusively male) society or social group. In view of this, Lewis’s films with Dean Martin are tales of Martin’s seductive successes, where normative heterosexual coupling triumphs over homosocial relations between men such that the complicity between men that Freud writes of doesn’t occur because Martin always gets the girl, and Lewis remains the eternally overlooked rival for a woman’s affection. Attention to the resonances between the film and Lewis’s work with Martin thus turns The Ladies Man into the production of a childish, narcissistic fantasy on Lewis/Herbert’s part to compensate for his sexual inadequacy. In the boarding house where Herbert gets a job, the object of desire is not only made available and attainable, but excessively so. This film, and more generally other self-directed Lewis comedies, have thus unwittingly been interpreted in the order of a second kind of aggressive joke—the nonsense joke or shaggy dog, a joke-like production where one finds a kind of “idiocy masquerading as a joke.”65 Such jokes raise the expectation of a joke, or in Lewis’s case of comedy. That such jokes deliver pleasure to the teller at the audience’s expense, making the listener/viewer the butt of an aggressive sadistic act on the part of its maker, plays rather well to Lewis’s nomination of himself as “total filmmaker.”

Figure 7.3 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). From the opening credits. Screenshot captured by author.

150

Chapter 7

PREMARRIAGE COMEDIES Instead of settling with this line of argument though, I want to explore further the idea that Lewis’s refusal to conform to the conventions of comic decorum and delivery emerges from his recognition of the saturation of the conventions of the genre of comedian comedy, and to give Lewis credit for more serious (and not simply egotistical) intentions than interpreting the film as either a straightforward wish-fulfilment and/or aggression-venting exercise would permit. To do this, I want to return to the question of the mythos of romance that Cavell elaborates in relation to the remarriage comedies and to contrast that mythos to the function of romance in the comedian comedy genre. The mythos of romance is no less present in comedian comedies than it is in romantic comedies, even if Seidman fails to acknowledge it. For the sake of this chapter, we might call such comedian comedies premarriage comedies in order to keep in mind their connection to the remarriage genre. Here are the provisions of the premarriage genre: a man wants to marry a woman, or a heterosexual couple want to marry each other but they are ostensibly prevented from doing so by a blocking character or identified lack such as wealth. Occasionally in the feature-length slapsticks of the 1920s, this blocking character is a senex, though his appearance in an unadulterated form is more frequent in the Sennett comedies of the preceding decade. In Sherlock, Jr., the waning of parental authority as the means of suppressing the fulfilment of the couple’s desire displaces the function of the senex onto the alternative pairing of the girl and the hero’s rival (possibly as a signifier of the growing importance of competition among suitors of the same generation rather than tension between generations as arbiter of relations). The question of who or what blocks the romance is less straightforward in comedian comedies. In many of the films, it is something about the character himself that is at issue, thus raising the question of the man’s worthiness. If, as we see in some of Keaton’s films for example, the girl herself functions as the blocking character, there is only the mildest hint of the striving for equality between the sexes that Cavell observes in the remarriage comedies.66 Indeed, the films of comedian comedy are more homosocial in their focus on the question of the man’s legitimate entry into the social realm via marriage, while the woman’s status as marriageable is not usually in question. At issue is both the man’s capacity to conform to the norms of masculinity and his fitness for marriage prior to undergoing some kind of transformation. As the scenarios develop, the man appears to undertake a huge feat, putting his life at stake, and the success of his actions makes the marriage possible and brings the story to an end. The feat is both a hyperbolisation of the claim that the man makes on the woman’s desire in remarriage comedies and in most cases its empty form, and

Living in the Doll House

151

this is because it is usually gratuitous in some way rather than intentional.67 I say “appears to” because in many cases the comicality of the story emanates from the fact that the character’s self-transcendence is dubious. Precisely because of the priority given to comedy over romance in these films, the resolution that the stories of the genre seek is often achieved by a deus ex machina,68 and because of this the narratives establish only “inauthentic unities” between the sexes and are usually understood as structures on which to hang gags rather than authentically spiritual quests. This means that the myth itself seems not just to be provisional, but to be recognised as such by the proponents of the genre, and to function as the screen for the much more serious “problem” of gender deficiency and inept masculinity that generates the comic in a more authentic way than romantic comedies conventionally do. For the wit that impels the comedian comedy genre is generated by the unconscious and to a certain extent remains unconscious. It is not shared between the protagonists but is part of an unspoken compact between the director and the audience. This is borne out by the fact that the protagonists in comedian comedy are not included in the humour. We have noted, along with other commentators, that Lewis takes this “masculine deficiency” beyond what is simply comic. Unlike the comic misfits of the silent era and beyond—including the Marx brothers and W. C. Fields—who are loved by their audiences, the primary feelings that Jerry Lewis’s character arouses in his audience are frustration, irritation, annoyance and revulsion on one hand, and anxiety, embarrassment and painful identification on the other. There is little room for the admiration of the comic figure that Freud writes of when he tries to separate an appreciation of the comic from a feeling of superiority.69 Certainly the record doesn’t show an abounding enthusiasm for the Lewis persona, and what admiration for his work there is comes predominantly from the French and was either expedient (in celebrating Lewis’s personal vision in the heyday of auteurism), political (applauding Lewis’s unmasking of Classical Hollywood Style) or intellectual (affirming Lewis as reflexive filmmaker challenging the constraints of comedy). Consider the case of Steven Shaviro, who observes his own masochistic identification with Lewis’s abject persona and then despairs that even though Lewis’s characters’ behaviour systematically deploys the strategies of the comic (let’s say, clumsiness, awkwardness, lack of physical agility, unintelligibility, stupidity and disruptiveness to name the most obvious) in order to destroy norms, rituals, rules, etiquette, instrumental procedures and so on, Lewis’s characters ultimately fail to assert their individuality “in opposition to society”70 and only come to “believe in themselves . . . if they are given permission and encouragement to do so by others.”71 As such they are absolutely dependent, Shaviro argues, on the “stereotypical, hegemonic terms of the social order” for psychological rehabilitation.72

152

Chapter 7

On the other hand—and this is the point I would like to press home—it is also arguable that if the comic misfit really is a misfit, perhaps what Lewis is suggesting is that what he needs is not so much a cure (as a Bergsonian conception of the comic as being in need of a corrective would demand) as a community that will accept him as he is. The question of the struggle of audiences with Lewis’s character, as well as with his gags, his sense of humour and even his stories, suggests a need for an alternative means of apprehending his films than those we conventionally rely on for Hollywood cinema and even for films of the comedian comedy genre. Jean-Pierre Coursodon pursued this line of argument when in the 1960s he reversed his negative assessment of the previous decade of Lewis’s films to celebrate instead the intentionality of the films’ humourlessness. Their originality, he declared, rested “in precisely the fact that while nominally slapstick comedies, they so transcend categories that laughter, in their case, ceases to be the test of success and failure.”73 Sadly, Coursodon backflipped in the 1970s with the admonishment that “underneath our pleasure at being tricked and our recognition of the director’s cleverness, we experience real frustration at a let down which, although intentional, remains a let down nonetheless”74 and complained that Lewis’s self-directed films were plotless, singling out The Ladies Man as particularly burdensome in this regard: “One longs for some kind of story-line—no matter how slender—onto which gags could be hung, and that would lead somewhere. There is no build up, no progression, no climax.”75 The Bellboy, The Errand Boy and The Patsy are no doubt open to the same accusation. The problem of understanding Lewis’s work is exacerbated by its episodic mode of delivery, which runs closer to the review film and the sketch comedy, not to mention the peculiar temporality of the skits and set pieces, with their non-suspenseful dilations and unsurprising contractions of time, which often serve to attenuate situations of narrative importance. An orientation towards incidental tasks of little or no narrative consequence can cause the viewer to forget what preceded them and to abandon expectations of what is to come. The extravagance of the set and the novelty of the image in The Ladies Man should also be considered. The assertion of mise-en-scène over classical realism, of form over content, means that such extravagance initially steals our attention from the clauses, propositions and possibilities of the story. Yet such peculiarities also seem to be asking the audience to find an alternative mode of apprehension to that demanded either by classical Hollywood realism or even comedian comedy. Perhaps a better way of understanding film form in this instance is to take our cue from Freud and psychoanalysis, specifically from Freud’s own alignment, in his metapsychology essays, of jokes, dreams and hysterical symptoms with works of the imagination. This

Living in the Doll House

153

kind of viewing would warrant our isolation and extraction of components that are more performative, theatrical, even operatic, instead. We might even surmise that the film’s episodes, their bearing on the protagonist and their relation to each other, have more in common with the structure of the therapeutic sessions of psychoanalysis than conventional narrative exposition. In this respect what transpires in the episodes of The Ladies Man is that Herbert’s imagination runs riot with his perception to the point that the least hint of a sexual relation becomes intolerable to him. His initial exclusion from heteronormative sexuality is followed by an almighty effort to put the heterosexual couple out of the picture entirely, despite the fact that women are everywhere. The scenario would thus be taken as a hyper-cathexis of the object of Herbert’s fear, nothing less than the morbid, delusional, paranoid fantasy of the nightmare that precedes the Keaton character’s dream in Sherlock, Jr. The reverse-shot following Herbert’s missed encounter with Faith, where he immediately looks to his mother for reassurance, and which shows Lewis himself dressed in drag as his mother, would be the signal that diegetic reality has given way to psychical reality or at least that the two are no longer discernible. Herbert from this point on restricts himself to purely practical pre-sexual or non-sexual modes of interaction with the occupants of the house, either attaching himself to older maternal figures such as the housekeeper Katie (Kathleen Freeman) or the boarding house owner/retired concert soprano Mrs. Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel) or engaging with the innumerable females at a purely professional level. Yet there is no indication that his anxiety is diminished.

Figure 7.4 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). Herbert’s mother. Screenshot captured by author.

154

Chapter 7

Herbert only comes to feel at home in the doll house after the occurrence of several seemingly incidental but curatively significant events. In attending to them here, I want to suggest that the film demands to be read not as a series of fragmentary episodes that work independently as set pieces but as a story participating in the claims of romantic (rather than simply comedian) comedies. Apart from the film’s prologue and the scene where the television crew from “Up Your Street” come to the “doll house” to film an episode devoted to celebrating Mrs. Wellenmellon’s social and cultural contributions, only two other men have parts to play in the film. Both are dates for the women who live in the house, and both function to reassert the question of the heterosexual couple that the film has otherwise sought to avoid. Their rivalry with Herbert also presents opportunities for heroic identification. In the first case, the American comedian Buddy Lester plays an illiterate gangster called Willard C. Gainsborough who threatens Herbert by telling him that the C is for killer, but whose attempts to intimidate him backfire, not because Herbert isn’t scared, but because Herbert’s inadvertent destructive tendencies (already established by his smashing to pieces the antique glass collection, smudging the still-wet paint on the lips of Mrs. Wellenmellon’s portrait, and breaking the ornamental vases on the mantelpiece) reduce the gangster to a babbling abject mess. Having been asked to notify Willard’s girlfriend of his arrival but warned not to get too close to her, and having returned with lipstick on his cheek (put there not by the girl but by the housekeeper Katie who deposited it in gratitude for his hard work), Herbert incites a jealous rage in “the gentleman caller.” Willard’s subjection of Herbert to an intense and aggressive line of questioning about the origin of the lipstick and Herbert’s ineffectual attempt to provide an explanation are sidelined as Willard becomes aware that his encounter with Herbert has resulted in an even greater indignity: bristling anger turns into incandescent rage as Willard realises that Herbert is sitting on his new hat. Herbert unsuccessfully tries to make amends by following Willard’s instructions to fix the hat and put it on Willard’s head. No matter how much Herbert shapes and reshapes the hat, he can’t recapture the dapper lilt it gave to Willard when he first strutted into the house. Despite Willard’s tough guy approach to the situation, the ensuing shot reverse-shot sequence in which the two men become painfully and intimately intertwined, sees Willard—with the lining torn out of the hat, threads left dangling from inside its rim, and tears streaming down his face—the more degradingly emasculated of the two, and no doubt confirming many a critic’s worst fear about the dire consequences of any encounter with Lewis. Soon after this episode showcasing Herbert’s capacity to bring anyone down to his level, the real gangster actor George Raft appears at the house. Herbert initially refuses to believe that George Raft is who he claims to be and demands he prove it by tossing a coin as he did in Scarface. Raft tries

Living in the Doll House

155

Figure 7.5 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). Herbert H. Heebert and Willard C. Gainsborough. Screenshot captured by author.

but fails, so offers to prove himself instead by showing Herbert that he has George Raft’s dancing skills. To do this Raft insists that Herbert dance the female part and Herbert after some (masculine) protestation complies. In relation to the Buddy Lester scene, we see the gangster actor able to command more authority than the real gangster, but also that Herbert’s pathology fails to break the gangster’s composure. In this second confrontation with a rival figure, aesthetics, we might say, triumphs over reality and Herbert is able to acknowledge the existence of other men and accept himself in relation to them. That all this is done through dance constitutes an important segue with a later scene when Herbert encounters Miss Cartilage. Therapeutically speaking, his willingness to dance as a girl before he can do so as a man permits him to acknowledge his own “castration” but also attests to the mobility of the phallus. When Herbert finally succeeds in sneaking into the one room in the house that he has been forbidden to enter, he finds no ordinary room but a place where the laws of verisimilitude hold sway even less than they do outside it. There is no transcendent perspective on this room as there is for the other rooms of the house, which are all locatable in the extreme long shots of its open façade. Miss Cartilage, a 1960s beatnik dominatrix, should be Herbert’s worst nightmare. Instead, in the mime sequence that follows she cajoles and coaxes him, pushing him to the point that he can experience himself for the first time as an ideal ego. In contrast to the technicolour palate that makes the rest of the house and its contents pure eye candy, the camera pulls back to reveal virginal white-on-white decor. The idea of chasteness

156

Chapter 7

clearly doesn’t refer to the occupant, who hangs upside down from the ceiling like a bat, but speaks directly to Herbert’s fear and curiosity. Miss Cartilage descends to the floor and gently but firmly corrals Herbert into an adjacent space behind a curtain where there should be a wall, but where Herbert discovers a dance floor and a jazz orchestra, and finds himself suddenly debonair, crisp and elegantly dressed in a properly fitting suit, trousers to the floor. When Miss Cartilage turns on the record player, his fear of being chased by women is aesthetically sublimated into a dance. Herbert, like so many of the other comedian comics who preceded him, rises to the occasion, becomes masterful, even adding his own flourishes to the dance while he incorporates into its rhythms his inclination to flee the woman’s clutches. One could read this episode through André Bazin’s “law of forbidden montage,” which stipulates that at the climax of the narrative a confrontation must take place between the character and his adversary such that the two appear together in the same frame without recourse to montage.76 Miss Cartilage’s room would thus be the real stage around which the bigger set of the doll house is constructed as a veil or a screen, much like the grottos that Josephine Gray writes about in her chapter in this volume. Yet Herbert has encountered women repeatedly throughout the film. One of his jobs is to deliver the mail to each of the girls (with a pun intended perhaps?)—a job which exposes him to the object of his terror in a non-threatening way and with which he has no problem. Indeed, while we would expect to see Herbert coming undone in various ways in each of these encounters, what we find instead is that each of the girls struggles with speech and self-expression as much as Herbert does.

Figure 7.6 Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man (1961). Herbert, Miss Cartilage and the Harry James Orchestra. Screenshot captured by author.

Living in the Doll House

157

That Herbert is conscious of their inadequacy while the girls themselves are as oblivious to their incapacities as Herbert is to his extends the diagnosis of his pathology to them as well, as if hysteria were no more the prerogative of one sex than the other. The sequence of Herbert’s encounter with Miss Cartilage takes place between a scene where we see Herbert building the self-esteem of the depressed Fay (notably, little Faith, the second her-bit to Herbert’s he-bit) by taking lessons in music, elocution and dancing from the other girls and reiterating them to Fay, and the penultimate scene in which Fay, having found her voice, implores the other girls to stop pretending to need Herbert in order to keep him and acknowledge that they really need him. Were this a conventional romantic comedy, or even a conventional comedian comedy, Fay is the girl that Herbert should end up with. Perhaps the encounter with the phallic woman is itself a screen for the repeatedly missed encounter with Mrs. Wellenmellon’s pet, “Baby.” What is better kept offscreen, unrepresented and unrepresentable, except through a series of contradictory substitute formations, is not the encounter as such (which is to say, an encounter between the sexes or even just plain sex) but its irrefutable consequences. While offscreen, Baby is variously indicated as an infant in need of feeding, a cat in need of milk, and a ferocious animal that devours sides of beef for dinner. On-screen, Baby appears first as a meek basset hound and then in the film’s final shot as a lion. Despite the often cartoonish style of its elusive “appearances,” much like those of the Road Runner to Wiley E. Coyote, Baby is more suggestive of the Lacanian “tuché,” the encounter with the Real as the source of anxiety—which, as Shapiro tells us in her chapter in this volume is a necessarily missed encounter—the problem from which Herbert is hiding and which represents his own point of vanishing.77 Perhaps Herbert’s real adversary never was women, just as Sherlock Jr.’s destiny was not, it turns out, to get the girl. The end of the The Ladies Man distinguishes itself, however, from both romantic comedy and comedian comedy because it does not end with the affirmation of heterosexual union, authentic or otherwise, but with the acquisition of speech, the mutuality of friendship, and the final revelation of the power of the excluded other—Baby, of whom Lewis is no longer scared but who finally manifests as the ferocious animal we had feared it was. Instead of a deus ex machina descending from the heavens, the manifest themes of the film are “resolved” in a meaningful if awkwardly sentimental way, but Baby’s final appearance as a lion suggests (much like Keaton’s ambivalent end to Sherlock, Jr.) that harmonious relations are fleeting and transitory and that the Real remains in the wings, ultimately untameable and capable of asserting itself at any moment.

158

Chapter 7

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bukatman, Scott. “Paralysis in Motion.” In Comedy/Cinema/Theory, edited by Andrew Horton, 188–205. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. “Jerry Lewis Films: No Laughing Matter,” Film Comment 11, no. 4 (1975). Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. “Jerry Lewis.” In American Directors, vol. 2, edited by Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976. Krutnik, Frank. “Jerry Lewis: The Deformation of the Comic.” Film Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1994). Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979. Lewis, Jerry. The Total Film-Maker. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973. Matthews, Nicole. Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy after the New Right. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Mellencamp, Patricia. “Jokes and Their Relation to the Marx Brothers.” In Cinema and Language, edited by Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp. University Publications of America, 1983. Polan, Dana. “Being and Nuttiness: Jerry Lewis and the French,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 12, no. 1, (1984). Robinson, David. “Buster Keaton,” La Revue du cinéma 234 (December 1969). Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions: 1929–1968. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968. Seidman, Steve. Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1981. Selig, Michael. “The Nutty Professor: A ‘Problem’ with Film Scholarship.’” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (1990). Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Trahair, Lisa. The Philosophy of Comedy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Žižek, Slavoj. “Does the Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?” Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Living in the Doll House

159

NOTES 1. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1. 2. Pursuits of Happiness, 2, my emphasis. 3. To say that there are just two genres is of course an oversimplification, both of film comedy and of the concept of genre, but it is necessary for the argument that follows. Although remarriage comedies, and indeed romantic comedies, include slapstick, its prevalence and function are much diminished in these genres; and while the extra-diegetic status of the performers may occasionally come into play in romantic comedies, as in the famous reference to Cary Grant’s birth name (Archie Leach for Archibald Leach) on the tombstone in Arsenic and Old Lace (1943) it is incidental, something of a joking aside, rather than modal or structural. 4. Pursuits of Happiness, 101. 5. Pursuits of Happiness, 243. 6. Pursuits of Happiness, 243. Finally in the appendix, “Film in the University,” Keaton is deemed to be the comic figure whose absorption in his activities is shown to be a mode of awareness that both participates in the obstinacy, obtrusiveness and conspicuousness of the world and neglects it but in a way that nevertheless allows the worldhood of the world to assert itself. Pursuits of Happiness, 272. 7. Cavell acknowledges both the Depression (2) and the emergence of a group of women born of mothers who were part of the first generation of prominent women— their contemporaries so to speak—women like Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins and Margaret Sanger (18), but it is clear that he wants to broaden the scope of the determinants of the subject matter of film stories to give equal weight to aesthetic and cultural inheritances. 8. Pursuits of Happiness, 19. 9. Pursuits of Happiness, 21, quoting the last pages of the Ibsen play. 10. Pursuits of Happiness, 22. 11. Pursuits of Happiness, 22. 12. Pursuits of Happiness, 23. 13. Pursuits of Happiness, 23. 14. Pursuits of Happiness, 27–28. 15. In attempting to account both for the intergeneric connections and generic development over time, Cavell’s conception of the nature and constitution of a genre sets one of its tasks to be the steady erosion of one of the central concepts used in the identification and discussion of genre films. The notion that sets everything on the wrong track, which is from Cavell’s perspective a too structuralist track, is captured in thinking of genres as entities comprised of features or as objects comprised of properties. 16. Pursuits of Happiness, 28. 17. Pursuits of Happiness, 28. 18. Cavell considers the legacy of one particular feature of the remarriage genre: “the removal of the pair to a place of perspective in which the complications of the

160

Chapter 7

plot will achieve what resolution they can.” The first film of the genre has no such feature: instead of finding themselves in a specific place, the couple are in transit, on the road. “I say that what compensates for this lack is in effect the replacement of a past together by a commitment to adventurousness. . . . But then it will be found that adventurousness in turn plays a role in each of the other films of remarriage . . . [leading to the conclusion that] perspective doesn’t require representation by place but may also be understood as a matter of directedness, of being on the road,” (29) which leads Cavell in turn to question the nature of the substitution: “what is ‘compensating’ for what? Nothing is lacking, every member incorporates any ‘feature’ you can name, in its way” (29–30). 19. Pursuits of Happiness, 30. Emph. added. 20. Pursuits of Happiness, 30. 21. Pursuits of Happiness, 28. 22. Cavell’s emphasis, Pursuits of Happiness, 29. 23. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 31. 24. On Cavell’s argument, the myth that will become the primary inheritance does not necessarily exist as a known cultural construct before it is found in a genre. It is conceivable that a single myth may be found in various media (with media here being understood in the more conventional sense of medium: theatrical play, film, novel, etc.), and that different media may reflect on a common myth. 25. In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell doesn’t explain what he means by clause, and his use of the term raises the question of whether he is thinking about it as something like a narrative clause, where there is a sequential or head clause and other subordinate clauses that depend on it, or more legalistically as dictating the conditions under which the parties entering into a contract agree to act under its terms. His later discussion about compensatory clauses suggests his leaning is toward the latter understanding. See note 30 below. 26. Pursuits of Happiness, 31. 27. Pursuits of Happiness, 31. 28. Pursuits of Happiness, 31. 29. Pursuits of Happiness, 32. 30. Pursuits of Happiness, 33. Cavell may seem arbitrarily finicky here, but the point is not so much a perfectly balanced mathematical equation (all films must total the same number of clauses) as a way of distinguishing between genres and calling out adjacent genres. Cavell’s argument for this is quite interesting because of what he does and doesn’t do with the issue of comedy. He notes how other remarriage films such as Random Harvest and North by Northwest belong to adjacent genres not because they don’t adequately compensate for missing clauses, meaning that they do not dialectically sublate them, but because they outright negate them. Hence the phenomenology of consciousness that lies at the heart of the educative project of the remarriage films is stopped short. While Random Harvest, on Cavell’s description, misses the crucial feature that the man never makes the claim on the woman—a claim that, it is worth remembering, involves the man putting his masculinity at stake, and which is doubtless inherently comic. Curiously too, he implies that the myth of the story of Random Harvest concerns being punished for daring to pursue

Living in the Doll House

161

the remarriage myth in the first place! And North by Northwest belongs to an adjacent genre because the narrative is focalised around the man’s symbolic death and rebirth, not the woman’s. Cavell offers no insight into why a woman’s symbolic death and rebirth is grounds for comedy and a man’s isn’t. He says merely that “in negating a clause of the genre of remarriage, the film declares its own way of working out the legitimizing of marriage” (34). 31. Pursuits of Happiness, 33. 32. This is not to say that I think that Cavell’s idea of identifying “the logic of a genre” is an unimportant task for film criticism and film as philosophy—indeed, it is one of the points where the two become one and the same thing—but it is a task for monographs rather than book chapters. 33. Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1981). The films that Seidman calls comedian comedies span the silent and sound eras. The genre would include films starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, Jacques Tati, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Jim Carey, Mike Myers, Sacha Baron Cohen, perhaps Goldie Hawn and Whoopi Goldberg. The genre’s emergence is coincident with the first feature films, but its prehistory includes the two-reelers that preceded them, the Keystone films of Sennett before them, and the European chase comedies before them (and vaudeville, the music hall, commedia dell’arte and the harlequinade before them). 34. The difficulty of Cavell’s “genre as medium” argument is that precisely how it co-articulates with the specificity the filmic medium tends to fall by the wayside. For all of its nuance and attentiveness to the specificity of the remarriage genre and to comedy, the question of enunciative mode and of slapstick is subordinated to more easily interpreted narrative clauses like play and adventure. 35. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 2. Initially this was in the music hall or on the vaudeville stage, then later it was on Broadway or the radio or the nightclub circuit. Today such performers often come from television variety shows such as Saturday Night Live, but many of them are sourced from Chicago’s The Second City (Mike Myers and Tina Fey to name two of the most well known). 36. That said, Seidman acknowledges that Harold Lloyd, having had no prehistory in another medium, fulfills the genre’s criteria in the likeness of others rather than in strict adherence to this condition. 37. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 3. 38. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 3–5. This also means that there is an emphasis on performance: the style of framing is oriented toward frontality rather than shot-reverse-shot, the character directly addresses the audience (breaking the fourth wall), and self-reference is permissible. 39. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. 40. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 144. 41. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. 42. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. Seidman quotes Levi-Strauss on the way myth draws on historical reality to integrate it into its narrative model and notes that Levi-Strauss also argues that the nature of the correspondence between history and

162

Chapter 7

mythic narrative is not one of mirroring but of transformation. Moreover, the problem that lies at the heart of myth can be presented either in “straight terms,” that is, identically to the way that it presents itself in the society that seeks to meet its challenge, or by means of absurdity so that its “overt content will become modified accordingly to inform an inverted image of the social pattern actually present to the consciousness of the natives.” This link to myth/absurdity sounds potentially central as well. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Four Winnebago Myths,” in The Structuralists, ed. Richard and Fernande DeGeorge (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1972), 201; Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. Unfortunately, Seidman doesn’t explain how these two ways of adapting historical reality to myth impact upon genres, but one assumes that the distinction he is making here is between drama and comedy. 43. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. 44. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. 45. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145. 46. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 145–46. 47. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, 146. 48. David Robinson uses the term to describe the pure continuous linear gags of Buster Keaton’s silent slapstick. “Buster Keaton,” La Revue du cinéma 234 (December 1969); cited by Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 175. Such gags were not however invented by Keaton. Keaton’s gags riff on Rube Goldberg cartoons and the early French and Italian chase comedies of the pre– World War I era. The latter are quite possibly the first purely “cinematic gags” and can be found in the Italian films starring the persona of Tontolini and the films Romeo Bosetti made for Gaumont in France, such as Le tic (1907) and Une dame vraiment bien (1908). For more on trajectory gags and physical causality see Deleuze, Cinema 1, 173–77. 49. In the real world, his rival for the girl’s affection steals her father’s watch and plants the pawn shop receipt on him, thereby framing him for the crime and giving the novitiate sleuth the opportunity to put his study to the test. On consulting his “How to Be a Detective” manual, he resolves to shadow his man but quickly finds himself outmanoeuvred, backed into and locked in a train carriage—literally a dead end. He escapes through the roof of the carriage, but the train is now moving and takes him along with it, so he runs in the opposite direction, adventitiously taking hold of the spout of a water tank as a means of delivering himself from its trajectory. The spout however has a purpose of its own, as he finds out when it dumps him on the ground along with a truckload of water. Cavell calls this Keaton’s (the director) embodiment of a mode of awareness that simultaneously neglects and participates in the obstinacy of the world. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 272. See also note 30. 50. There is a contemplation of the identificatory mechanisms of cinema also at work in the film that I haven’t mentioned here: the film’s awareness of the coincidence of the dreamwork and the formal mechanisms of cinema, the question of the contemplation of film’s mirroring capacity and its repetition of identificatory

Living in the Doll House

163

structures such as we see when the Keaton character, finally reconciled with his girlfriend, has to look to the on-screen characters to see what to do next. 51. She is not unlike Sylvester and Tweety’s granny, who hails from the Loony Tunes cartoon series that Lewis’s mentor, Frank Tashlin, worked on decades earlier. 52. Slavoj Žižek, “Does the Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?,” Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992, 2001), 4. 53. The others are urban life, industrialisation and domesticity and the family. 54. If one of the many stakes of the genre is the central comic performer’s abject relation to social norms, it also indicates why the creativity or the performative license of the comedian comic seems to be available almost exclusively to men. Nicole Matthews, author of Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy after the New Right, notes that the unruly woman is much more acceptable on television. But it is arguable that even here the female comic performer does not have the “freedom” of her male counterparts in the cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 55. Frank Krutnik, “Jerry Lewis: The Deformation of the Comic,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1994): 14. 56. Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 192. 57. Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion,” 193. 58. Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion,” 190. 59. Krutnik, “Jerry Lewis,” 14. 60. Krutnik, “Jerry Lewis,” 14. 61. They also see it as the reason why the films, not to mention Lewis himself, were tolerated less well by audiences. 62. On the tendentious joke, see Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976), l32–67. 63. An example of this kind of comedy in cinema is seen in Groucho’s jokes to and about Margaret Dumont’s character in the Marx brothers’ films. See Patricia Mellencamp, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Marx Brothers,” in Cinema and Language, ed. Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983). 64. Freud, Jokes, 142–44. 65. Freud, Jokes, 190. See also Samuel Weber, “The Shaggy Dog,” in The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 113–14. 66. The woman saves the day in Sherlock Jr. and enters into a partnership with the Keaton character in The Navigator although both are cast to some extent as children lost at sea; in The General she strives to help Johnnie (the Keaton character) in his efforts to escape his enemies and warn his allies of an impending invasion but becomes the butt of many jokes that simply repeat his previous humiliations on the journey north. 67. Chaplin’s films do not include this provision. 68. In The General, the bridge that catches fire and prevents the Northern Army crossing the river; in The Navigator the submarine that comes to the rescue of the

164

Chapter 7

drowning couple. Lloyd’s Safety Last! is an interesting case because he has to perform the feat he had lined up for someone else. 69. Freud, Jokes, 256, 260, 288, 292. 70. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 113. 71. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 113. 72. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 113. 73. Jean-Pierre Coursodon, “Jerry Lewis Films: No Laughing Matter,” Film Comment 11, no. 4 (1975): 9. See also Coursodon, “Jerry Lewis,” in Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage, American Directors, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1983). 74. Coursodon, “Jerry Lewis Films,”13. 75. Coursodon, “Jerry Lewis Films,” 10. Coursodon’s and Krutnik’s analyses of Lewis’s deformed gags doubtless go some way to explaining the predominantly negative reception of Lewis’s work in the United States, particularly of the Lewis-Lewis films made after his break with Dean Martin and Frank Tashlin, a reception that is nowhere more evident than in Andrew Sarris’s emphatic exclusion of him from his pantheon of American auteurs. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions: 1929–1968 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 243. By contrast, and notwithstanding the vacillating Coursodon, the French understood Lewis’s work as generically reflexive. In 1967 Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “Jerry Lewis [is] the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn’t falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. . . . Lewis is the only one today who’s making courageous films.” Cited by Krutnik, “Jerry Lewis,” 12. Indeed, Cahiers du cinéma’s initial interest in Lewis’s personal vision shifted as the ethos of Cahiers itself changed toward a more systematic analysis of the films for their social and political critique. From this point, Cahiers thus took up Lewis’s films in relation to issues about narrative, psychoanalysis and ideology, seeing Lewis as “a consummate social critic of American materialism and male sexuality” (Michael Selig, “The Nutty Professor: A ‘Problem’ with Film Scholarship,” The Velvet Light Trap 26 (1990): 43. Lewis himself was quick to don the modernist cloak, calling himself a total filmmaker, producing what he defined as truly single-authored work: “[W]hen you make a film yourself, write it, produce it, direct it, perhaps star in it; a piece of your heart enters the emulsion. It stays there the rest of your life, good film or bad. . . . [A]s a total film-maker, I’m convinced that there is a greater chance of inconsistency when the four separate minds of writer, producer, director and actor collaborate.” Jerry Lewis, The Total Film-Maker (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973), 32–33. Cited in Krutnik, “Jerry Lewis,” 12. More recently the French view of Lewis has become more acceptable to American critics. Dana Polan for example follows one of the views taken of Lewis by Coursodon as an exemplary modernist to argue that the significance of Lewis’s films lies in their reflexivity and their determination to break with the structures of classical Hollywood narrative (Dana Polan, “Being and Nuttiness: Jerry Lewis and the French,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 12, no. 1 (1984): 42–46. Coursdon himself claims that “his aggressively personal” style, his

Living in the Doll House

165

strategies of dedramatisation and elliptical narration on the one hand and techniques of de(con)struction on the other put him in better company with Bresson and Godard than Chaplin or Keaton (Coursodon, “Jerry Lewis’s Films,” 9). Such readings of Lewis’s work have also attracted disagreement from hardline exponents of comedian comedy who argue that what are here touted as modernist techniques are in fact features that derive from conditions internal to the medium/genre of comedian comedy. Thus Michael Selig writes that Lewis is only the latest in a long line of subversives in the genre of comedian comedy (“The Nutty Professor” 42–56). 76. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 153. 77. Jacques Lacan, “Tuché and Automaton,” The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), 53.

Chapter 8

Trouble in Paradise? Impotence and Comedy Lisabeth During

PROBLEMS FOR THE PHALLUS It is a question I am tempted to ask the men I know. Is sexual failure funny? Maybe the movies can help. Our best case of impotence humour is Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), a film often at the top of the lists of the funniest movies ever made. Joe (played by Tony Curtis), a penniless womaniser and saxophonist obliged for various reasons to cross-dress as Josephine, finds himself in an unusual position. If he is to seduce the irresistible Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), a singer with a history of disastrous affairs especially with saxophonists, he must feign impotence. And he must also fake a persona that will disarm Sugar, that of a bespectacled, diffident, sexually uncertain millionaire named Junior who is the heir to the Shell Oil fortune. Much as he is grateful for her interest, Junior says, he is unable to perform; neurosis has “inhibited his male potency,”1 as Sigmund Freud helpfully puts it: If the practicing psycho-analyst asks himself on account of what disorder people most often come to him for help, he is bound to reply—disregarding the many forms of anxiety—that it is psychical impotence. This singular disturbance affects men of strongly libidinous natures, and manifests itself in a refusal by the executive organs of sexuality to carry out the sexual act.

167

168

Chapter 8

Junior has taken advantage of the help offered by the Viennese psychoanalyst. But his “executive organs” are still reluctant to do the job, as he explains to Sugar: SUGAR: You should see a doctor—a good doctor. JOE: I have. I spent six months in Vienna with Professor Freud, flat on my back. Then, there were the Mayo Brothers, injections, hypnosis, mineral baths. If I weren’t such a coward, I’d kill myself. SUGAR: Don’t say that! (She rushes over to him.) There must be some girl some place that could . . . JOE: If I ever found the girl that could, I’d marry her just like that. SUGAR: Would you do me a favor? JOE: Certainly, what is it? SUGAR: I may not be Dr. Freud or a Mayo brother, or one of those French upstairs girls, but could I take another crack at it? JOE: All right, if you insist. (PAUSE) SUGAR: Anything this time? JOE: I’m afraid not. Terribly sorry.

The treatment Sugar proposes is, as it turns out, effective. Whatever other obstacles lie in the path of this couple, impotence won’t be one of them. Sexual failure, that “singular disturbance,” as Freud delicately puts it, can be a laughing matter, if it’s not yours. In other cases, the situation is not so amusing. When it is serious, it deserves the ingenuity of the physician or the witchdoctor, the Freudian or the Mayo brother or, in a pinch, the procurer. Ancient medical experts advised that overindulgence in sex caused male debility. “Newlywed husbands and lechers” were particularly prone to this embarrassing loss of potency. While not always guilty of unrestrained lust, the elderly suffered the most, and cures (aphrodisiacs, stimulating beverages and herbs, pornographic pictures, young women and boys) were prescribed.2 But sexual success is an elusive goal. Desire is no guarantee, as the Roman poet Ovid insists when he excuses the hiccups in his own performance on the ground of too eager an enthusiasm, and 1,600 years later the Earl of Rochester agreed: But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive, To show my wished obedience vainly strive.

Trouble in Paradise?

169

Eager desires confound my first intent, Succeeding shame does more success prevent, And rage at last confirms me impotent.3 History offers a variety of perspectives on the question of sexual failure. Comic poets were as ready as the sex therapists and the cranks to profit from the opportunities offered by the unfortunate. So were the young men assumed by conventional wisdom to be looking for a chance to steal the power and privilege of their older rivals. You might not have position or property yet women will forgive you if you are good in bed, and, in some cases (as imagined by Machiavelli in La Mandragola) elderly husbands make their cuckolding almost an obligation. Comedy and the cuckold are well matched. But the comic does not have a monopoly on sexual failure. Philosophers from antiquity to early modern Europe have also weighed in, advising the cultivation of a life secured as much as possible from insecurity. Manliness, it seems, is a vulnerable condition. The sage will minimise that vulnerability. If you follow the example of the wise and the moderate you won’t be caught in situations that expose you to ridicule: “It shows a lack of refinement,” Epictetus said, “to spend a lot of time exercising, eating, drinking, defecating or copulating.”4 The less you indulge, the less your carnal and sensual nature has the opportunity to dominate you; you should concentrate always on what you can control, and cultivate indifference to the things you cannot. It may be that the performance of your penis is one of those. When the desire is there but the powers are wanting, the human condition comes out from under its wrappings. It is not a pretty sight. Ambition and futility are tied together in the same moment, mind and body ignoring each other’s entreaties. For the sage at his most morose or stoical, the unreliable penis is a reminder of the unreliability of all things mortal. For the sage’s Christian descendent, Augustine of Hippo, it is a proof of the scandalous fallibility of the flesh, tainted as it has been since Adam’s Fall. Augustine is famous for his discovery of concupiscence. (He did not have far to look.) In the City of God, Augustine studied the problem of sexual arousal with great care. Fleshly desire is always importunate, often tyrannical. Impotence is the sign of the waywardness of the penis, as is the erection, which happens when it wants, not when you want. With its whims and its urgencies, the libido makes the Bishop, now converted to continence, suspect it of malice, if not a diabolical inspiration. But the truth that it makes obvious is, in fact, a psychological and commonplace one. The will does not rule; the mind is a poor master:

170

Chapter 8

In fact, not even the lovers of this kind of pleasure are moved, either to conjugal intercourse or to the impure indulgences of vice, just when they have so willed. At times, the urge intrudes uninvited; at other times, it deserts the panting lover, and, although desire blazes in the mind, the body is frigid. In this strange way, desire refuses service, not only to the will to procreate, but also to the desire for wantonness; and though for the most part, it solidly opposes the mind’s command, at other times it is divided against itself, and, having aroused the mind, it fails to arouse the body.5

God fashioned our bodies for our benefit and enjoyment, and, in a well-ordered world, we should be grateful for everything about them. But this is not a wellordered world. The serpent’s temptation has ensured that everything since is out of joint. Clearest proof of this rift between “would” and “do not” is the perversity of the will, lamented by Paul in his Letter to the Romans: For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I practice.6

As is the performance of the will, capricious and ineffectual, so is the libido. We may have the “strong psychical inclination to carry out the act,” as Freud says in “The Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), but the performance flops. The penis marks this defeat. It is, thinks Augustine, the representative in the male flesh of that long-ago swerve, when Adam and Eve first realised that their freedom to move was freedom to ruin themselves. Called into active practice, the disobedient rebel refuses “to serve.” Equally insubordinate to the will to beget as to the lust for lascivious indulgence, it is even disloyal to itself. Such is the penalty, visited on all, of that first careless disobedience in the Garden of Eden, where there would have been procreation without lust, love without unruly passion: “The sexual organs would have been brought into activity by the same bidding of the will as controlled the other organs.”7 But once the libido recognised that it could rebel against the will and rampage free of the deliberation of reason, it began to act like a usurper, tyrannising the self who should have been its master and making the genitals its “private property.”8 Augustine is not casual in his use of political language. The disorder of lust, including the added shame of sexual failure, is a crime against rightful sovereignty, leading to a state of anarchy and confusion. If we cannot lay down the law to our bodily members, how can we presume to act effectively in a social world where power is admired and competition keen? Men must have credit and be seen to have credit. To lack virility could be just the beginning of any number of lacks—moral, physical, financial, not to speak of the disorder introduced into the household when an opportunistic lover makes a laughingstock of

Trouble in Paradise?

171

the cuckold. What is true in the economy of goods and capital is true in an economy of desires and possession. All it takes (or used to take) to drive a reputation into the ground is just one instance where your cheque bounced: from that moment on, the doors of your club are closed to you; the title of “honourable” is removed from your name. It takes just as little to turn the hero into the eunuch, the man of means into the cuckold. Or the sexual athlete into the butt of the joke. THE UNHAPPY PERFORMATIVE: DEMANDING POTENCY To enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of masculinity, sexual prowess must be something you can prove. Yet, as Augustine ruefully remarked, the demonstration so keenly desired depends neither on will nor intentions: the penis has a mind of its own. And this weakness of the flesh further complicates the divine command to “be fruitful and multiply”: medieval Christians were told they had a duty to procreate, as only through their determined production of offspring could the loss of souls caused by the fall of the angels be “repaired.” To fill Paradise, some argued, Christians needed to beget Christians.9 As St. Paul advised in I Corinthians 7, “Let the husband render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to her husband.” Of course, if you had the gift of chastity, you could be lucky enough to propagate in the spirit rather than carnally. But for the run-of-the-mill believer, marital intercourse was prescribed, and for Christians (unlike the Jews) even the marriage of the sterile was accepted as a good thing. Given your willingness to procreate and your ability to engage in coitus, the failure to achieve the goal of offspring did not invalidate the marriage, and most theologians held that the aged could marry with dignity. The handicap of impotence, on the other hand, meant that dignity was tossed to the winds. In the European towns of the Middle Ages it was hard to keep your sexual problems to yourself. Public eyes could peer very closely into this question of sexual incapacity, for “frigidity,” both male and female, and impotence disqualified the sufferer from contracting a marriage or, if the marriage had been performed with this antecedent knowledge, made the marriage null and void. (In this Christians differed from their Roman predecessors: in Rome the impotent could marry but not the castrated.10) St. Thomas Aquinas explained this in Pauline terms. Marriage, he taught, was a contract to pay a debt. The debt was intercourse. The impotent could not pay the debt and so were unfit for marriage.11 Canon law allowed very few reasons to end a marriage. But inability to consummate, as he explained, made the marriage not a marriage. Aquinas is always admirably clear. Shortly before turning to closely related

172

Chapter 8

questions such as “whether madness is an impediment to marriage?” and the larger question of wife-murder,12 Aquinas concludes that a frigid person, being incapable of carnal copulation, cannot marry. If a married couple has honestly tried and failed to perform coition, the marriage should be dissolved. The same disqualification applies if the impotence is caused by witchcraft. Aquinas completes the discussion by considering that, if a man feels aroused enough to perform the act with one woman who stirs his imagination but flops hopelessly with another, it can often be an interfering devil or sorcerer who is at fault, an excuse that a number of Christian men might have found useful.13 Even the occasional saint could be brought into the picture. The Venetian Saint Orsola would apparently answer the prayers of anxious women concerned about their men’s straying by rendering the unfaithful impotent with others.14 Whether the result of magic, bad luck, or a defective imagination, the predicament brought serious consequences to the men and women involved, particularly in an age that allowed so few grounds for dissolving a marriage. To rule on allegations of sexual impotence, canonical courts were convened; witnesses were brought in. Experienced women could be asked in front of the court to do all they could to produce arousal in the men accused.15 Everyone could contribute, from local midwives and doctors and busybodies to cardinals and papal legatees; but evidence of erection, indeed of ejaculation as well, had to be sufficient to satisfy the skeptical. Even if reputations could be preserved and the humiliating public tests survived, those suspected of impotence were not rid of their problems. Outside the purview of the church and the law, multiple traps remained to catch those whom Samuel Pepys (and others) described as the “fumblers” of early modern Europe—other popular English insults for the nonperforming male were alkin, pillock, fribble, bungler, bobtail, domine-do-little, drone, cocksparrow and “John Cannot.”16 High and low, at every level of society all agreed that those caught out in a mortifying position were hilarious. Male potency was a serious business; all the more biting the tales of deficiency, the whispers of bedroom fiascos, the reports of wives still virginal after years of marriage and cradles empty in households expecting heirs. Testing masculinity is a game few will win. The more bravado, the more room for shame. Rumour will expose the pretender under the rake’s slick costume. COMEDY LOVES IMPOTENCE And so will farce. From the Old Comedy of Aristophanes to the worldly satire of Billy Wilder, human pretensions provided no shortage of material. Sexual or social prowess, if you are lucky enough to enjoy these, are sure to inspire

Trouble in Paradise?

173

others with the wish to make those enjoyments seem hollow and undeserved. And that wish burrows deep into the soul of comedy, blessed as it is with a taste for some of the attitudes moralists prefer us to avoid—spite, cynicism and meanness. Without their help satire would not have a chance. Yet even in the less satirical forms of humour, the delight in saying and doing things that good society frowns upon is one of the treats the joker offers. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1906), Freud discovers the value of mischief. Life is uncertain. Virtuous renunciation is unrewarding. The joker whispers: Why not rebel? Who says you have to be altruistic, compassionate, prudent? “The wishes and desires of men have a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality.”17 Civilisation has made itself adept at controlling those “wishes and desires” by reminding us of painful facts and by enlisting the internal agency of the superego to extend the sovereignty of repression. “Why be happy when you could be normal?” as Jeanette Winterson’s mother told her. Somewhere back in our infantile psychic economies, as Freud speculates, there could have been room for happiness. With its genius for simplicity, the Freudian pleasure principle aims at release. It is committed to diminishing painful psychical “expenditure” (like the expenditure on inhibition, a demanding and unsleeping taskmaster).18 Laughter takes the path offered by the pleasure principle, detouring around the censorship. Laughter’s outburst—whether tittering or convulsive—lets free a libidinal energy that otherwise would be bound, unavailable because it is required to serve the fatiguing discipline of self-control. In finding things funny, and in laughing at them, we escape. The “primary process” is generous enough to allow moments of pleasure and ease, relaxation and satisfaction. Yet even if we accept Freud’s image of a self-correcting psychic system, this still leaves unsolved the problem of humour’s decided preference for the ugly, the ridiculous, the bitter and the dark. If Aristotle was right to share the comic with the ugly, with the gross and disagreeable experiences otherwise excluded from aesthetic appreciation, we need a theory that is more encompassing. How do we find a place for failure among the things we enjoy? How make a comic muse out of impotence? The human mind—willing ally of its own misery—has often been quick to take aim at itself. Who isn’t melancholic? The philosopher Simon Critchley wonders if anyone (who still has a brain) is free from self-laceration or exempt from that sickness of ego inflation, “the malady of the ideal.”19 We conspire in our own shaming and impotence, half believing that the extent of our failure proves we had the ingredients of something great, something out of the ordinary. As if death, disease and deprivation weren’t enough: the distressing and unpleasurable affects that are a regular feature of mortal life are multiplied by the ingenious and artificial “unpleasures” developed under

174

Chapter 8

the conditions of social coexistence, unpleasures such as stigmatisation, ostracism, inhibition, social humiliation and the Freudian favourite, fear of castration. And some of these brutal attacks—the best of them, in fact—are performed by the self-critical modern subject (shall we say the modern Jewish subject?) whose flair for denigration flourishes in an atmosphere where direct aggression towards social rivals is precluded. Does laughter offer any way out? Can humour be an antidepressant? Probably the oldest of theories of humour (as deftly tracked by Critchley) is the superiority theory, accepted by (among others) Thomas Hobbes: “Sudden Glory, is the passion that maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.”20 The discovery that pleasure can be derived from the infirmities of others has encouraged other theorists of the comic to perceive “degradation” as a key to comic aesthetics, a view considered in relation to 1920s cinematic comedy by Lisa Trahair.21 The connection, however, is older. The pleasures of degradation—normally that of others, but in important cases one’s own—are well known to satire and to that other provider of infirmity humour, the grotesque. It is hard to imagine the aesthetics of the grotesque without what a critic has called “the gross materiality of the flesh”:22 the physical body, when it falls short of perfect health and proportion (and when doesn’t it?), provokes strong reactions. Is it deformed? Is it filthy? Does it bulge and leak and smell? We could expect pity and active concern to be appropriate responses to bodies perceived as diseased, disfigured, or needy. But the average human ways of dealing with somatic failure or abnormality are much less compassionate: indeed embarassed laughter is only the beginning of a pattern of avoidance, in which the reaction of disgust is probably the most familiar. And that is true even when the “disabilities” in question are no more than those inherent in the female, generative body. According to the superiority theory of humour, in a laughable situation we enjoy the discomfiture of another: someone who is like ourselves and just temporarily stuck in the path of a minor disaster, as for instance, sexual shipwreck or an inopportune attack of hiccups. Yet the term “degradation” also implies the low moral standing of the laugh worthy. We may, as Trahair notes, feel superior to “unsympathetic,” crass, or rude comic characters, yet we also are allowed to identify with their “antisocial behavior.”23 Henri Bergson is the thinker who has done the most to articulate the contradictory relationships between the social and the antisocial. His study, Le rire, first published in 1900, is at once a major advance in the philosophical engagement with comedy and a puzzling anachronism. In the early years of high modernism, Bergson toyed with what at least one critic has called a “regressive” view of the social function of laughter, reminiscent of the early modern principle

Trouble in Paradise?

175

that the community binds itself together by chastising the ridiculous.24 Social life fluctuates, sometimes being more easygoing and accommodating, at other times insisting on precedent and custom. Yet if it manages to avoid the worst of its possible offenses against personal liberty, it does so by allowing individuals a comfortable margin of elasticity. Society as an institution cannot afford that those inscribed in the social community fall too far into what Bergson describes as a state of “relaxation,” for otherwise they are no better than the dreamers lost in their dreams. Yet it cannot require too much tension of them, or it will risk encouraging the negative response that is individual “rigidity” and self-contained singularity. And so society laughs, collectively. It offers us the chance to laugh at the faults or follies of others. That is fun not just for the sneaking pleasures of “superiority” as Hobbes thought, but because breaking out in laughter gives us an explosive and physiologically regenerative pleasure (a little epileptic, as the ancients said, but they also said that about orgasm); it serves society’s moral purposes because “[l]aughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed, By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it.”25 Why do this? Why must those who voluntarily or inadvertently back away from social conventions be subjected to this display of malice, entertaining as it might be? A more convinced Nietzschean would compliment us on our cheerful callousness: “Laughter,” as Bergson goes on to say in this section of his essay, is never absolutely “just” or “kind-hearted” or reflective. It hits some aptly; others by mistake; knocking out “excess” where there is some but also where there is none, or where the effects of such excess are entirely “innocent.”26 Comedy’s moral ambivalence is a problem Bergson acknowledges. Social life likes folly and it dislikes folly; it is amused by the misfit and it drives him down. Although it needs its rules, it is never sure how or where to draw its moral fences. Responding to this ambiguity, the comic finds pleasure in failure and sadness in success. Hence it can, as I want to argue, make a virtue out of impotence, and a hero out of the dysfunctional. Corrosive humour can, as Nietzsche insisted, be festive. It tosses the absurd in our faces not to crush but to invigorate us. We could say as much for other aesthetic forms, even for tragedy. But there is something special about the darker kind of humour, as (for instance) satire. The muse of satire is sharp-eyed. Mordant and mischievous, it is meant to hurt and, as Bergson repeats, to educate, to “correct.” But it also manages to permit the expression of emotions and thoughts that “proper” social life ignores. Given the right frame of mind, we can go further in celebration of the socially inept, even (through a reading of some choice film comedies and a choice comic novel) turning a reluctant tolerance into a full-blown license. Folly is never just a mistake. Human silliness can cover the whole gamut from trivial glitches in

176

Chapter 8

the established codes of ethics, conduct and protocol, to grander transgressions of social normalcy like heresy or mania. All of these are what I will call the desirable aberrations, the detours and wrong turnings in the running of the everyday that include adultery, sexual misfortune, incompetence and irresistible absent-mindedness: a mismatched crew that, nonetheless, are all essential to the pleasures of comedy. All, to push the point further, are antisocial, but not all are viciously so. They may even, by accident or by the unpredictable actions of a careless Providence—make the world a more pleasant place. To defend the virtuously antisocial—the erratic, the innocent and the beguilingly inattentive—is my purpose, and one that should no longer be delayed. COMIC CHARACTERS AND HUMAN LIMITATIONS: THE CASE FOR SHANDYISM Bergson finds something laughable in the behavior of the antisocial, that is, the eccentrics and oddities who wander through “normal” society but always seem as if they are responding to different signals.27 They are awkward where they should be smooth, repetitious and self-willed when they should be fluid and flexible, whimsical and obstinate when they should be sensible. It is as if they move in a dream of their own, he thinks, under the control of an “automatism.” Are they closer to nature or to art? To an elite or to a class of the benighted, the hopeless and the absurd, which any company would be better without? There is grandeur as well as pathos in those Bergson identifies as “comic characters.” He has in mind Molière’s obsessive personages— Alceste, for instance—and giants of the comic tradition like Don Quixote and Falstaff;28 I would add the quirky inhabitants of Lawrence Sterne’s Shandy Hall: Tristram, Uncle Toby, Walter and Yorick; it would not be a stretch to add Buster Keaton or Beckett’s Molloy, Malone and Watt. That we are given the opportunity to laugh at the Don or Alceste or Tristram and the Shandys is, in a way, a sign of our own pettiness: laughter reveals “even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at all events, of mischief.”29 It is proof (for Bergson) that we the laughers (“assertive and conceited”) are more firmly entrenched in that cold and “stony surface,” the crust (pellicule solide et froide) that is society.30 We laugh because we belong and they don’t; because we have escaped the zaniness of the truly comic character. We laugh because we are somewhere else than that “inverted world” where they live. We are the successful egoists; they the children that haven’t figured out how to unwrap this complicated package that is social life and success. But are we better off? Do they deserve our patronising smiles? The well-adjusted and average social being might well envy the liberties taken by the eccentric, the absent-minded, the finely tuned oddity, the impertinent, the

Trouble in Paradise?

177

silly. Those liberties include the chance to fly the flag of one’s own pet obsessions, to ride the proverbial “hobbyhorse” for all it’s worth, to tilt with Don Quixote at windmills and build kit houses with Buster Keaton, or to apply ourselves to the creation of our own imaginary, unreal worlds, as does Uncle Toby, recreating the siege of Namur in which he received his life-changing wound in the groin. There is a nobility in weakness, an art of impotence. But to enjoy these you need to be tolerant of ridicule. Or perhaps (as is the case with some of my heroes) to be oblivious to it. And that is a special kind of strength. In modern times, impotence comedy has a hero and a family of heroes, introduced in Lawrence Sterne’s eccentric novel of 1759, Tristram Shandy. Tristram himself is a whimsical explorer of his own “Life and Opinions.” He comes from a family of men who are, at the very least, bashful in the presence of women, if not downright allergic. A novel full of asterisks hiding, for modesty’s sake, any number of lewd or unmentionable words and phrases, it is also a novel that mentions on almost every page impotence, castration and premature ejaculation: if some words cannot be spoken, then probably no word is innocent. Tristram is a creature awry from the moment of his (botched) conception. Yet, rather than pity him, a recent critic proposes that we should hail him as “our best consolation against the melancholy born of powerlessness.” Tristram’s incapacities are benign; indeed they are liberating. He represents a model of maleness unknown to the ancients and incomprehensible to the warrior, the libertine, or the priest. He will never be a husband, a father, or a responsible citizen. He follows his own humour up every blind alley it can discover, and his only sustaining relationship is the one he has with his various “hobbyhorses,” useless and obsessive attachments to projects and pursuits that allow grown men to continue the unproductive life of the child. Just as his narrative line refuses to conform to any control, his magpie intellect refuses to acknowledge the presence of any authoritative principle or pattern. Neither Law nor God, neither science nor morality, can exercise a hold over a spirit so wayward, so intentionally inconsequential. And his mind reflects his body. Physically, Tristram is dysfunctional: his nose was crushed at its birth by an inept doctor, delivering him to a lifetime of phallic jokes, his legs are too long, his lungs too weak. Not only was his cerebellum also damaged during his forceps delivery, but a mere five years later, while pissing out an upstairs window for want of a chamber pot, Tristram was circumcised by the fall of a window sash. (As he remarks, “Nothing was well hung in my family.”) Tristram’s imagination is shambolic and irrepressible; his ability to plan or to keep to a linear narration nonexistent; his erotic adventures doomed to mishap. Yet in his engaging histories of disability and distraction, a sexual imagination reigns that is bawdy, suggestive, ironic and absurd.31

178

Chapter 8

Tristram’s message is a boon to those inclined to reject the dominance of the phallic economy and look for a new economy—a circuitous path towards joyful expenditure—in the comedy of impotence. That message is the one I want to support. In the spirit of Shandyism, it is OK to embrace interruption. Celebrate the digression and the hiccup. Find on the far side of virility a utopia inhabited by the child, the goof and the player, a dreamtime where no one needs to be afraid of failure because they have made failure their comfort zone. This utopic space would not exactly be empty of the libidinous. But it would offer its inhabitants something rather different than that grownup sexuality for which we are supposed to exchange our masturbatory fantasies and inopportune giggles. The trouble with grownup sexuality is that it is always so exhaustingly effectual and purposeful. You must do it right: you must be energetic, exciting, adventurous; you must have pleasure, and demonstrate your successful comsummation as loudly as possible.32 In the tradition Sterne belongs to, the sexuality of achievement (and male self-importance) is exchanged for a sexuality far more whimsical and satirical. Sterne left literature the image of a household of chattering, indecisive men unable to carry through the most basic demands of their gender. All too aware of their sexual incapacities, they flee for compensation into language and imaginative reinvention. Out of the ruins of the traditional masculine ego is born this new genre: the impotence comedy, a cultural form only rarely acknowledged, but necessary to our alternative imagining of comedy. Where other comedies rely on aggression or incongruity or, at best, a delight in the curious liabilities of the human body and mind, the impotence comedy pursues tolerance, and gets it. (Whether on those on the receiving end of male impotence are equally tolerant is another story. Maybe they don’t get the joke.) Tolerant sexuality—eros rediscovered as more whimsical than obsessive—is what I propose as the special domain of the flippant film comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, where the child’s addiction to the pleasure principle is both redeemed and ransomed from the threat of castration. In Lubitsch’s early Berlin silent features such as as I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918), The Oyster Princess (1919) and The Doll (1919), the zany Ossi Oswalda races through a series of farcical plots with the greatest good temper in the world: she can be a teenager escaping in drag to the city’s louche nightlife where she can indulge the fantasies of her drunken, stuffy guardian; she can be a mechanical toy who will disarm the sexual phobias of the young heir hiding out among gluttonous, misogynistic monks; and she can be the sort of American Lubitsch liked to imagine, impulsive, outrageous and totally immune to social niceties. Inhibition, one would have thought, has no place here. Neither, we have to admit, has adult reality. Because nothing is forbidden, nothing counts. The male who tries to avoid the tests of maturity in the monastery has a chance to avoid them in this artificial playroom. Someone in the wings is winking, and

Trouble in Paradise?

179

the grownups in the audience can get the libidinous jokes, but for the anxious hero the hour of decision is deferred (and with it the possibility of failure). Between Sterne and Lubitsch lies an unexplored terrain of erotic uncertainty. This erotic uncertainty is the true home of the distracted modern hero, often a male suffering from the impossible burdens of masculinity. Generally middle-class in origin, and often higher, he trusts his mind and is more doubtful about his body. Strategically deaf to the opinions and judgments of others, especially female others, he is inordinately aware of his own self-judgments. And despite an enviable education, his practical skills are minimal, as are his powers to anticipate consequences. His shadows turn up everywhere in twentieth-century literature, from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger to Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus or Moravia’s Agostino. Awkward in some situations, arrogant in others, he is known for his difficulties in getting the carnal and the intellectual into the same package, and he would be at home on Freud’s couch. As much of a modernist cliché as he sounds, the sexually confused male of this type did not have to wait for World War I to find a slot for himself. At once callow and sophisticated, sex obsessed and obtuse in the face of the most obvious of sexual invitations, the heir of the Shandys seems very far removed from the dashing figures played by Herbert Marshall, Maurice Chevalier and Adolph Menjou in the ironic sex comedies of Lubitsch. But the continuity, I believe, is there. In Sterne’s satire of hapless patriarchy and sexual failure, the Shandy family is an eighteenth-century canary in the mine. In its future are generations of masculine sexual dread and heroes who are unconsciously bawdy when they are not being modest, who are preoccupied with a genital fatality they only begin to suspect. The descendants of Tristram may still pay lip service to the code of aggressive male sexuality, but they have come to understand it as a mug’s game. The Don Juan always has to work too hard to fulfil someone else’s fantasies. Womanising (but this is a secret he has to keep to himself) is hard work; it is not the frolics of shepherds and milkmaids. In the modern world too much is stacked against the light-hearted skirtchaser: mastery of money, status and the intimidation of others—all these things siphon precious energy away from the free expression of desire. Ernst Lubitsch is the champion of the modern refusal of the “spirit of gravity” (to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase) as Sterne was before him. Sincere in his sympathy for the men—and women—who could toss aside the stifling curtains of “good behaviour,” Lubitsch shows great affection for those who know how to share pleasure without pain, for the charming con artist and the perpetual child. Making artifice and make-believe a safe place to be is one of the conditions for sophisticated comedy, from the Restoration to classic Hollywood. Lubitsch’s laughter is not at the expense of the klutz and the misfit who we all fear we are. His laughter is the glee of getting away with it, the prospect of freedom when you

180

Chapter 8

have been cooped up too long. It means that, for him, sexual mischief does not require that the weak be manipulated by the strong, women by men, nor the gullible by the exploitative. Here Lubitsch agrees with Kierkegaard: the insouciance of the Don Juan is one of the ways human freedom has been, can be, imagined. Comic and seductive lawlessness, if this is right, remains for all of us, whatever our sexuality, a hint or memory trace of life outside repression, play without sacrifice, energy without castration. Is it possible? In a number of films Lubitsch made after his move to Hollywood (1924–1948)—The Marriage Circle, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Angel, That Uncertain Feeling—he explored the various possibilities of utopia within adultery, and his conclusions became more pessimistic. You can’t bring this energy into the domestic sphere, the settled space of marriage, without a loss and a certain amount of suffering. For a time Lubitsch tried to make light comedy burnish the reputation of the inexhaustible womaniser. With actors like Adolph Menjou (The Marriage Circle) or Maurice Chevalier (The Smiling Lieutenant, The Merry Widow), he made a hero of the charmer and the cad, he who escapes the anger of the law by succeeding with a different kind of authority, the authority of the bedroom (the favour of women). But the task proved too much. Or women wanted too much. (They still do.) In the first part of the twentieth century, there was a popular theory going round that history had taken us from worry to worry, especially where sex is concerned. The history of the “civilised” started with shame and self-consciousness. Later we learned to internalise our feelings of inadequacy into guilt, a more “grown up” kind of moral accusation. Honour societies, it was said, suffered from worries about shame. As societies developed different habits of evaluation, they continued to have doubts about their sexual morals. Those persuaded by the language of duty and judgment worried about the burden of responsibility and the ultimate fate of the soul; accustomed to self-scrutiny, anxious moralists longed for help from theorists such as Reich, happy to teach us that our political health might depend on overcoming our sexual scruples. But comedy always had ways to get around things. Comedy, I would suggest, offers a way out of the war morality wages against our happiness (a war Nietzsche and Freud documented with care). If we can turn humiliation into pleasure, we have less to fear, and less to brood about. I started with the puzzle about whether sexual failure can be funny. Sterne’s play with the comedy of impotence tells us it can, and in a few minor moments of a long comic career, Ernst Lubitsch agrees. Making humour out of humiliation is the revenge art plays on the law, and the tool used by the spirit of frivolity to lay to rest the spirit of gravity. Lubitsch, our twentieth-century Sterne, is an ironist and a sentimentalist. Educated in a rough and tumble tradition of Jewish humour from well east of

Trouble in Paradise?

181

the Rhine, a great fan of burlesque stereotypes, Lubitsch perfected in his filmmaking a light-hearted examination of the follies and exhilarations of adulterous sexuality. In the worldly and romantic place you could call Lubitschland, there is no marriage that can’t be improved by a hint of infidelity, no superiority of manners that can’t be mocked, no ambition that can’t be made to look absurd. Innocence, however charming, hasn’t much to offer: an understanding of the social forms and how to manipulate them is much more useful. In Lubitschland perceptions are always clouded by desire and bias; longing for the truth is a weakness the knowledgeable have learned to renounce; if you have suspicions, they are likely to be confirmed. Far better to remain on the surface, playing with looks and appearances, impressions and facades.33 In 1932’s Trouble in Paradise, the elegant seducer may be a fraud and a dissembler (the dapper Herbert Marshall playing the jewel thief Gaston), but he delivers more happiness than the strict soldier of virtue or the anxiously devoted wife. The social codes are defended by pompous aristocrats and millionaires, lacking in self-awareness or even courtesy; their unexamined certainty of entitlement barely hides their sadism. In the “real” social world, the world outside the movies, our interactions are always being judged, our fitness for our roles as employer, spouse, parent and apprentice always open to criticism. But in comedy the artful “fraud”—the masked intruder into the house of social privilege and power—is far more lovable. Trouble in Paradise’s Lily (the devious Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston are crooks and heartbreakers, liars and seducers, but they bring the sparkle of the aphrodisiac to everything they look at (and steal). That, Lubitsch is saying, is the way desire plays with us. There is little point in arguing for what “ought to be” the case, for examining motives and proving truth. What comedy asks is that you give in, suspend judgment, stop wishing it could be otherwise. There will always be another chance, another window to slip out of, another encounter to turn in your favour. Comedy never gets tired of the slippery, even when it gets repetitious. For that is part of the point. No one encounter is the one that matters; no passion is really “the” passion; no assignation the one where you really get to triumph. While a Bergsonian feeling for the erotic effects of the comic machine contributes to the fun and the style of Lubitsch’s early films like The Doll and The Oyster Princess (both 1919), his sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the 1930s are marked by a rather different spirit— one of amused tolerance of human self-deception. Is this the spirit you need in order to tolerate yet more disappointment (because disappointment is always going to come)?

182

Chapter 8

THE IMPOTENT HERO AND THE HICCUP The penis upright, triumphant, or at least operative, vouches for the viability of the sovereign subject, the male sovereign subject. But flaccid, it sends another message. Caught in an amorous scene that had promised so much, the Roman poet Ovid feels a premonition of death: I lay with her limp as if I loved not, A shameful burden on the bed that moved not. Though both of us were sure of our intent, ‌‌‌‌ could I not cast anchor where I meant. Yet Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, It humbled me, hung down the head, and sunk. ‌‌‌‌And were I ghost or body, who can say? Ovid manages to be both amused and rueful. I am, he observes, known for my successes in the bedroom, and she was more than enough to stimulate any man who was not already dead. But no luck: “Like one dead it lay, / Drooping more than a rose plucked yesterday.”34 A useless weight, the unlucky lover has come to be “an empty shell of a man” in a world where manliness was the ideal, virtually synonymous with virtue (virtus), and virility is a condition of moral excellence.35 Softness, or “delicateness” (mollitia), is what can be expected from women, reflecting not simply the softness of their bodies but also “their love of luxury, the languor of their minds, the ease with which they gave themselves to their emotions, and their dissolute morals.”36 The Greeks agreed: one version of the ideal man was the hoplite, the citizen soldier in armour, the warrior self who is sound in body, disciplined in desires, a winner: his appetites serve him; he never serves them. The negative mirror of manhood was the kinaidos, the soft man, who probably even likes to lose. To be virtuous is to be hard. To have honour is to be trained and fortified in character, and thus to be ready for any competition, physical or mental. And if you cannot even win over your own body, you must be weak indeed. Why even allude to the moments of your defeat? Why make a public and poetic display of your impotence? Ovid, it seems, can handle it. He handles it, I want to suggest, through humour. The comedy of sexual failure can turn a misfortune into a strength, a disaster into a joke. That is, in part, the magic of wit, converting loss into enjoyment and surplus into economy. Bergson shared with Freud the insight that laughter performs a social function: elements otherwise disturbing and rebellious blend into a light but morally corrective “froth.” Thus comedy

Trouble in Paradise?

183

could be said to relieve the victims of civilisation from the intolerable strain of too much thinking—by, in fact, doing their thinking for them.37 Laughter never promises to soothe or mollify us. Sentiments of compassion or kindness do not create the atmosphere in which the comic can flourish. Laughter’s accomplishment is, rather, to humiliate and intimidate, to correct the deviant, the eccentric, the failure. That “corrective,” of course, bears the stamp of unpleasure: it is not fun to be humiliated, to watch your precious illusions wither under a well-aimed sarcasm or your fantasies of sexual prowess evaporate. But the effect is energising: to laugh at yourself is tonic. It is also a shortcut, a way to enlist the agency of judgement—the cruel and exacting super-ego—onto your own side. To master life—to be the winner in the struggles the Greeks and Romans and their heirs acknowledge as constitutive of heroism and merit—requires considerable intellectual effort and tension: Freud would call it “considerable expenditure of thought and feeling.” Humour, Freud concluded in his 1926 paper, can reduce that expenditure, save us from some of that misplaced idealisation, that wasted investment in the “upper” levels of the mind. It might also save us from our excessive investment in erotic success, indeed in phallic efficacy and power. For why shouldn’t failure be amusing and fun? Substituting its own libidinous economy for the harsher economy of effort and merit, judging and striving, humour says there may be a pleasure beyond the phallic. A gentler, less determinate, more anarchic, less sovereign pleasure, mocking where there was the anger of aggression, digressive where there was thrust and rivalry. And if there is such a libidinal economy, as I am suggesting there ought to be, then the comic world of the impotent offers a look into that. Ovid, rueful at his failure to perform, is reminded of the chill of death, the paralysis of the grave, the loneliness of the condemned slipping out of life’s companionship and comfort. It is just him, left there embarassed, in exile from virility. As Rochester will echo: the confronation of man with the flaccid penis can be a dispiriting experience. But why not make a joke of it? Or even a poem? Or a movie? “Many people in early modern Europe,” a cultural history of impotence tells us, “found the subject of impotence inherently funny.”38 Saint Augustine had linked original sin to the insubordinate performances of the male organ, so prone to rise when not invited to or to droop when its energies are in demand. King James I, a great enthusiast for witchcraft and the darker corners of early modern pedantry, was sure that the Devil himself had power, if not over the flesh in general, certainly “over the filthiest and most sinful part thereof, whereunto original sin is soldered.” But if erectile dysfunction is a sign of man’s vulnerability to black magic, it is hardly the subject for a smile. To fail in the matrimonial duty was something a man could not countenance without some humiliation: was he bewitched? Was he paying the

184

Chapter 8

price of excess, the sordid debt incurred by all of Eve and Adam’s children? Witchcraft remained the most popular explanation of “imperfect” male—and female—enjoyment, and one that certainly allowed dangerous women to be blamed for the male mishap. Neither Ovid nor Rochester are, however, churlish enough to hide under that excuse. They are confident enough to take the rap. Corinna, Ovid agrees, will find other, readier men, who will please her the way she has tried so hard to please him; his Corinna, Rochester agrees, deserves “ten thousand abler pricks.” James I was sure the only reason a man could be less than manly was if the Devil was involved. I have never had much time for James I. For some, with more wit, it’s possible to laugh. In one of his last films—and one of the least appreciated—Lubitsch installs sexual dysfunction under the sign of the hiccup. The film is called That Uncertain Feeling (1939) and what feelings are uncertain about is the very possibility that there can be such a thing as a sexual relation (a doubt also famously held by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan). Adulterous triangles, Lubitsch’s beloved subject, play their usual role in the ironic invalidation of that impossible institution, heterosexual marriage. The marriage in this case is an ornament of the Park Avenue elite, who distract themselves from their material and social sterility by looking good. Jill Baker, played by a wooden but beautiful Merle Oberon, has nothing to do but to think about the sexual desert that is her marriage (while all the while not knowing for a moment that it is this she is thinking about). Then she hiccups. Her straightfaced hiccup is the sign, in Lubitsch’s satire of American marriage, that something is broken in her marital bedroom. The marital bed has grown cold from disuse; the young wife, whose social standing doesn’t bring with it the sophistication she needs, cannot understand why her body is rebelling against her. Hiccups are, as her psychoanalyst notes with complacency, her conversion symptom, a hysterical protest against sexual deprivation. She is right to protest. But she hasn’t a clue about how to fix things. The sin against eros in this marriage is depicted in blandly Bergsonian strokes: Mr. Baker (Melvyn Douglas) has succumbed to the modern disease of professional deformation; all he thinks about is his work as a star insurance agent and what he can do to notch up yet more sales; he moves through his day in a strictly automated rhythm, turning his steps just long enough to peck his wife on the cheek, and then tumbling instantly into an impenetrable sleep the minute he hits the bed. “A husband should be a mystery,” Jill complains to her friend. “You should never know what to expect from day to day.” And yet with Larry there can be no surprise. He is as routine as clockwork. The irregularity of desire can find no lacuna through which to enter. There is, in this marriage, an absence of interruption, an obliviousness to the eccentric or the unknown. Yet Jill is fortunate: the virility of her husband is only deferred, not gone. To bring their erotic impasse to a successful conclusion requires not so much the shame

Trouble in Paradise?

185

that Ovid mentions as a dose of absurd competition. Lurching in the direction of the first man who offers himself, an impossibly annoying narcissist named Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith) who is seeking treatment for his stage fright (he is a “genius” pianist whose genius only blossoms in his own company), Jill revives her marriage through Lubitsch’s favourite cure for social malaise and sexual hypocrisy, the reliable tonic of adultery. The monomaniacal Sebastian takes over the management of her life, pushing the self-possession of this Park Avenue socialite to the limit, and eventually even manages to penetrate the self-absorption of the Park Avenue husband, who begins to awaken from his somnolescence, revealing a spontaneity and flexibility the film had initially denied him. Gallant to the end, Jill’s husband Larry agrees to give his wife a divorce, freeing her to choose her annoying lover. Then there is a twist. Called upon to provide a “matrimonial cause,” Larry can’t hit his wife. He is constitutionally unable to provide the “cruelty” that the law requires to award Jill her decree. The performance fails. The husband can play dull, routinised to the point of imbecility, predictable and oblivious (in short, an average American spouse, in Lubitschland); but he cannot perform cruelty, even when thoroughly drunk. At this failure to play the part—Larry cannot produce the bullying masculinity expected of cuckolded husbands—Jill realises what she wants, and it is not the absurd Sebastian. She doesn’t need hiccups to protect her from sexual neglect or to attract the attenions of her husband. (Only Freud could tell us if the hiccups were in fact displacing her spasms from below to above; the bored analyst Jill consults seems to assume so.) With that moment of mutual acknowledgment the estranged couple quickly decide they would be better off home in bed. Lubitsch, one of our most gifted comic artists in film, was in more instances than we can count, on the side of the seducer, the adulterer, the flirt. Bemused by the prudishness and sexual evasion of early twentieth century United States culture, he found a way to insinuate his own brand of suggestiveness into pre-Code Hollywood. And Hollywood responded by believing that this descendent of the Eastern European Jewish working classes was the epitome of sophistication. He is probably the last person one would expect to find enlisted to defend the liberating character of sexual failure. But Lubitsch’s refined understanding of the needs and detours of sexual happiness leads him to identify, as among the involuntary protests of the body against its neglect and mistreatment, a convulsive symptom Freud glanced over too quickly: the hiccup.39 I am reminded again of Bergson, whose book on laughter Freud read with delight before he started his own book on jokes and the unconscious. Bergson qualifies: “In a society composed of of pure intelligences, there would probably be no more tears. But perhaps there would still be laughter.”40 Rational beings know that joy is not our fate. Being neglected,

186

Chapter 8

abandoned, and undesired is the wretched side of life from which we hope humour can save us. Lubitsch prefers to promise that desire will return, that seduction and flirtation are not illusions but the food without which no one should live. But to make the world safe for the libido, his films insist that a place must be found for the acceptance of the libido’s occasional misfirings, hiccups or otherwise. If all sexual success—and all sexually suggestive comedy—existed under the patronage of the assertive phallus alone, we would have much cause to complain. To defend impotence—to stake out a role in comedy for the muse of impotence—is not simply to indulge humour’s taste for humiliation, sadism, or ridicule. At its most generous, comedy refuses to indulge our interests in exploiting the misfortunes of others. It even turns a deaf ear to our taste for self-loathing, to our fondness for transgressive postures. At such moments comedy teaches us what Lawrence Sterne’s readers have always known: that malfunction, incompetence and absent-mindedness can also be loved. BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 1984. Barton, Carlin A. Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Bergson, Henri. Œuvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002. Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings: Enchiridion. Translated by Robert Dobbin. London: Penguin, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 11, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 8, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1960. Hake, Sabine. Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Heath, Stephen. The Sexual Fix. London: Macmillan, 1982. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. King, Ross. “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language.” In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, edited by Thomas Keymer. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Trouble in Paradise?

187

Kuefler, Mathew. The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. McFadden, George. Discovering the Comic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. McLaren, Angus. Impotence: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Noonan, John T. Jr. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Ovid. The Love Poems. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948. Trahair, Lisa. The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. Wilmot, John. “The Imperfect Enjoyment” (1680). Poetry Foundation website, accessed March 27, 2022, https:​//​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/50452​/the​ -imperfect​-enjoyment.

NOTES  1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 11, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 179. 2. See Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–24. 3. Ovid, Amores, 3.7 in The Love Poems, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67–69; Ovid; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “The Imperfect Enjoyment” (1680). 4. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings, chapter 41, Enchiridion, trans. Robert Dobbin (London: Penguin, 2008), 240. 5. Augustine, City of God, book 14, chapter 16, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984); I have borrowed (with some adaptations) the fluent translation by Elaine Pagels, in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 111. 6. Romans 7: 18–20 (King James Bible). 7. St. Augustine (City of God, book 14, chapter 26). 8. St. Augustine (City of God, book 14, chapter 19).

188

Chapter 8

9. See John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 275–83. 10. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37. 11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), vol. 8a, Supplement, Question 58, Article 1; On the Sentences 4.34.1.2, 2766–68. 12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, vol. 8a, Supplement, Question 60, Articles 1 and 2. 13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 8a, Questions 74–90; Supplement, Questions 1–99. Canonists distinguished several possible causes of marital incapacity: lack of sexual organs, natural frigidity, quasi-natural frigidity and impotence caused by maleficium or sortiligium. They did also allow for the selective impotence of a man with his wife, a concession that spared a number of masculine egos. 14. McLaren, Impotence, 51. 15. See plate 14 illustrating a medieval examination for impotence reproduced in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (following p. 324), from an illuminated manuscript held by the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. 16. McLaren, Impotence, 60–61. 17. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, vol. 8, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 110. 18. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 119, 228–29. 19. Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 104. 20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43. 21. Lisa Trahair, The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 129ff. 22. Ross King, “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language,” in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 23. Trahair, Comedy of Philosophy, 130. 24. See George McFadden, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 123. 25. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), 196. 26. Bergson, Laughter, 197. 27. Bergson, Laughter, 19. 28. Bergson, Laughter, 75, 146, 183–85. 29. Bergson, Laughter, 198. 30. Henri Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Frances, 1959), 463. 31. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 128–34.

Trouble in Paradise?

189

32. On the modern industrial regime of sex, see Stephen Heath’s complaint in The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982): “Orgasm, which is ‘a form of work,’ is a deadly serious affair, with strict standards of correct behaviour. Talking or laughing, for instance, are definitely out” (67). 33. See the sympathetic reading of the Lubitschian philosophy of life in Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139–99. 34. Ovid, Amores, 3.7, lines 3–6, 14–16, 65–66, in The Love Poems, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67–69. 35. See Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 36. Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 21. 37. Bergson, Laughter, chapter 2, section 5. 38. McLaren, Impotence, 50. 39. Had he been willing to write more about fellatio, we might have found other resources. 40. Bergson, Laughter, 105.

Chapter 9

“Only What Is Born Lives” Kafka L.O.L. Jean-Michel Rabaté

It should be possible to limn the specific features of Franz Kafka’s laughter without spoiling it. Concerning Kafka, a critical debate has raged and still rages about the meaning of his texts. There is no clear agreement about the comic in his works: we are still debating whether Kafka should be treated as a tragic or nihilist author, a terrifyingly dark, sardonically bleak neurotic, or as a savvy comic writer with a taste for black humor. My title takes as its point of departure the testimony of Kafka’s friend, Gustav Janouch, twenty years younger than Kafka, the son of his colleague at the Workers’ Insurance Company. He called upon Kafka regularly and found him always available, dispensing advice and tips. When he jotted down their conversations, Janouch highlighted the spontaneous gaiety displayed by Kafka. Summing up his impression, Janouch writes, “Franz Kafka and I laughed long and loud together, that is to say, if one could describe Franz Kafka’s laughter as loud.”1 Their laughter was as frequent as it was contagious—another vignette describes a witty exchange: “In short, office life is—as my father says—a dog’s life.” “Yes,” Kafka agreed. “Yet I don’t bark at anyone and I don’t bite either. As you know—I’m a vegetarian. We only live on our own flesh.” We both laughed so loud that we nearly didn’t hear the knock on the door of a colleague who was about to enter.2

Janouch’s notes provide instances of witticisms and wordplay. Kafka had been annoyed by a stupid colleague who believed that he was a poet. After the man left, Janouch asked whether Kafka agreed he was a poet. Kafka answered, 191

192

Chapter 9

“Yes, in the literal sense of the word. He is a poet [Dichter], a dense [dichter] man.”3 Similar testimonies abound. Dora Diamant, the woman with whom he lived in Berlin at the end of his life, insists on Kafka’s cheerfulness: “He was always cheerful [heiter],” his eyes kept a sparkle of mischievous humor, “as if he knew something the others did not,” Dora avers.4 Elsewhere she says, “Everything was done with laughter.”5 In the first passage quoted, Janouch not only mentions the varying intensity of Kafka’s laughter but also the gestures he used to express merriment: he would throw his head back, half-close his eyes, raise his shoulders with one hand on the desk and so on—there is a long list of Kafka’s bodily postures meant to enhance the expression of mirth. However, once Janouch mentioned a Chinese parable stating that one should not laugh out loud: loud laughter wakes up the Sorrow that sleeps in the next room. Joy itself is deaf, unable to hear Sorrow’s sobs. Kafka approved, adding that he merely pretended to enjoy himself: “For instance, me. I simulate gaiety, in order to vanish behind it. My laughter is a concrete wall.” Janouch asked, “Against whom”? Immediately, Kafka replied, “Naturally, against myself.”6 Sensibly, Janouch objected that a wall protects one from the exterior world not from oneself. Kafka disagreed, launching a theme that he later treated in “The Burrow,” one of his last stories: “A blow at the world is a blow at oneself. For that reason, every concrete wall is only an illusion, which sooner or later crumbles away. For Inner and Outer belong to each other. Divided [von einander losgelöst], they become two bewildering aspects of a mystery which we endure [erleiden] but can never solve.”7 Kafka’s laughter functions as a protection against himself as well. Laughter of this kind is not primarily directed at the world. It contains few features of satire, it shuns the barbs of aggression. This type of laughter is primarily divided, in a division that is more reflective than oppositional. What is rejected is the usual division of the world into Inner and Outer. This looks like a paradox, but it defines accurately the mainspring of Kafka’s humor. Kafka’s laughter is divided against itself, which makes him traverse the binaries he was enmeshed in: Jew versus gentile, Czech versus German, masculine versus feminine, slave versus master, high culture versus popular culture, religious versus profane, mature versus immature, serious versus not serious and so on. By virtue of its reflexivity, this laughter questions the foundation of the binaries, thus posing epistemological and ontological questions. Kafka was aware of the dangers of introspection allied with the reflective nature of self-consciousness. One of his aphorisms formulates this quandary: “Everything is allowed him, with the exception of self-oblivion, wherewith in turn, however, everything is forbidden him, except the one thing that is immediately necessary for the whole.”8 This points to a strategy of exception,

“Only What Is Born Lives”

193

for if self-oblivion is ruled out, self-consciousness also becomes impossible, and the notion that everything is allowed immediately turns into its opposite: everything is forbidden. Kafka notes that we cannot inspect ourselves or plunge into ourselves without turning into something else, becoming an inquisitive animal whose searches and investigations will be shown to rest upon a fundamental mistake. This is demonstrated in the superb last stories “Investigations of a Dog” and “The Burrow.” Let us not run too fast ahead of ourselves just to avoid digging a hole—the hole is already there, in our heads: “A piece like a segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun looks in and the whole world with it. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that he should be the very one excluded from the spectacle.”9 Kafka’s laughter, because it foregrounds subjective division, entails a slippage of subjective positions that keep moving and morphing into one another. We witness this process in “Description of a Struggle,” a baffling and complex text often bypassed by critics. It is either considered juvenile, or not in keeping with the minimalism of the later texts. We should not ignore Kafka’s beginnings, because they took place in what is above all pure comedy. The plot is simple: one night, the narrator rescues an acquaintance who made a gaffe during a dinner party, boasting about his recent flirtation with a young woman, another guest; the narrator, fearing that his friend’s attitude will be condemned, offers to accompany him for a walk at night. They will go up the Laurenziberg although it is past midnight and the weather is freezing. During their stroll, their exchange is punctuated by alternating periods of mistrust, misunderstanding and tenderness. At one point, the narrator trips and injures his knee; later he rides on the shoulders of his friend so as to reach the top of the hill. Up there, he meets a fat man carried by porters on a litter; the fat man tells a story of a man who prays in a dramatic fashion; there is also an encounter with a drunken man. These subplots fade away, and we return to the narrator and to the friend who then stabs himself with a knife. They debate whether the young woman with whom the friend has fallen in love is worth his sudden infatuation. This is a rough outline. We have diverging versions of the texts written between 1904 and 1909. Eight passages were excerpted for publication in Hyperion magazine in 1909. A beautiful section of the second version, “Children on a Country Road,” turns up as the beginning of Betrachtung, Kafka’s first published book, his 1912/1913 collection of short stories. In all these stories, Kafka foregrounds the gestures of his characters, fixating on their bodies as they display an excessive theatricality in their gesticulations. Here is an evocation of the narrator’s walk:

194

Chapter 9

While I was still urgently trying to think of some means by which I could stay at least a little while longer with my acquaintance, it occurred to me that perhaps my long body displeased him by making him feel too small. And this thought . . . tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees. But in order to prevent my acquaintance from noticing my intentions I changed my position only very gradually, tried to divert his attention from myself, once even turning him towards the river, pointing out to him with outstretched hands the trees on the Schützeninsel and the way the bridge lamps were reflected in the river. But wheeling suddenly round, he looked at me—I hadn’t quite finished yet—and said: “What’s this? You’re all crooked! What on earth are you up to?” “Quite right. You are very observant,” said I, my head on the seam of his trousers, which was why I couldn’t look up properly. “Enough of that! Stand up straight! What nonsense!” [Solche Dummheiten!]10

One cannot help agreeing with the friend: this “nonsense” comes from the fact that the narrator, like Kafka, is tall, and absurdly tries to make amends for his immense body. Later, the difference in size does not prevent him from riding his friend as if he were a horse: And now—with a flourish, as though it were not the first time—I leapt onto the shoulders of my acquaintance, and by digging my fists into his back I urged him into a trot. But since he stumped forward rather reluctantly and sometimes even stopped, I kicked him in the belly several times with my boots to make him more lively. It worked and we came fast enough into the interior of a vast but as yet unfinished landscape.11

Why is the landscape unfinished? We are here in an imaginary setting in which the narrator can modify the mountains, the clouds, all elements at will: “I felt how healthy this ride in the good air was for me, and in order to make him wilder, I let a strong wind blow against us in gusts.”12 Literal horseplay marks the beginning of the section titled “Diversions or Proof That It’s Impossible to Live.”13 What is translated as “diversions” [Belustigungen] could be rendered literally as “merriments.” These merriments revolving around the “impossibility of living” then take on a sadistic tinge—the friend is not only treated like a horse but also callously abandoned as soon as he collapses to the ground: Then my acquaintance collapsed, and when I examined him I discovered that he was badly wounded in the knee. Since he could no longer be of any use to me, I left him there on the stones without much regret and whistled down a few vultures which, obediently and with serious beaks, settled on him in order to guard him.14

“Only What Is Born Lives”

195

The motif of the “vulture,” a recurrent image in Kafka, evokes Prometheus as read by Nietzsche, to which I will turn later. The “badly wounded knee” alerts us to another detail: earlier in the story, the narrator fell on the frozen ground, hurting his knee.15 When the friend comes by to help him, he spouts philosophical banalities, but the narrator suddenly entertains suspicions that his friend is about to murder him, a thought that crosses his mind without any grounds. While his friend lifts his arm, the narrator ruminates: Obviously, this is the time for the murder. I’ll stay with him and slowly he’ll draw the dagger—the handle of which he is already holding in his pocket— along his coat, and then plunge it into me. It’s unlikely that he’ll be surprised at the simplicity of it all—yet maybe he will, who knows? I won’t scream, I’ll just stare at him as long as my eyes can stand it.16

No reason is given why the friend would have these designs. The fantasy of being killed by a knife has heightened sexual connotations in Kafka’s work. It announces the ending of The Trial, when Joseph K. is killed “like a dog” by two assassins. As in that last scene, a policeman sees nothing, absorbed as he is in his skating moves. Of course, nothing of the sort happens—the two friends continue their desultory walk up to the hill. Once they reach the top, new characters like the “fat man” and the “praying man” are introduced, signaling an increasing narratological instability. The first-person speaker can no longer be distinguished from characters who all end up speaking in the first person; we feel less certain about the reality of the events narrated; identities merge. I could go on quoting this curious novella whose difficulties are increased by the fact that Brod’s rendering is a composite that jumbles two different versions. A dream-like delirium is a recurrent feature in both versions of Description of a Struggle. What stands out is a lack of consideration for psychological verisimilitude, along with little concern for tonal harmony. An insertion in the right hand side of manuscript A, page 7, spells out the comic tone. Next to “Wissen sie, wie sie sind, komisch sind sie,” Kafka added in the margin “komisch, komisch, kom.”17 This could be rendered as “You are comical—comical—com . . . ” Such a stutter doubles as a stylistic device enhancing the text’s comedic atmosphere. The atmosphere of comedy does not exclude sexual drama. Laughter is never far from tears, and kissing between men is quite frequent, even if this is paid for by fantasies of murder. We catch a young Kakfa uncertain about his sexuality, struggling against himself in sexual terms. Obvious same-sex attractions between the narrator and other male characters generate an inversion of laughter into crying, as at the end of the second manuscript. After a conversation with the praying man, the narrator sits next to him in a musty corridor and feels his face too close to that of the other. He then laughs into

196

Chapter 9

the other’s face in order to introduce some distance. The man caresses the hair of the narrator, who starts crying—the man tells him that, from the start, he was trying to make him cry, but contradicts himself: “I make another joke to finish it all and then you please me by starting to cry. Now! Shame on you!” “I won’t cry any longer,” I said and looked at him, leaning my chin on him, “If I have such a friend as you, I won’t need to cry.” But I kept on crying because I could not stop all at once.18

The sudden reversibility of affects from the comic to the tragic and conversely is a feature shared by two artists who were close to Kafka, one by proximity, since they met several times, the other by sensibility. One is Alfred Kubin, who befriended Kafka and illustrated “The Country Doctor”; the other, Paul Klee, lived for a while in Munich, a city visited by Kafka. Walter Benjamin pointed out links between Klee and Kafka.19 Kubin and Kafka often met in 1910–1911. Kafka liked Kubin’s illustrated novel The Other Side. Klee and Kubin soon became friends as they were gravitating towards the Blauer Reiter group of expressionist painters. There is a strong visual component in “Description of a struggle.” According to Max Brod, Kafka’s evocation of the “fat man” had been suggested by a Japanese print by Hiroshige showing a huge Sumo wrestler.20 In 1908, Paul Klee sent an etching titled “The Hero with the Wing” to Franz Blei, who coedited Hyperion, the magazine that published Kafka’s first prose pieces. (The publication folded in 1911 before they could publish Klee’s visual caricatures.) Klee’s notes are relevant for Kafka’s humorous tales about classical gods (Poseidon) and a Titan like Prometheus. Klee writes, “The Hero with the Wing,” a tragicomic hero, perhaps a Don Quixote of ancient times. . . . The man, born with only one wing, in contrast with divine creatures, makes incessant efforts to fly. In doing so, he breaks his arms and legs, but persists under the banner of his idea. The contrast between his statue-like, solemn attitude and his already ruined state needed especially to be captured, as an emblem of the tragicomic.21

Klee made the tragicomic his signature in daring, ironic, pre-expressionist artworks produced before he joined the Blaue Reiter. Another etching from the series of ten Inventions titled “The Aged Phoenix” captures the spirit of a German “Comic Grotesque.”22 One finds exemplifications of this parodic mode in Kafka’s stories: his “Poseidon” presents the Greek god as a harassed civil servant who is so immersed in his tedious bureaucratic management of the seas that he has no time to leave his office and experience what the waters look like. His “Sirens” do not sing but exploit their silence to trap a

Figure 9.1 Klee, Paul (1879–1940): Der Held mit dem Flugel (The Hero with the Wing), 1905. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Etching, plate 10 x 6 1/4' (25.4 x 15.9 cm); sheet 16 x 12 1/16' (40 x 30.7 cm). Publisher: Paul Klee, Bern; printer: Max Girardet, Bern. Purchase. Acc. n.: 182.1942. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.  

198

Chapter 9

not-so-wily Odysseus—he plugged his ears with wax, to no avail. Sisyphus is simply described as a lonely bachelor. Even the unnamed philosopher of “The Top” tries to get at the essence of the top by watching children play, and in a neat inversion of Heraclitus’s model, he gazes at the motionless top uncomprehendingly, and is chased by the jeers of the children, spinning himself like a top. In that sense, Kafka is a modernist who treats antique exemplars as stereotypes that need to be inverted, debunked, actualized and thoroughly cleansed of the respect usually reserved for mythical models. For Klee as for Kafka, truth is not incompatible with the grotesque; on the contrary, its unfolding depends upon the grotesque and caricature. This is condensed in aphorism 63, which I translate literally: “Our art consists in being blinded-by-the-truth [von der Wahrheit Geblendet-Sein]: The light upon the grotesque mask as it recoils [auf dem zurückweichenden Fratzengesicht] is true, and nothing else.”23 The truth is so blinding that one cannot see anything, thus one has to recoil or shrink away from it. The only beings capable of facing the blinding sun of truth would be eagles, mythical birds that can stare at the sun and to whose mythos we will return. Being only men, we withdraw our dazzled faces; however, faint traces of truth still adhere in the form of a distortion that remains printed on the face as a grimace, which may be caused by either pain or joy. Kafka presents his own face as that of a clown’s mask, a caricature distorted and blinded by the sun. This parallel postulation mixes pain and laughter in an uncertain compound that characterises the grotesque, an aesthetic category suggesting excess and hybridity, juxtaposing absurd configurations and incongruous images. We recognise the mixture of reflexivity and sudden transformation that characterises Kafka’s humor. The grotesque has the effect of making Kafka laugh—most of us might remain doubtful, with a smile on our lips, hesitating between horror and mild amusement; as we have seen, countless testimonies exist about Kafka’s weird sense of humor, about his delight in telling jokes, his fits of laughter when reading his texts. Brod mentions the fact that Kafka laughed so much when reading the first chapter of The Trial to his friends that he had to stop reading.24 Some commentators have tried to explain why Kafka laughed so much. They generally highlight a combination of religious elements and of the profane release of libidinal energies. David Foster Wallace is exemplary in understanding the need for a double take. Wallace explains that when he teaches Kafka, he first makes his students notice the humor, being aware that the features Americans associate with comedy are lacking: there are no sexual innuendoes, no Jewish kvetching in the Woody Allen mode, no cynical coworkers or profane grandparents. However, once he has succeeded in showing that this type of humor is linguistic and works by literalising metaphors, he must warn his students that it would be an exaggeration to see

“Only What Is Born Lives”

199

Kafka only as a source of fun, for with Kafka, comedy tends to turn into tragedy, and conversely. Wallace condenses this thesis cogently: “What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, ‘unconscious,’ which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul.”25 Kafka’s laughter is never simple: it always combines a duality of affects or a tension between incompatible concepts. Walter Benjamin grasped this duality and expressed it in letters to Theodor Adorno and to Gerschom Scholem. A letter to Scholem criticised Brod’s biography for being pious and badly written.26 Meditating on why Kafka had accepted Brod’s friendship, even though they were so different, Benjamin hit upon a striking formula: he was Laurel while Brod was Hardy! A later letter used the insight to stress the factor of humor: More and more, the essential feature in Kafka seems to me to be humor. He himself was not a humorist, of course. Rather, he was a man whose fate it was to keep stumbling upon people who made humor their profession: clowns. Amerika in particular is one large clown act. And concerning the friendship with Brod, I think I am on the track of truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his Hardy—and that was Brod. However that may be, I think the key to Kafka’s work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology.27

Benjamin hoped that Scholem would work on this project—but he never did, as one would expect from a serious theologian of Jewish mysticism. The comic features found in “Description of a Struggle,” analysed by Wallace and Benjamin, have been gathered in the “Comical Kafka” [Der komische Kafka]. With this alert anthology, Günther Stolzenberger allows us to peek into the works of a different writer—different from the author we think we know when we rattle off titles like “Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” The Trial and The Castle. The collection is introduced by a vignette presenting Kafka’s favorite joke. As she leaves the opera, a well-dressed lady is stopped by a beggar who asks her for money, adding, “Dear lady, please: I haven’t eaten for three days.” She considers him for a while with pity and says, “Well, young man, you’ll have to force yourself.”28 What makes the joke irresistible in the context is the knowledge that Kafka himself fought anorexia. Kafka had become a “champion of fasting,” and indeed he starved to death because he could not swallow anything in the last weeks of his life. Der komische Kafka follows the associations triggered by the notion of comedy. The collection of short stories and narrative fragments does not obey a strict logic: the headings are thematic; chapters quote Kafka’s own texts, such as “Wish to Be a Red Indian,” “The Eighth Wonder of the World,”

200

Chapter 9

“The God with Clenched Teeth,” “Absolutely Nobody,” or “In the Center of Noise,” whereas other titles are evocative, such as “Kafka in Wonderland,” “The Mouse That Cannot Trust Itself,” or “Wicked Asides.” Do I agree with the choices made by the editor? Not always. Indeed, more than half of the texts selected failed to make me smile. Often, I was wondering: why does Stolzenberger find this text funny? Why include a fragment from Kafka’s evocation of an airplane race in Brescia? Another collection made me laugh much more: Reiner Stach’s wonderful Is That Kafka? 99 Finds. This series of biographical vignettes of one or two pages touches on weird facts about the writer’s life and works.29 Indeed, “komisch” has a broader semantic range in German than in English; it is funny, comic and humorous, but also odd and strange. Many texts are characterised by their oddity, their lack of logic, their dreamlike jumps and their wild associations rather than by the slapstick qualities one finds in “Description of a Struggle.” We read about Talmudic paradoxes, Zenlike koans, absurdist jokes, enigmatic animals, or indescribable or uncanny contraptions like “Odradek,”30 a being that may be a machine and that symptomatically triggers wheezy laughter, the laughter that would issue from a person who has no lungs. Der komische Kafka includes some of my favorite shorter pieces, brief gnomic texts that I find hilarious—here is one. Given the title of “Better Memory,” it comes from the 1920 Konvolut A: “I can swim like the others, only I have a better memory than the others, I have not been able to forget that once I could not swim. Since I have not been able to forget this, the fact that I can swim does not help me and then after all I cannot swim.”31 The idea that a swimmer who thinks too long about swimming will be unable to continue swimming was developed in another story also anthologised by Stolzenberger.32 “The Great Swimmer” is an unfinished piece in which a man is hailed as a champion by the crowd in his native city; he has won the Olympic Games and set a world record, but in his speech of thanks, he confesses that he is unable to swim. One could publish a similar but different Comic Kafka that would be made up of completely different texts, because virtually all of Kafka could be inscribed under the heading of an extended comicality. The fact that the editor did not use generic categories means that it is almost impossible to isolate funny moments in Kafka—the sense of fun lies more in the tone of voice that we overhear when reading the texts, whether famous or relatively unknown. The well-known parable “In Front of the Law” does not figure in Der komische Kafka, which is understandable; however, every time I reread it, when I reach the passage where the guardian tells the man of the country “You are insatiable,” I am tempted to laugh.

“Only What Is Born Lives”

201

Laughing in Kafka would be one manifestation of the “thought from outside” taken as a model of modern art by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? Art is presented as the ability to create not an effect but an affect. Kafka would present an original interaction between the grimace and truth, inventing a grotesque critique of all ideologies that does not follow any psychology. However, laughter as such is not an affect, it is a manifestation of one affect or of several at once. Like the other writers and artists praised by Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka evinces an ability to “write exteriorly,” or “think externally,” to quote Virginia Woolf’s diary from November 1928. Kafka and Woolf are called mental “athletes” by Deleuze and Guattari, because they were able to confront their “inorganic doubles.”33 Kafka’s solution was to choose exteriority, wherever it came from, against interiority, or as he wrote, “In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.”34 Also, “He has discovered the Archimedean principle, but he has turned it to account against himself; evidently it was only on this condition that he was permitted to discover it.”35 This exteriority of affect is connected with the use of grotesque caricatures that put some distance between the self and the mask. This cannot be restricted to a religious intention but discloses an important political function. Joseph Vogl defines Kafka’s “Political Grotesque” accurately: From the terror of secret scenes of torture to childish officials, from the filth of the bureaucratic order to atavistic rituals of power runs a track of comedy that forever indicates the absence of reason, the element of the arbitrary in the execution of power and rule. However, the element of the grotesque does not unmask and merely denounce. Rather it refers—as Foucault once pointed out—to the inevitability, the inescapability of precisely the grotesque, ridiculous, loony, or abject sides of power. Kafka’s “political grotesque” displays an unsystematic arbitrariness, which belongs to the functions of the apparatus itself. . . . Kafka’s comedy turns against a diagnosis that conceives of the modernization of political power as a “rationalization process.”36

Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner who quote Vogl, add this: “Vogl refers to the Court bureaucracy in The Trial; Kafka’s Castle is even richer in comic-grotesque effects. The world of the castle is marked by a traffic in script that circles around higher authority at an immeasurable distance.”37 This political reading opposed to a religious or humanist reading was initiated by Günther Anders, one of the best commentators on Kafka after Benjamin, of whom Anders happened to be a distant cousin. Anders published Kafka, Pro et Contra in 1951. With this agonistic and pugilistic title, he meant less to allude to Kafka’s legalistic propensities or to the plot of the Trial itself than to run against the grain of Kafka glosses at the time which,

202

Chapter 9

following Max Brod’s lead, insisted on the religious and allegorical dimensions of the work. Anders’s book on Kafka starts with a series of refutations: no, Kafka is not a “Jewish saint” as Brod had it, neither is he a mythical dreamer or a religious writer. Kafka is a realist, a “realist fable-writer.”38 Anders places Kafka next to Bertolt Brecht, not Scholem, and notes that while many characters and situations in Kafka’s works are felt to be “Jewish,” this factor is disguised, and that, for instance, “Chinese” means Jewish.39 Kafka is a “realist” because he describes accurately our contemporary situation in a society defined by repression and alienation. To do so, Kafka has first inverted the roles of things and humans, of humans and animals. The “blatant horror” of the world after the Holocaust has left us with one truth well perceived by Kafka: “[W]e are shown without further explanation how in reality men are not rendered speechless by the unspeakable, nor horrified by what is horrifying.”40 The neutral tone used by Kafka works well because of the inversion of roles that goes back to Aesop: instead of saying “men are like beasts,” Kafka shows us beasts as men (as in the “Josephine” story). The story “Investigations of a Dog” calls up Kafka’s difficult position as a Jew in Prague and as a non-believer in the Jewish community, but it can be universalised because we all run the risk of turning into pariahs. Kafka’s heroes are always arriving somewhere as in The Castle and Amerika. In the former, K. is a sort of Don Quixote; like Cervantes’s hero, he is an “individual” because “divided,” that is cut off from the world that proceeds to “cut dead” whoever ventures into it.41 These heroes are placed in the position of newly arrived immigrants: an immigrant tends to analyse what remains obvious and unquestioned for the locals. Immigrants are prone to join radical movements, often agitating “for the rights of the unrecognized.”42 Kafka’s newcomers become hyper-rationalists and paranoid over-interpreters. We see this in The Castle where K. keeps questioning the dangerous slippage of customs into morals. However, this feature leads to a dangerous tendency to self-abasement: all his heroes will be found guilty in the end because they were guilty in advance. People are reduced to their social function, as we see with the man who stolidly tortures two policemen in The Trial. Kafka is fascinated by the rituals of power but insists on our powerlessness; powerlessness then triggers interpretive mania.43 We live in a world of infinite interpretations while being unable to effect any change. Kafka is all too ready to acknowledge the inscrutability of power. We never learn what is the right interpretation of the most obscure parables as with “In Front of the Law.” Kafka stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Romanticism, for he does not believe in self-expression. Kafka’s style remains neutral throughout: it enacts the alienation it describes. Men and things all turn into a nature

“Only What Is Born Lives”

203

morte.44 Indeed, Kafka’s sentences look either like imitations of notices in officialese, approximating legal notices, sections from medical records or modest but obstinate political petitions.45 If there is a measure of gaiety in the style, it is the desperate enjoyment of the man who is never taken seriously.46 Anders links Kafka’s approach with the book of Job, a text that he believes, following Brod, was a key for Kafka. Anders adds this commentary: Kafka would be “like Job in his sacrificium intellectus: Job finally recognises God because God has created ‘the hippopotamus and crocodile,’ whereas he himself has created nothing; so Kafka, or at least K., recognises that his own powerlessness deprives him of the right to question the Law.”47 If Kafka identifies religious faith with a degrading humiliation, he can only be saved by the double irony of an “ontological proof” requiring the existence of hippopotamuses and crocodiles, a point that cannot be taken very seriously. Anders broaches a theme he was to develop in the 1950s: there is no “Nature” in Kafka’s works because he criticises our “mechanized civilization.” This is a society in which human beings are mercilessly destroyed or treated like fuel.48 Commenting on two stories (“Josephine” and “The Giant Mole”) from the point of view of the clash between orthodox and assimilated European Jews, Anders concludes with a series of brilliant images condensing the paradoxes and contradictions of Kafka’s position: “He is an atheist: but makes of atheism a theology. . . . He is a sceptic: but one who is skeptical of his own skepticism.”49 Is Kafka really an “ineffectual conformist who sees himself with the eyes of the authority he has courted in vain”?50 If this is so, indeed, we should agree with Anders’s harsh judgment: guilty! But we might add that Kafka knew he would be found guilty. The connection between Anders’s reading of Kafka and Anders’s later discovery of a general principle that he calls “Promethean Shame”—the shame of humans who discover that machines function better, last longer and are more efficient than they are—would require a whole book. When Anders published The Obsolescence of Man [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen— also translatable as The Antiquatedness of Humankind], with the subtitle On the Soul during the Second Industrial Revolution, he opposed the world of machines to the world of men. Like Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” he imagines that humans have a “Promethean Shame” because they have become inferior to the machines they have created.51 Indeed, shame is one of the dominant affects in Kafka’s texts, from “Description of a Struggle”52 to the painful ending of The Trial: when K. is murdered he only thinks about the shame that will survive him. There is a link between shame and laughter. One example appears in “Children on the Road.” The narrator remembers how the rough workers of the village would come back home, laughing so loud that, literally, “it was a shame”: “I heard

204

Chapter 9

the wagons rumbling past the garden fence, sometimes I even saw them through gently swaying gaps in the foliage. How the wood of their spokes and shafts creaked in the summer heat! Laborers were coming from the fields and laughed so much that it was a shame [Arbeiter kamen von den Feldern und lachten, dass es eine Schande war].”53 The mixture of grotesque, tragic and comic elements in most texts by Kafka tends to become less expressionistic and more subdued with time, but it remains dominant until the end; this combination never rules out shame or laughter, even when the most subversive thoughts are displayed. The unstable compound is linked with issues of an oral tradition that represents humans facing the divine. This is especially true in the “Prometheus” text, which is also concerned with the phenomenon of obsolescence. In most legends concerning Prometheus, the hero’s liver is repeatedly gnawed at by an eagle; in other versions, it is a vulture, which may indicate a certain degradation. Eagles were also rumored to test their offspring: if they could not withstand the glare of the sun, the little ones were cast out of the nest. There cannot be a starker contrast than a darkly pulsating viscera linked with divination and a paternal “truth” so blinding that few are capable of withstanding it. We recognise Kafka’s predicament, his being divided between a maternal side and a father’s law that crushes him and that has to be resisted. Kafka’s laughter is a weapon against the castration threat; it makes the father’s law stutter in its silly reiterations, thus turning it into what I would call mere “kafkastration.” However, as Anders has suggested, such laughter is never far from shame, especially when shame is triggered by an awareness of the innate deficiencies of the human facing machines, which means the entire system of tools used by absolute power, whether deriving from God or the State. In some cases, laughter manages to create the possibility of a felicitous exit, wit thus “outwits” censorship, and a respite can be found. An irrepressibly “wicked” laughter, the laughter of the reprobate, or the Son as a Promethean rebel cast into darkness by the sun god, often appears in Kafka’s letters; only when this laughter cannot be shared does he feel the need to apologise, as with Brod in August 1913: Kafka had laughed uncontrollably as they parted; he writes a postcard to explain—but can’t explain in the end, concluding that he would be forced repeat this wicked laughter: “Which calls for another laugh, to be followed within five minutes by another such card as this. Beyond doubt wicked people exist, scintillating with wickedness.”54 The question would then be: how can one laugh in such a way that laughter sweeps away all shame, the shame of being born and the shame of sexuality leading to reproduction, as if one was being born anew to the world, all the while knowing that this is a world in which one is forced to survive as a wounded immortal whose body is racked by endless suffering? Here was

“Only What Is Born Lives”

205

Kafka’s symptom, his melancholic and bilious laughter, a laughter issuing from the depth of grottoes and reaching hysterical climaxes. The pattern fits Freud’s general thesis about jokes and humor: the hilarity generated by a joke generates a sense of freedom from shame, constraints and inhibition. This attempt at freedom would find an equivalent in the inchoate character of Kafka’s work, with all those beginnings, and all those stillbirths. When Janouch showed him the outline of a bad drama on a biblical theme, Kafka was skeptical. Sensing his reluctance, Janouch admitted that his efforts were “scissors-and-paste-work.” Kafka agreed: “You are right. Only what is born lives. Everything else is vain: literature without any justification.”55 One might say that for Kafka, in literature, the only justification of existence is the birth of existence—the key to whatever we do would be to know how to remain forever in statu nascendi. . . . And like the Biblical Sara, we laugh at God when we are told about any future birth. ‌‌ This essay is a revised and condensed excerpt from Jean-Michel Rabaté, Kafka L.O.L.: Notes on Promethean Laughter (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018). BIBLIOGRAPHY Anders, Günther. Kafka: Pro et Contra. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1951. Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1956. Anders, Günther. Franz Kafka. Translated by A. Steer and A. K. Thorlby. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Benjamin, Walter, and Gershom Scholem. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gerschom Scholem, 1932–1940. Translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka. Translated by G. Humphreys Robert. London: Secker and Warburg, 1947. Brod, Max, ed. Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Novellen. Skizzen. Aphorismen. Aus der Nachlass. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1954. Corngold, Stanley, and Benno Wagner. Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Diamant, Kathi. Kafka’s Last love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Janouch, Gustav. Gespräche mit Kafka. 2nd ed. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968. Janouch, Gustav. Conversations with Kafka. Translated by Goronwy Rees. New York: New Directions, 1971.

206

Chapter 9

Kafka, Franz. Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Novellen. Skizzen. Aphorismen. Aus der Nachlass. Edited by Max Brod. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1954. Kafka, Franz. Description of a Struggle. Translated by Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken, 1958. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Edited by Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1971. Kafka, Franz. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken, 1977. Kafka, Franz. The Great Wall of China. Translated by Malcolm Pasley. London: Penguin, 1991. Kafka, Franz. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente. Vol. 2. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992. Kafka, Franz. Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Facsimile and transcription. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1999. Klee, Paul. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918. Edited by Felix Klee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Koch, Hans-Gerd, ed. “Als Kafka mir entgegen kam,” Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2005. Kort, Pamela, ed. Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–1940, New York, Neue Galerie. Munich: Prestel, 2004. Müller, Christopher John. Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. North, Paul. The Yield, Kafka’s Atheological Reformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Stach, Reiner Stach. Is That Kafka? 99 Finds. Translated by Kurt Beals. New York: New Directions, 2016. Stolzenberger, Günther, ed. Der komische Kafka, Eine Anthologie. Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2015. Vogl, Joseph. “Kafka’s Political Comedy.” Kafka and the Law. Course book L8250. New York: Columbia University Law School, Spring 2006. Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006. Wasihun, Betiel. “To Be Seen: Shame in Kafka’s ‘Beschreibung eines Kampfes,’” The Modern Language Review 110, no. 3 (July 2015): 704–23.

NOTES 1. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: New Directions, 1971), 33. 2. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 169. 3. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 62. 4. Hans-Gerd Koch, ed., “Als Kafka mir entgegen kam,” Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2005), 195–96.

“Only What Is Born Lives”

207

5. Kathi Diamant, Kafka’s Last love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 48. 6. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 33. 7. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 33. 8. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1991), 111. 9. Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, facsimile and transcription (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1999), 104. 10. Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1958), 24–25. 11. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 35. 12. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 35. 13. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 35. 14. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 37. 15. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 30. 16. Kafka, Description of a Struggle, 27–28. 17. Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, 31. 18. Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, manuscript 2, page 26. 19. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 143. 20. Max Brod, ed., Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Novellen. Skizzen. Aphorismen. Aus der Nachlass (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1954), 347. 21. Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 162. 22. See the catalogue of the exhibition Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–1940 at Neue Galerie, New York, edited by Pamela Kort (Munich: Prestel, 2004). 23. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China, 89. 24. Max Brod, The Biography of Franz Kafka, trans. G. Humphreys Robert (London: Secker and Warburg, 1947), 139. 25. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006), 64. 26. Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gerschom Scholem, 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 220–26. 27. Benjamin and Scholem, Correspondence, 243. 28. Günther Stolzenberger, ed., Der komische Kafka, Eine Anthologie (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2015), 7. 29. Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds, trans. Kurt Beals (New York: New Directions, 2016). 30. Günther Stolzenberger, ed., Der Komische Kafka, 32–34. 31. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, vol. 2, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), 334. Paul North provides an excellent commentary in The Yield, Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 164.

208

Chapter 9

32. Stolzenberger, Der komische Kafka, 80–82. 33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 172. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 87. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 105. 36. Joseph Vogl, “Kafka’s Political Comedy,” Kafka and the Law, Course book L8250 (New York: Columbia University Law School, Spring 2006), 3.. 37. Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 117. 38. Günther Anders, Franz Kafka, trans. A. Steer and A. K. Thorlby (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), 9. 39. Anders, Franz Kafka, 10. 40. Anders, Franz Kafka, 15. 41. Anders, Franz Kafka, 26. 42. Anders, Franz Kafka, 29. 43. Anders, Franz Kafka, 51. 44. Anders, Franz Kafka, 66. 45. Anders, Franz Kafka, 69. 46. Anders, Franz Kafka, 70. 47. Anders, Franz Kafka, 89. 48. Anders, Franz Kafka, 92. 49. Anders, Franz Kafka, 97. 50. Anders, Franz Kafka, 98. 51. See Christopher John Müller, Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 30. 52. See Betiel Wasihun, “To Be Seen: Shame in Kafka’s ‘Beschreibung eines Kampfes,’” The Modern Language Review 110, no. 3, (July 2015), 704–23. 53. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 379, modified. 54. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 99. 55. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 54.

Chapter 10

The Grotesque Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting Josephine Gray

“The fun of society is a light froth, which evaporates on the stage; the fun of the stage is an edged tool which would cut deep in society.” —Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting

The perplexity of the actor and the ontological status of her métier—her simultaneous being and not-being who she appears to be—has rarely been so wittily dissected as in Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting. The work, itself written as a pseudo-Platonic dialogue, tackles the relationship between nature and art. The great actor must disavow sensibility in order to remain cold and calculating, with the objective of observing the person of sensibility in reality and from this approach the character on the basis of those very observations. Human nature is occupied by the sensibility that according to Diderot is that disposition which accompanies organic weakness, which follows on easy affection of the diaphragm, on vivacity of imagination, on delicacy of nerves, which inclines one to being compassionate, to being horrified, to admiration, to fear, to being upset, to tears, to faintings, to rescues, to flights, to exclamations, to loss of self-control, to being contemptuous, disdainful, to having no clear notion of what is true, good, and fine, to being unjust, to going mad.1

Juxtaposing the madness-inducing sensibility that naturally occurs in man, art steps in as the only available recourse for the (great) actor through the 209

210

Chapter 10

simulation of Diderot’s spectre. A purely imaginative (psychological) operation, gathered from observations of real life, undertaken by the actor.2 The spectre is that which plays the play and acts as intermediary between the insensibility of the actor and the world of emotions present in the character. The spectre contorts the actor’s body, sheds the tears, makes ugly faces and sounds ringing laughter through the auditorium, all the while leaving the actor perfectly capable of returning home at the end of the play completely unaffected. The spectre lies at the very heart of acting according to Diderot, born out of the play-acts of children, “who play at ghosts in a graveyard at dead of night, armed with a white sheet on the end of a broomstick, and sending forth from its shelter hollow groans to frighten wayfarers.”3 Diderot’s work, seminal in its dissemination of acting as a noble endeavour to be taken seriously, nevertheless poses questions of methodology and style of acting.4 Although the very paradox of the art of acting is one that most theatre practitioners would agree exists—the actor’s ability to remain insensible to the world of emotions present in the character while simultaneously allowing her body (and voice) to express those very emotions—it is far from obvious exactly what the scope of the paradox is. The paradox that Diderot describes, in spite of its lucidity, is put forward as a theory formed from the outer signs that the actor displays that implicitly override the internal movements the actor experiences herself. The conjuring up of a spectre that is part-actor, part-character seems to become an odd hybrid of the corporeality of the actor’s body fused with her imagination and observations of “real” life, which are derived from her psyche rather than her physical actions. It is my intention here to place this idea of an otherworldly “spectre,” extracted from Diderot’s own thesis on acting, within a grotesque genealogy of acting that reveals a (perhaps) surprising assimilation of play-acting to the monstrous. This monstrosity, present in all dramatic genres, finds itself peculiarly allied with comedy and the comedic, and in this context with acting, as an explicit rendering of the very structure of acting itself. As such I propose that the (grotesque) “spectre” is intimately tied to the theatrical tool of the mask as both material object that transforms the actor’s body and more importantly as the experiential method whereby the actor negotiates the distance between herself and the character. Tracing the roots of the grotesque beyond its existence in the fine arts as pittura grottesca, I make the case for an earlier origin of the grotesque. An origin that stems from ancient Greek drama—especially comedy. The grotesque instantiates a constant between that which is other and that which is otherworldly. Weaving a path through a discussion on komastai, Aristophanes, St. Francis, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Jacques Copeau, I will demonstrate that the monstrous—from the Latin monstrum, that which shows or warns—does

The Grotesque

211

just that: it shows that the undercurrent of actorial performance, with comedy as prime example, springs from a grotesque well. ORIGIN OF THE WORD: GROTESQUE The excavations of Emperor Nero’s palace in Rome during the fifteenth century revealed grottos decorated with frescoes depicting fantastical creatures fusing human with animal and floral features. These frescoes set the template for what was to become a distinct style in the fine arts and later literature—grottesche.5 Too easily dismissed as ornamental in the twentyfirst century, the frescoes unearthed half a millennia ago ignited a host of artistic visions hitherto unparalleled through works of art, extending from Michelangelo, Piranesi, Bosch, Goya, Callot, Giranesi and Hugo to Rodin, Magritte, de Chirico, Dix, Kahlo and Carrington, to name but a few.6 What signals the grotesque in these artists’ work is their proclivity for treating the grotesque as a phenomenon tied to its namesake derived from the experience of place—the grotto. The grotto plays tricks on the mind of the person entering it by creating a suspension of disbelief through its unrecognisable habitat. Only upon exiting does the person regain a sense of relief when realising that reality—and reason—has been restored to normality. From this subterranean origin the grotesque actively creates a space where things come into play, upending the relation between structurally opposed forms such as man-woman, human-animal, angelical-diabolical. Through its playfulness new categories are suggested that override opposition in favour of fusion and hybridity, which enable new expressions of art to emerge. The fact that the various expressions, forms and media of the grotesque expanded rapidly from the classical paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo to the artworks of Carrington, Kahlo and Dix in the twentieth century, points towards a fundamental quality of the grotesque—its constant shifting, as a state in “flux” as Frances Connelly says in The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture.7 This quality has made it difficult to rationalise and categorise its appearance and function throughout the art and literature of Western civilisation since its discovery, leading scholars to avoid ascribing it to an era or even a medium.8 Most scholarship on the grotesque relies predominantly on the influential texts by Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin with additional studies by Geoffrey Galt Harpham—the latter describing the fact that Kayser and Bakhtin differ on the most basic premises.9 Such discrepancy between leading scholars has engendered further analysis of the grotesque within more specified areas of research, such as Bernard McElroy’s work on the grotesque in literary fiction, which we will discuss further on. By reviewing the most important principles of the grotesque according to these scholars we will be

212

Chapter 10

able to show that the grotesque operates within the otherworldly and plays with our behaviour and perceptions of it—regardless if that otherworld is diabolical, human, or psychoanalytic. It will show that although scholarship on the grotesque in the fine arts and literature is extensive, it does not account for the medium of live performance. Kayser takes his cue from the Horatian notion of the grotesque as aegri somnia (a sick man’s dreams) developed during the Renaissance as sogni dei pittori: dreams pregnant with hidden meanings. In doing so Kayser continues the tradition established by artist Albrecht Dürer who understood the grotesque in the broader context of the oneiric. Dürer translated the Horation somnia into his own term, Traumwerk, proclaiming that “[w]hoever wants to make dreamwork must mix all things together.”10 Establishing a push-and-pull dynamic, the grotesque transcends mere caricature in place of something more profound whence one is placed in an “estranged and alienated world.”11 Alienation bears upon the grotesque as something incomprehensible, testifying to a barrier between the subject experiencing the grotesque and the grotesque object. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mix of “all things together” was directly related to the diabolical, which Kayser emphasises by attending to its etymological link to spiritual essence via the suffix –esque.12 Bakhtin, by contrast, rather forcefully refutes the tethering of the grotesque to the diabolical and places it within the realm of human culture. The spectacle of carnival acts as Bahktin’s prime medium of the grotesque liberation, through which all social orders and behaviours are stood on their head to enable society to act without inhibition. The carnivalesque body proposed in his reading of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, embraces the basic functions of the human body and its secretions of semen, blood, spit and piss. The carnival provides an uninhibited space of play at the same time that living the grotesque entails being wholly consumed by it.13 According to Harpham, the bridge between these two views of the grotesque is found in the idea of the grotesque as something that works on the margin, creating a gap in our understanding of the world.14 To support this idea Harpham uses John Ruskin’s analysis of what the grotesque effectively provokes in the spectator, A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself only; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.15

Kayser refutes the idea that we can bridge the gap: the grotesque remains estranged. For Ruskin, and by extension Harpham, the gap offers a possibility for us to access a dimension of reality hitherto unknown by interacting with

The Grotesque

213

the subterranean world of the grotto. The grotesque harbours neither benevolent nor malevolent intent in the sense of being morally superior or inferior, it rather acts as the medium through which the possibility of transformation takes place—an idea of the grotesque that does not stray far from the liberation sought by Bakhtin. The grotesque opens up the potential encounter with the fantastical, frightening and even terrifying. The terror might hide the profound, the ugly, the beautiful—and the “ludicrous might become the idea”; what Harpham suggests is that the grotesque enables us to “break through confusion to discovery.”16 The “discovery” that the grotesque instantiates nevertheless remains constrained due to the prevailing sense of disbelief— and irrationality—related to the grotesque, which in turn renders it undesired by the sense of order human society adheres to. Even Bakhtin’s grotesque liberation could only take place under very strict regulations of time and place— the carnival. This attests to the fact that if we are enchanted by the grotesque, we are nevertheless advised to stay away from that which enchants. In the genre of literary fiction Bernard McElroy gives another account of the “modern” grotesque, which in spite of its nominative modernity links back to older sources. McElroy introduces the source of the grotesque in art and literature as “man’s capacity for finding a unique and powerful fascination in the monstrous.”17 The monstrosities that fascinate are frequently painterly and literary concoctions, but equally potent are the sights of deformed bodies, creatures, even inanimate objects that appear other than they are. The term fascination derives from the Latin fascinum, connoting the sense of spell and witchcraft. McElroy’s source of the grotesque is something otherworldly— magic.18 In support of his argument that the grotesque is intimately tied to magic, McElroy draws on Freud’s theory of the uncanny as an embrace of the “animistic conception of the universe,” suggesting that traces of our animist ancestry carried down through the centuries make us, as modern peoples, reactive to certain external phenomena (such as the grotesque), which can be experienced as seeming animated by some non-human intelligence.19 On this basis McElroy proposes that “our response to the grotesque, whether in life or in art, has as a fundamental component that sense of the uncanny that arises from the reassertion of the primitive, magical view of the world.20 The mere suggestion of a “magical” creature such as a hybrid, ghost, or monster confuses the rational mind, rendering it unable to overcome its viscerally instinctive and fascinated response. Furthermore, the impulse of terror increases when the grotesque object resembles our world to such an extent that our view of the world becomes characterised by the grotesque.21 Subverting the distinction between imagination and reality, “[t]he grotesque does not address the rationalist in us or the scientist in us, but the vestigial primitive in us, the child in us, the potential psychotic in us.”22 It is the fascination and curiosity of becoming something else, of the world being other

214

Chapter 10

than we expected, that is the impetus for the dynamic movement set in motion by the grotesque as a constant push and pull towards it. The propensity for the grotesque to imbue a sense of terror and fascination in whomever comes into contact with it is also why Horace calls it “a sick man’s dream”—with emphasis on the malady—and why he dismisses it as a proper form of art in Ars Poetica.23 The grotesque as that which continually transforms, and remains in a state of flux, between that which we think we know and that which is presented to us, brings us back to the actor and her paradox. The actor uses something familiar—her body and voice—to transform herself into something that is unrecognisable from the person she presents herself as in “real” life. The actor’s paradox begins to resemble the grotesque operation per se when we take stock of the fact that the actor always plays a game of enchantment and transformation. Furthermore, the idea of a spectre in its immaterial (magic/ uncanny) sense presents itself as a monstrosity that simultaneously hides that which the actor is not from the audience and protects the actor from the audience’s gaze as a kind of apotropaic operation.24 To investigate this further we need to establish a reason to believe that the grotesque is fundamental to the art of acting. In contrast to the fine arts and literature the primary medium of theatrical performance is governed by that which is subject to corruption and decay: the human body. The human form portrayed in painting and literature falls flat on its face in physical performance simply because the physical reality of the human body is a priori doomed to failure. The grotesque human (and animal) form in painting, sculpture, or literature—although potentially horrific—remains transfixed, impervious to the passing of time, creating a barrier between the inanimate object of the work of art and the animate observer of the work of art. This renders the grotesque bearable for the observer. Theatrical live performance dissipates the barrier between spectator (observer of art) and actor (object of art) as it creates a milieu in which both come to terms with their shared mortality. The monstrosity of the actor, the game she plays, is an acute assault on the senses that leaves the spectator trembling because the distinction between spectator and actor—for that brief moment—is non-existent in the corporeal and ontological sense. Both face the unbearable truth of their own demise. In seeking the origins of the grotesque in theatre, vase paintings from the classical period up until the Hellenistic age can give insight into what came before Old Comedy. Here the existence of floral and human motifs abounds, but more interestingly one finds for the first time the deformed body of the komastai, on vases found in Corinth from around 620–595 BC, from which we derive the term comedy.25

The Grotesque

215

Figure 10.1 Corinthian cup. Multi-figure komast scene with lame dancer. 6th century BC (600–501 BC). Reproduced by permission from the Ashmolean Museum. AN1968.1835.

ANOTHER ORIGIN In looking at the ancient komastai dancers, we sense a direct connection between the term comedy and the grotesque. The komastai were seen as outsiders and represented the other: both mythical and human.26 Although the appearances of the komastai vary throughout the period in which they appear on vases, it is clear that the exaggerated and disproportionate body of the komastai retained its significance in later comic imagery.27 The physical bearing of the komastai lived on in Aristophanes’s comedies inasmuch as the actors would not only have worn comic masks but would have been fitted with body masks that used prostheses and dangling phalluses.28 Indeed, critical attention directed towards the use of masks in Old Comedy, as well as tragedy, has primarily focused on features of the mask/face precisely because scholars have been able to study terracotta figurines and vase paintings up close. But for the spectators of the live performance, it would have been impossible to inspect the mask so closely. More to the point, it would have been entirely redundant because it was the full-body action of the actor that brought the mask to life. As Angeliki Varakis has suggested, the use of mask and body-mask was never mentioned in the writings of comedy (nor tragedy) because the mask (and body-mask) were simply regarded as the tools with which theatre was enacted.29 The physical distortions of such a grotesque body-mask has constantly posed an inherent threat to the current establishment; its otherness was not delimited by any physical attribute but

216

Chapter 10

bore a host of implications concerning what differentiation is, what it looks like and how it behaves. Having already abandoned the rules of decorum, the grotesque body is at liberty to profess allegiance to whomever, or whatever, it pleases. Its actions and thoughts (speech) are potential truths simultaneously considered valuable and susceptible to rational invalidation because of the otherworldly nature it constitutes. The physical bearing of the komastai, also retained in Old Comedy, means that we can draw a lineage within a grotesque genealogy of acting between the spectre at work in the modern actor and her ancestors from antiquity and beyond. In this context, the ancient Greek body-mask is the intermediating spectre materialised as the physical bridging of the gap between actor and character.30 The mask protects the actor from her characters’ sensibilities and emotional fits. The actor remains in total control of her natural (personal) being because she is literally acting with another body. The material donning of that which is monstrous—a distorted, exaggerated body and face—both reveals and warns against (human) hypocrisy. An outlining of a genealogy of grotesque acting would be remiss to omit mention of those examples of theatricality that seem to make do without requiring supplementation from other bodies. Instead, an alternative tradition makes the flesh and blood of human beings into its own kind of monstrous mask. Such is the status of St. Francis’s performative oeuvre, lodged in the tumultuous Middle Ages. In this material staging of theological reflection, we find engrained evidence of the grotesque as that which is divine. Having proceeded largely without notice, this peculiarly performative case of the grotesque nevertheless informs our modern notion of acting as transformation. THE GROTESQUE AS THAT WHICH ULTIMATELY TRANSFORMS The actions of St. Francis and his band of joculatores Domini are characteristically theatrical yet have been entirely eliminated from the canon of Western theatre history.31 They are, however, noted by Erich Auerbach in his seminal work Mimesis to have furthered the establishment of a living and popular Italian vernacular through their “accessible” sermon scenes.32 Yet Auerbach’s interest remains fixed on the linguistic possibilities inherent in the “living” speech of these scenes, rather than the semantic possibilities underpinning the unorthodox methods that St. Francis used. An example of one such “accessible” scene is his grotesque rendition of the hymn “Bethlehem” by way of sonorous bleating. The reception of such acts as blasphemous has overshadowed the reading of the performance as revealing a curious connection to both a concrete and semantic reality. Bet Leḥem (‫)בֵּית לֶחֶם‬‎ , literally means “house

The Grotesque

217

of bread.” Viewed in this way, the bleating establishes a connection between the body of Christ as the bread of the Eucharist and his representation as the sacrificial lamb.33 Words that carry reverence and seriousness are drowned out by various indefinite interpretations in the voice of an animal: the fool appears to mock the pretence of the situation. The act, although “accessible,” deceives the rational mind into pronouncing it profane when, in fact, the very idea of transubstantiation is the metamorphosis of the body from one thing to another. The comic fuses with the grotesque in this instance as that which refuses to comply with the normative conduct applied to hymn-singing. Behind the direct accessibility of Francis’s sermons lies a refusal to fall into line with the norms of appropriate social conduct and rational communication, especially when considering his unique and disturbing treatment of the leper. The leper, too disgusting and too ugly for anybody to imitate, calls forth feelings of terror that forestall the response of laughter from whomsoever he might encounter. This view of laughter is longstanding and finds its genesis in Aristotle’s Poetics in his description of the comic mask as ugly but harmless. Two millennia later this point was taken up and expanded by Henri Bergson who claimed that “a deformity that may become comic is a deformity a normally built person could successfully imitate.”34 The inability to imitate the grossness of the leper is one of the main reasons why his appearance is hidden from depiction in literature and on the stage and screen. Yet for St. Francis it is precisely his encounter with the monstrosity of the leper that saves Francis and releases him from his sins of judging others, and in doing so allows for merriment and laughter in the face of adversity. Such is the depiction in Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel God’s Pauper: St. Francis of Assisi, narrated by St. Francis’s closest follower, Frate Leone. Halfway through the novel, Frate Leone asks St. Francis what he hates and despises the most. Hesitating, St. Francis admits that the lepers disgust him and that he feels hate not only at seeing them but also in hearing their bells. That night God appears to St. Francis in a dream and tells him that he will meet a leper whom he will embrace and love. Upon waking he finds himself in despair over the demanding will of God. As the two brothers set out from the cave where they had spent the night, a leper appears before them with stumps for limbs and oozing sores for lips, at which point Frate Leone recounts how, “[t]hrowing himself upon the leper, Francis embraced him, then lowered his head and kissed him upon the lips. Afterwards he lifted him in his arms and, covering him with his robe, began to advance slowly, with heavy steps, towards the city.”35 The leper for his part utters a shrill cry as St. Francis runs towards him and tries to ward him off: a reversal of roles has taken place. While the leper apprehends the actions of St. Francis as grotesque, in the moment of embrace the leper surrenders to this unexpected act of humanity. The grotesque nature of the leper is in this situation used as a displacement of the comic: it is St.

218

Chapter 10

Francis who acts grotesquely whilst the fearful grotesque subject is the one who experiences fear. Probing deeper still, we find that the moment of transformation is the acknowledgment of the horror of what leprosy signifies— both for the leper himself and for St. Francis. The grotesque nature of the act of the embrace transgresses the boundaries between tragedy and comedy and thereby creates a singular category of its own wherein the leper and non-leper coexist on equal terms. The physical demand put forward by St. Francis, that faith must be treated as a living thing that is sensed with the body, naturally put him at odds with his fellow clergymen. Yet viewed as an example of theatricality, St. Francis offers us an insight into the fundamental power of using the body as a means of transformation. In the case of his preaching, he was in no need of a mask for his face or body, as his divine calling gave him “spectral” protection. His theatrical preaching nevertheless relies upon a mode of comic staging that transforms the actor as well as the spectator through allegories, themes and transformative embodiments—all of which are grotesque in nature. THE GROTESQUE AS THAT WHICH ULTIMATELY TRANSFORMS THEATRE “Is it not the task of the grotesque in the theatre to preserve this ambivalent attitude in the spectator by switching the course of the action with strokes of contrast?”36 ——Vsevolod Meyerhold

St. Francis’s transformative practices outside of the theatrical arena shine a bright light upon the perplexing nature of the actor as monstrous. What, then, happens if the grotesque not only operates in the actor as an otherworldly deformity, as in the case of the komastai or the divine presence in St. Francis, but becomes the main dramaturgical tool that transforms the very nature of theatre? Advocating a theatre rooted in the grotesque remains controversial because of the confused and negative connotation associated with the grotesque. And, if its power to effect ambivalence in the spectator makes the grotesque controversial, it is perhaps even more controversial to state that the monstrous problem of the actor is that she does not know what to do with herself, as Jacques Copeau suggests. The proposition of a theatre rooted in the grotesque—whereby the actor inhabits a certain monstrosity—is contested and divides opinion. When investigating a theatre of the grotesque further one encounters the comic trope of cabotinage time and again.37 According to Meyerhold,

The Grotesque

219

cabotinage capacitates the possibility of a new revitalised theatre. He proclaims that “the cabotin keeps alive the tradition of the true art of acting,” evoking the strolling wanderer, juggler and histrion who frequented medieval fairs—echoing the jocular friars of St Francis.38 Meanwhile, Copeau considers it to be a term of denigration. His mission is to “free the actor from cabotinage . . . it is to that end we stubbornly bend our efforts.”39 While clearly at odds with one another on whether or not cabotinage should be referred to in actor training, both Meyerhold and Copeau yield surprisingly similar methods to instigate theatrical reform. Both develop and practise a new system of actor training reliant upon the visceral, age-honed traditions of commedia dell’arte, with particular emphasis on mask-work. Their respective activities and curricula40 coincide with a transformation of theatre fuelled by the interrelation of the grotesque and the comic as a refusal of naturalistic theatre.41 The defence of cabotinage Meyerhold proposes finds its roots in the reappreciation and reappraisal of the art of the comic actor.42 Condemning the “intellectual actor” as merely a reader put on stage in make-up and costume, Meyherhold holds that the “true art of acting” requires the actor to have the necessary physical skills to enable her to be totally self-possessed and not merely at the service of the dramatist’s words.43 Being in full possession of her body like an acrobat, a juggler, or a mummer means that the actor, rather than becoming a puppet to the dramatist, is able to harness and understand her own capacities and the range of skills she can put into play, either at the behest of the director or by her own initiation. That range of skills available to the actor must be able to be put to the test at any given moment. The actor must always be prepared to improvise without hesitation in response to whatever the situation, scene, or character demands.44 Meyerhold sought to provoke the acquisition of such skills by sudden interruptions of the actors’ performances to negate the process of rational thought, obedience to dramatic text, or psychological intention: Meyerhold called theatre itself the grotesque. This particular notion of the grotesque lies very close to the observations made by Ruskin outlined earlier, but here it is not the painter who traces gaps in their interpretation of the motif but the actor who constantly upsets the desire for comprehension and reason in the spectator. The cabotin does this for Meyerhold: he introduces the grotesque as the fundamental ground upon which theatre is able to rest—a ground which constantly provokes and nurtures a “conflict between form and content.”45 Just as the Roman grottos left the spectator conflicted and confused as to what form—and understanding— one should prescribe to the hybrid figures painted on the walls, so theatre should impact its spectator too. Thus theatre as spectacle comes to the fore.46 Disregarding literary devices, logical rationalisations and eloquent renderings of thesis-antithesis, the stage is suggested as pure potency. The spectator

220

Chapter 10

is to be bombarded with images and movement that make it impossible to rationalise what is seen, leaving only an immediate imprint of emotions. The interruption and suspense, the transformations of the actor and her ability to convey her role through bodily movements and gesture signal that “[t]he basis of the grotesque is the artist’s constant desire to switch the spectator from the plane he has just reached to another which is totally unforeseen.”47 In Meyerhold’s defence of the grotesque, allusions to the vaudeville of the late nineteenth century and the pantomimes of ancient Greece and Rome abound, as the predecessors upon which the history of “theatricality” has to be founded.48 Without the intention to revive either of these predecessors in their historical form, references to them nevertheless act as reminders of how the popular and comic interventions of those forms sprang from a subterranean source that regarded laughter and comedy as able to deliver provocative and hard-hitting truths more readily than tragedy—as in Old Comedy and the antecedent komastai. The examples of the grotesque that Meyerhold calls upon are exclusively comic, or from the comic repertoire. As a template for grotesque theatre Meyerhold singles out commedia dell’arte and from it he draws a programme for the actor that aims to harness the actor’s ability for the sincerity of play by always retaining the sense of make-believe.49 Exploring the mask-work in commedia—and the beguiling cabotin—Meyerhold seizes upon the fact that in order for the mask to be played well there clearly needs to be an emotional detachment from it on the part of the actor. Once the mask comes off, the actor should maintain the same attitude as when she played with the mask:50 he [the actor] remains in full control of his actions by virtue of the physical dexterity and self-control that he has inherited from the cabotin; at the tensest moments of the drama he continues to “manipulate his masks,” thereby conveying without ambiguity the most subtle shades of irony and the most complex patterns of emotions.51

Meyerhold’s research enforces and provides a practical example of how technical (psychological and physical) skill rather than emotion creates the character. It suggests that an intermediating spectre is honed by physicality rather than psychological effort—implicitly refuting the Diderotian spectre based on imagination and observations alone.52 While the body-masks of the komastai were not used by Meyerhold, it is nevertheless telling that the distortion of the body and face in commedia and the cabotin emboldens and thus frees the actor from psychology. While Meyerhold uses the comedic genres of the cabotin and commedia to bring theatricality back into the theatre, Copeau, during the same period, wrestles with what is ultimately at stake in the work of the actor. In his refutation

The Grotesque

221

of cabotinage, we find that what is under attack is actually the artificiality of the actor: the insincerity of play that Meyerhold was also combatting.53 That their theatrical intuitions aligned is made obvious by Copeau’s multiple references to Meyerhold. He proudly states his allegiance with Meyerhold’s theatrical reforms and suggests that both express “the same unlimited dramatic ambition” concerning mise-en-scène.54 The fact that Meyerhold had already seized upon the acting techniques of commedia dell’arte spurred Copeau on to develop them within his own school and company.55 To state that Copeau would have had major issues with Meyerhold’s use of the term cabotin rings false, as both used primarily comic acting techniques in order to create a theatre based on the sincerity of play, exposing the cloak of false seriousness donned by their predecessors, especially in naturalistic theatre.56 Copeau’s meditation upon Diderot’s paradox of the actor ignites his own reconsideration of what is at stake in the theatre.57 He finds that the monstrosity of acting derives from the “blood” that ceases to flow in the actor no matter how much she has prepared or is “in tune” with her character, What is horrible about the actor is not the lie, for he does not lie. It is not deceit, for he does not deceive. It is not hypocrisy, for he applies his monstrous sincerity to being what he is not, and not at all in expressing what he does not feel, but in feeling the make-believe . . . the actor is doing something forbidden: he is playing with his humanness and making sport of it . . . he can give nothing but himself, not in effigy but in body and soul, with nothing in between. His creation is himself, both as subject and as object, beginning and end, matter and instrument. Therein lies the mystery: that a human being can think of himself and treat himself as artistic matter, play on himself like an instrument with which he must identify while never ceasing to be distinct from it, simultaneously active as a person and impersonating that activity, the natural man and the puppet.58

The make-believe, so pronounced in Meyerhold, prevails here as the forbidden act that discloses the essence of acting: we are back in the graveyard with Diderot’s playing children, only now the actor is the spectral white sheet on a broomstick. The Diderotian spectre that mediates the gap between actor and character—the white sheet on a broomstick—is in Copeau transformed into a living, breathing, creature, namely the actor herself. The question as to how an actor is supposed to be devoid of feeling and sensibility, according to Diderot’s definition, lies in the work of the mask, which both places theatre back at its origin in ancient Greece and proposes the solution to the actor’s paradox as an actual method. The actor, when donning the mask, immediately experiences the bodily transformations that the use of the mask requires of her. These transformations become the blueprint—the spectral properties—that lay the groundwork for whichever character she will play. The wearing of the mask thus lends itself to an experiential method whereby

222

Chapter 10

the actor is able to create—through her bodily transformation—the same sense of distance between herself and the character as she does once the mask comes off. On Copeau’s understanding, the actor is not simply “devoid of emotion” but actually physically exposes herself to a multitude of emotions by initially donning a mask through which movement, rhythm and plasticity are developed. Once the tool of the mask comes off, these qualities of movement, rhythm and plasticity have the possibility of settling within the actor’s body as she takes on any character. Only then is it possible to distinguish the operation of a so-called spectre. The deformed nature of acting, whether the gestures and bodies inhabited by the actor are of noble character or not, suggests that the actor as a species is grotesque. While this might seem straightforward, Copeau’s realisation about the awkwardness of the actor, which Meyerhold also seizes upon when calling for a grotesque theatre that relies on physical training, is that the actor is often incapable of acting with conviction and sincerity. She does not know what to do with her hands, how to stand, or where to look because she feels exposed when she cannot hide behind the words of the dramatist. Copeau, like Meyerhold, commedia, the pantomimes and plays of ancient Greece, resorts to the mask as that which frees the body from the face (grimaces) to restore to the actor the capacity of being fully aware of her body, its movements, and its positions: “You understand that the face, for us, is tormenting: the mask saves our dignity, our freedom. The mask protects the soul from grimaces. Thence, by a series of very explainable consequences, the wearer of the mask acutely feels his possibilities of corporeal expression.”59 The notion of the mask, as we’ve seen, is intimately tied to the comic and this is further established by the sole use of the comic repertoire in the rediscovery of the mask in the twentieth century as a tool that enables the actor to free herself from the dictated words of the dramatist and relieve herself of the bondage of psychology in favour of physiology. The operation that takes place within the actor and lends her the possibility of a second nature taking hold of her is thus initiated by the mask that she applies in order to find the character. Once there, she can submit herself to objective observation and the rigorous physical work that facilitates a presentiment of whatever the character goes through—physically and spiritually. A simple exercise of this kind would be to position oneself in a physical attitude that initiates the emotion or state of the character.60 If a young actor plays someone of advanced age, or someone in a sad or proud state, she positions herself in the outer shape: with bent knees and supporting her back for old age; letting her shoulders fall forward so that the chest is contracted for a state of sadness; opening her chest outwards and standing firmly for a proud posture. The actor creates an affinity between herself and the character which she is playing, not as a matter of representation but rather an attuning of what the

The Grotesque

223

Figure 10.2 Masks made by Josephine Gray used by Iraqi Bodies.

actor experiences through the various postures combined with the intuition that all of those states have either been experienced by her body or eventually will be experienced—as in the case of old age. She is, and also is not, entirely who she is—she is transformed. As the material seed of the spectre, the mask confirms the grotesque operations (and ontology) of the actor in her physical distortion of becoming other or even otherworldly, which she retains once the bare face is uncovered. The supposed deception of the actor, her monstrosity, is curiously also her salvation. The sense of joy, which we so readily relate to the comic, is intimately tied to the daily transformations of “truth” that we experience. Although we find the origin of the grottesche in the Roman grottos discovered in the fifteenth century, the operation of the grotesque has a much earlier beginning in performance. The komastai and later Old Comedy of ancient Greece disrupted not only the ideal but also the very notion of “truth-speaking” of which we found evidence in St. Francis’s “blasphemous” practices. Although his sermons were performed outside of the theatrical arena, with neither mask nor body-mask, the sense of “masking” retains its significance through faith. The entire body of St. Francis becomes the mask upon which sermons are transcribed, as seen in the bleating hymn and leprous embrace. This lineage of the grotesque continues throughout the medieval fairs of the cabotin and commedia as the total transformation of the actor’s body that the modern actor rediscovers in comic acting with masks. Only then

224

Chapter 10

is the actor once again situated within a space that makes room for play in communion with her second nature. The dynamic of the distorted body, the body upset by a “false” voice, or the human body transformed to animal carries the seed of terror, but equally of fascination and wonder. She began fitted with a full body mask that she the actor, through the centuries began to shed, revealing that the paradox of acting is the continual, physical, spectral transformation—always being in “flux”—which constitutes the grotesque species of the actor. Consequently, what is put into play by the grotesque is the comic nature of make-believe. The spectator immediately recognises that an actor playing an animal is comic, but it is equally comic when an actor plays an animal-like human. Take as an example the actor playing in a snake-like fashion; her limbs and gait are slippery, her gaze oscillates between side-glances and intent stares, she speaks with a slight lisp. Depending on the degree to which the actor chooses to exaggerate or diminish this animalistic body, the response of the spectator also varies. If the actor exaggerates, it is a play-act; if the actor chooses only to retain certain snakelike elements, another subtler gesture emerges that is in equal parts amusing and terrifying. In both cases we find the actor manoeuvring within a space where the familiar is disguised as unfamiliar. The grotesque, in privileging what is seen over what is thought, and the physical over the psychic, renders the notion of what Dürer called Traumwerk real in its carnate sense. The spectre of acting that loomed large in Diderot retains its significance as operation but is found inadequate as it relies on a purely imaginative (psychological) operation on the part of the actor. Further, the comic tradition of acting that is reliant upon the actor’s physical skill not only posits the high status of spectacle—that which is seen—over aural discourse, but it actually reveals that the grotesque, which finds itself lodged within comedy, actually upholds the most basic theatrical principles of sincere make-believe. Furthermore, the comic and the grotesque conceptually converge as they both upset the idea of philosophical enquiry as rumination on ideal abstract knowledge—a project long undertaken by (tragic) philosophy. The suggestion of a “comic” philosophy characterised by the grotesque naturally upsets the presupposed inclination we as a species have developed towards the ideal, towards truth, towards decorum. As rumination, comic philosophy (a philosophy underpinned by comedy rather than tragedy) reveals the terrifying truth that the only certainty we have is of our own demise. The (comic) actor as a species of the grotesque is our greatest example of this revelation, hence our ambivalent philosophical relation not only to theatre but to acting.

The Grotesque

225

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams James L., and Wilson Yates, eds. The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. New York: Dover Publications, 1997. Attisani, Antonio, and Jane House. “Franciscan Performance: A Theatre Lost and Found Again.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 1 (2003): 48–60. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Barasch, Frances K. The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Dover, 2005. Braun, Edward, ed. and trans. Meyerhold on Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016. Clark, John R. The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Clayborough, Arthur. The Grotesque in English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Connelly, Frances S. The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Connelly, Frances S., ed. Modern Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Copeau, Jacques. Copeau: Texts on Theatre. Edited and translated by John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul. London: Routledge, 1990. Diderot, Denis. The Paradox of Acting. Translated by Walter Harris Pollock. London: Chatto & Windus Picadilly, 1883. Edwards, Justin D., and Rune Graulund, eds. Grotesque. London: Routledge, 2013. Freud, Sigmund “The ‘Uncanny.’” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Horace. The Works of Horace. Edited by C. Smart and Theodore Alois Buckley. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863. Isler-Kerényi, Cornelia. “Komasts, Mythic Imaginary and Ritual.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond, edited by Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Kazantzakis, Nikos. God’s Pauper: St. Francis of Assisi. Translated by P. A. Bien. London: Faber & Faber, 1999. Lange, Konrad von, and F. L. Fuhse, eds. Dürers Schriftlicher Nachlass. Halle: Niemeyer, 1893.

226

Chapter 10

McCaw, Dick. Bahktin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Grotowski. New York: Routledge, 2016. McElroy, Bernard. Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989. Meyer, Michael J., ed. Literature and the Grotesque. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. “The Fairground Booth.” In Meyerhold on Theatre, edited and translated by Edward Braun. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. “The Naturalistic Theatre and the Theatre of Mood.” In Meyerhold on Theatre, edited and translated by Edward Braun. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016. Rudnitsky, Konstantin. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. Translated by Roxane Permar. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin (Library edition). Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. incl. appendix. London: George Allen, 1902–1913. Silk, M. S. Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Smith, Tyler Jo. “Komastai or ‘Hephaistoi’? Visions of Comic Parody in Archaic Greece.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 52 (2009): 69–92. Smith, Tyler Jo. Komast Dancers in Archaic Greek Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Symons, James M. Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque. Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973. Varakis, Angeliki. “Body and Mask in Aristophanic Performance.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 53, no. 1 (2010): 17–38. Wiles, David. The Masks of Menander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Yates, Wilson. “An Introduction to the Grotesque.” In The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, edited by James L. Adams and Wilson Yates. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1997.

NOTES 1. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. by Walter Harris Pollock (London: Chatto and Windus Picadilly, 1883), 56. 2. In the original French, Diderot uses the word fantôme; following the English translation of Walter Harris Pollock, I use the word spectre throughout the chapter. Another common translation is phantom, used, for example, by Copeau in his discussion of Diderot. The use of the word spectre also denotes its connection with that which is spectral—that which appears—as in spectacle. 3. Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, 12. 4. Considering that acting at the time was generally regarded as little more than vanity on the part of the actors, or worse, immodesty, Diderot’s dialogue is as refreshing as it is well written. It does nevertheless pose problems for theatre practitioners

The Grotesque

227

in the twenty-first as well as in the twentieth centuries. While the primary premise of Diderot’s argumentation pertains mainly to the problem in acting and enunciation of French plays and their dramatists, the notion of the spectre and the work it suggests for the actor—regardless of language or play—is still a notion we haven’t yet entirely come to terms with. 5. See James L. Adams and Wilson Yates, eds., The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, eds., Grotesque (London: Routledge, 2013); John R. Clark, The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Frances S. Connelly, ed., Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael J. Meyer, ed., Literature and the Grotesque (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 6. Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 7. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, 13. 8. “The grotesque is not a genre to which a work either does or does not belong. It does not originate in a particular school or artistic theory, but antedates all schools and theories. Nor is it an absolute which is either fully present or not at all. Rather, it is a continuum which may be present in varying degrees in otherwise disparate works.” Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989), 2. 9. “Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World are deservedly considered the two most important [theoretical works on the grotesque]. Both are prodigiously well informed, carefully argued, persuasive accounts. And they manage to contradict each other utterly on the most basic premises. Authority is even more widely dispersed among the lesser lights, so that, in mastering the field, one watches it atomize into fine mist.” Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), xvii–xviii, quoted in James L. Adams and Wilson Yates, eds., The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997), 29. 10. Albrecht Dürer, Dürers Schriftlicher Nachlass, eds., Konrad von Lange and F. L. Fuhse (Halle: Niemeyer, 1893), 219; quoted in Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, 120. 11. Wilson Yates, “An Introduction to the Grotesque,” in The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, 17. Emphasis in original. 12. Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 40. 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 7. 14. In addition to building on Kayser and Bakhtin, Harpham discusses the works of earlier theorists such as Kant, Hegel, Baudelaire and Ruskin.

228

Chapter 10

15. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin (Library edition), eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. incl. appendix (London: George Allen, 1902– 1913), 5. 16. Harpham, On the Grotesque, 14–18, quoted in James L. Adams. and Wilson Yates, eds., The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, 31. 17. McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 1. 18. “Fascinate, v,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, https:​//​oed​.com), accessed June 23, 2019. The origin of the word is given as “Late 16th century (in the sense ‘bewitch’): from Latin fascinat‘bewitched,’ from the verb fascinare, from fascinum ‘spell, witchcraft.’” 19. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 240; quoted in McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 3. 20. McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 4. 21. McElroy’s analysis of literary fiction leads him to posit that the literary device of heightening a magical aspect in relation to reality is what constitutes the modern grotesque. Modern man becomes humiliated and this is the grotesque denominator. He is no longer either angelic or diabolic but trapped in his own humanness dominated by reason as the guiding principle of knowledge. The modern grotesque turns the protagonist into an embodiment of grotesque as the animistic and magical aspects of the grotesque constantly poke at the imagination of another, magical reality, hidden within the material reality governed by reason. In the modern sense the grotesque can be used as a “heightening device by which the conflict between self and other is intensified by expanding it to magical proportions.” An example of this heightening can be seen in Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect, a reality in which the protagonist is no longer approached by grotesque external elements but completely transforms into a grotesque object. For the purpose of this chapter, which deals with the performative aspect of the actor, such a literary heightening device cannot account for much subtler operation of monstrosity on the part of the actor. See McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 18. 22. McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 5. 23. Horace, The Works of Horace, eds. C. Smart and Theodore Alois Buckley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863). 24. The study of the use of masks and acting as transformation seen in almost all indigenous cultures will not be discussed in this chapter. Although the ritualistic history of acting is an important aspect of anthropological theatre studies the purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the so-called “spectre” finds its material existence in the (comic) mask, which acts a practical tool for the actor rather than a mysterious “happening.” The material operation of the mask does not, however, detract from the spiritual/mysterious experience of play-acting, nor from observing it. 25. See M. S. Silk, Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9, 78, n. 116; and Tyler Jo Smith, “Komastai or ‘Hephaistoi’? Visions of Comic Parody in Archaic Greece,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 52 (2009), 70.

The Grotesque

229

26. Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, “Komasts, Mythic Imaginary and Ritual,” The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond, eds. Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 85. 27. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not the physical distortions of the komastai are created by padded costumes, or if the komastai are simply “fat.” Whether or not they wore padded costumes—or indeed how they would have looked in performance, if they actually performed as komasts—remains shrouded in uncertainty. The later comic oevre that sprang from figures such as the komastai, and indeed satyrs, nevertheless clearly indicates that padded costumes, or body-masks, would have been used by actors in Old Comedy. For further reading on komasts see The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond, eds. Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Tyler Jo Smith, Komast Dancers in Archaic Greek Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 28. Angeliki Varakis, “Body and Mask in Aristophanic Performance,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 53, no. 1 (2010), 17–18. 29. Varakis, “Body and Mask in Aristophanic Performance,” 35. 30. Shakespeare too, in the guise of Hamlet, proclaims this monstrosity and its deceptive nature—though the Shakespearean actor has been stripped of her outer mask(s): “Ay, so, God bye to you.—Now I am alone / O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul so to his own conceit / That from her working all his visage wanned, / Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! / For Hecuba!” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act II, scene 2. 31. Antonio Attisani and Jane House, “Franciscan Performance: A Theatre Lost and Found Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 1 (2003), 48. 32. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 162 and 168. 33. Another interpretation, based on the Arabic meaning of Bayt Laḥm (‫بيت لحم‬‎) as the “house of meat,” would suggest that not only does the lamb represent the body of Christ in its transubstantiation as bread, but also it is a literal image of the flesh and blood of Christ. St. Francis is known to have travelled to Egypt in 1219 to meet with Sultan Al-Malik-Al-Kâmal. It remains unclear what exactly happened during this visit to the Sultan, but we do know that Francis arrived back at the Christian camp unharmed. His hagiographers have suggested that the Sultan was in contact with practitioners of Sufism. If this were the case, St. Francis could have come into direct contact with the dance practices of Sufi rituals. 34. See Aristotle, Poetics [1449a], trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover Publications, 1997), 9; and Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Dover Publications, 2005), 12. Emphasis in original. 35. Nikos Kazantzakis, God’s Pauper: St. Francis of Assisi, trans. P. A. Bien (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), 93. 36. Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 166.

230

Chapter 10

37. Meyerhold’s and Copeau’s antagonistic views on the term cabotinage might have been linguistic rather than practical. Cabotinage in the Larousse dictionary is described as “action, pour un acteur ou une actrice, de parler de soi avec pretention.” If in French the cabotin represents pretentious acting, it is nevertheless true that Meyerhold tenaciously fought against pretentious and sophisticated acting. For Meyerhold, the cabotin represents the living, popular tradition of acting. 38. Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 148. The essay was a reply to Alexander Benois’s denunciation of cabotinage. Meyerhold’s reply, however, not only reacts against Benois’s allusion to the nostalgia and romanticism of the so-called Mystery Plays but seems also to implicitly attack Benois’s rise in the theatre as a director in his own right, having come from a background in the fine arts and having attempted to put his representational (and static) ideals of art upon the stage—a project that would have been the opposite of Meyerhold’s own experiments. See Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, trans. Roxane Permar (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 20. 39. Jacques Copeau, Copeau: Texts on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul (London: Routledge, 1990), 23–24. Emphasis in original. 40. Copeau’s first-year prospectus would have included the following classes: Prosody, Poetic Technique, Theory of the Theatre/Dramatic Instinct, Reading/Diction, Acting/mise en scène, French Language/Memory, Vieux Colombier Repertoire, Theatrical Architecture, Music and Song, Acrobatics, Hébert Method of Physical Education, Dance, and Workshops in Stagecraft. This kind of prospectus would have been far removed from other theatre courses in France at the time as it includes physical training and extensive study, not only of the history, theory and philosophy of acting but of all other aspects of the theatre such as set design and spatial architecture. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 41–42. Meyerhold, on the other hand, offered classes in, for example, Theatrical Production, Methods of Staging Commedia dell’Arte Performances, Techniques of Speaking Poetry and Prose, Stage Movement along with rigorous studies of theatre history and theory. The curriculum of his studio aimed to fulfil five goals: “(1) study of the technique of movement, (2) study of the basic principles of staging techniques of improvizational Italian comedy, (3) employing in the modern theatre the traditional methods of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (4) musical reading in drama, (5) practical study of the material elements of production: building, furnishings, lighting, properties, and makeup.” James M. Symons, Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque (Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973), 64–65. 41. Schopenhauer crops up as a point of departure (especially for Meyerhold) indicating the “gap” of the imagination that cannot be forfeited by naturalist tendencies in the theatre. See Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Naturalistic Theatre and The Theatre of Mood,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 29. 42. The definition Meyerhold gives of the cabotin is in response to Benois’s criticism of the cabotin as that which brings lies and deception into the theatre (contrasting with the supposed “truth” of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre). Meyerhold writes, “The restoration of the traditional theatre is hampered by the alliance which the public itself has formed with those so-called dramatists who turn literature for

The Grotesque

231

reading into literature for the theatre—as though the public’s attitude to the theatre were not confused enough already. . . . It was with his [the cabotin’s] help that the Western theatre came to full flower in the theatres of Spain and Italy in the seventeenth century . . . the mystery players themselves sought the help of the cabotins. The cabotin was to be found wherever there was any sort of dramatic presentation . . . if there is no cabotin, there is no theatre either; and, contrariwise, as soon as the theatre rejects the basic rules of theatricality it straightway imagines that it can dispense with the cabotin. . . . But how can this be done? First of all, it seems to me that we should apply ourselves to the study and restoration of those theatres of the past in which the cult of cabotinage once held sway. Our dramatists have no idea at all of the laws of true theatre. In the Russian theatre of the nineteenth century the old vaudeville was replaced by a flood of plays of brilliant dialectic, plays à thèse, plays of manners, plays of mood. . . . The story-teller employs fewer and fewer descriptive passages, enlivens his narrative by allocating more and more dialogue to his characters, and eventually invites the reader into an auditorium. Has the story-teller any need of the cabotin? Of course not. The readers themselves can go up on to the stage and read the dialogue of their favourite author role-by-role out loud to the public. This is what is meant by ‘an affectionate rendering of the play.’ No time has been lost in finding a name for the reader turned actor, for now we have the term ‘the intellectual actor.’ The same deathly hush prevails in the auditorium as in the reading-room of a library and it sends the public to sleep. The reading-room of a library is the only proper place for such gravity and immobility.” 43. Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 148–50. 44. Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 150 and 152. 45. Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 152. 46. Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 168. 47. In English the word “spectacle” is most commonly used negatively as something full of air with no substance. That isn’t the case in, for example, French, where spectacle merely suggests a performance. Imbedded in Meyerhold’s use of the word spectacle a critique seems to be put forward regarding the inherent prejudice found in Aristotle’s Poetics against theatre that relies on visual elements rather than text. For a discussion of Aristotle’s phrasing in the Poetics and its influence on theatre as auditory rather than visual experience, see David Wiles, The Masks of Menander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19. 48. Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” 166. 49. See Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” footnote 12, 150. 50. Molière is also read and studied in the laboratory of Meyerhold. Commedia dell’arte is the prevalent method and inspiration for Meyerhold but also for Molière. 51. Dick McCaw, Bahktin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Grotowski (New York: Routledge, 2016), 176. 52. McCaw, Bahktin and Theatre, 176. Meyerhold makes a very interesting claim that resonates with the Bahktinian grotesque of gargantuan exaggerations and that of Traumwerk when he says that theatre must borrow “from every source anything which satisfies its joie de vivre and its capricious, mocking attitude to life.” Bahktin and Theatre, 174.

232

Chapter 10

53. In Meyerhold’s writings one finds that he at times uses the term “artistic reincarnation,” which appears to be very similar to the notion of spectre. The choice of the word “reincarnation” stems from his view of the naturalistic actor as she who simply “reincarnates” nature. For the “true art of acting” to come alive, it would be necessary to instigate an “artistic reincarnation” that relied upon stylistic elements and the plasticity of the actor’s total expression. See McCaw, Bahktin and Theatre, 176, and Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 29. 54. On cabotinage Copeau writes, “What is cabotinage? We no longer have a clear idea of what it is, we are so saturated and infected with it. . . . It is a disease which is not only endemic to the theatre. It’s the malady of insincerity, or rather falseness. He who suffers from it ceases to be authentic, to be human. . . . I am speaking of all actors, of the most unimportant of them and of his slightest gesture, of the total mechanisation of the person, of the absolute lack of profound intelligence and true spirituality.” Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 24, endnote 1. In comparison to Meyerhold’s defense of the cabotin it is clear that Copeau also sought to look back through the annals of theatre history in order to evade the “total mechanisation of the person” by looking at theatrical traditions rooted in the “living”—symbolic, ritual and carnival—life of, for example, ancient Greece and the commedia dell’arte. This, however, was not to be confused with a revival of outdated forms but a search for theatrical techniques and constructions in order to avoid the trap of literature both Copeau and Meyerhold claimed that the theatre had fallen into. 55. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 111. 56. Discrepancies between Copeau’s methods and those of Meyerhold and— among others—crop up later in Copeau’s theatrical journey when he senses the tension between technical virtuosity and dramatic potential, firstly in his own work but consequently also in the work of others. The purely stylistic tendency he observed in what followed on from the work he had instigated was disappointing to him because he perceived that the virtuosity of the actor’s bodily skills had taken precedence over dramatic necessity. Many of his pupils went on to create and set-up schools devoted entirely to (corporeal) mime, which was experienced as a great failure by Copeau. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 207–8. 57. One example of exposing the false seriousness of naturalistic theatre was in Meyerhold’s case to rid the stage of the pretentiousness of the “intellectual actor.” 58. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 72–78. Copeau also wrote the preface to the 1929 edition of Le Paradoxe sur le Comédien. 59. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 72–73. 60. Copeau, Texts on Theatre, 50. 61. See McCaw, Bahktin and Theatre, 167.

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 199 “Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle” (Austin), 115 “The Aged Phoenix” (etching), 196 Ahmed cycle of plays, 58n9, 59n14; Ahmed le subtil, 37, 38, 39, 42, 45, 52, 53, 54; Ahmed revient, 37, 39, 45, 46; Ahmed se fâche, 37, 38, 39, 43, 49, 50, 54; Ahmed the Philosopher, 37–38, 41, 46, 47, 52–53, 58n3, 58n9; Les Citrouilles, 37, 39, 54, 59n16 Alceste (fictional character), 176 Amerika (Kafka), 199, 202 Anders, Günther, 201–2, 203, 204 anthropology of the actor, 66–69 Antigone (play), 21 Apollo, 22 Aquinas, Thomas, 171–72 Aristophanes, 5, 9, 10, 13n13, 172, 215; The Clouds, Plato’s familiarity with, 3, 7–8, 19; The Frogs, as author of, 6, 39, 59n16; intertextuality between Plato and, 3–4, 6–7, 11 Aristotle, 114, 125n4, 173; happiness and pleasure, theory of, 113, 115, 126n14; on mimesis, 3, 4, 7, 10; Poetics, 4, 5, 217, 231n47 “Ars Poetica” (Horace), 214

Astley, Philip, 20 Auerbach, Erich, 216 Augustine of Hippo, 3, 169– 70, 171, 183 Austin, J. L.: happiness/pleasure, on Aristotle’s notion of, 113, 115, 126n14; speech-act theory of, 115, 125–26n4, 126n12 automatism, 78, 101, 104, 119; Bergson on examples of, 100, 176; laughing and crying as reactions to, 71, 76; mechanism of, 92, 94; in Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop, 102 automaton, philosophical category of, 95, 114, 125n4, 129n53 The Awful Truth (film), 134 Badiou, Alain: L’Echarpe rouge, 37, 39, 41, 58n2, 59n16; ethics of play, 37, 42, 46–48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56; hypertranslation, undertaking, 38, 59n14; The Incident at Antioch, 37, 39, 41–42, 56, 59n20; on Theatre (capital T), 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50–51, 55–56; Theory of the Subject, 46, 56, 58n8. See also Ahmed cycle of plays Bakhtin, Mikhail, 211, 212, 213, 227n9 Barba, Eugenio, 75 233

234

Index

Bazin, André, 156 Beckett, Samuel, 118, 127n22, 176; Happy Days, 113, 115–16; Waiting for Godot, 21–22, 127n25 Being and Event (Badiou), 37–38, 41, 44, 52 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 97–98, 196, 199, 201 Bergson, Henri, 70, 94, 129n49, 181, 184, 217; automatism examples, 100, 106; on the comic in need of corrective, 152, 174–75; élan vital of, 93, 119; on social laughter, 17–18, 30, 90, 182; theory of comic inelasticity, 90, 92, 95, 98, 100–105, 118–19. See also Laughter Betrachtung (Kafka), 193–94 “Better Memory” (Kafka), 200 le bide. See the flop Blauer Reiter group, 196 Blei, Franz, 196 Boiron, Chantal, 39 Bois, Curt, 99 Boso, Carlo, 20, 34n16 Bosteels, Bruno, 37 the bouffon, 22, 31, 35n29, 36n31; cruel laughter associated with, 18, 20; Lecoq’s interest in, 24–25, 26, 35n24; pedagogy of the bouffon, 27–30 Braunbock, Carola, 104 Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 39, 101, 202; automatism, staging plays to highlight, 103–4; Brechtian actor, detached critical attitude of, 89–90; epic theatre, emphasis on, 89, 96, 98, 109n34; fairground aesthetics, enthusiasm for, 95–96; Man Equals Man, use of automatism in, 102–3; masks, work with, 99, 100, 105; materialist thinking, as drawn to, 92–93; rigidity, concern over forces of, 91, 94, 103, 105; Unzulänglichkeit, on the pleasure of, 92, 108n11

Brighella mask, 20, 39, 42 Brod, Max, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204 broken originality, 69, 84n31 Bukatman, Scott, 147–48 “The Burrow” (Kafka), 192, 193 Buytendijk, Fredrik, 63, 82n5 Byland, Pierre, 20–21, 34n14 cabotinage, trope of, 218–21, 223 Cantor, Georg, 52 The Castle (Kafka), 199, 201, 202 The Caucasian Chalk Circle (play), 99–100 Cavell, Stanley, 141, 148; on anxiety in comedy films, 134, 144, 147; clauses, role in determining genre, 137–39, 142, 160n25, 160n30; on genre as medium, 135–39, 159n15, 161n34; mythos of romance, relating to remarriage comedies, 28, 142, 150; Pursuits of Happiness, 133–34, 135, 139, 140, 160n25 Chaplin, Charlie, 89, 97, 134, 142, 143, 145, 147, 163n57, 203 Chekhov, Anton, 18 Chevalier, Maurice, 179, 180 City Lights (film), 134, 142, 145, 147 City of God (Augustine), 169–70 Claudel, Paul, 39, 59n16 The Clouds (play), 3, 6–9, 19 the clown, 35n29, 96, 117, 128n35; the bouffon, comparing to, 27, 28–29, 30; Harry Holtzman as a clown, 119, 120, 124, 130n56, 130n58; pedagogy of the clown, 22–24; in philosophy of the encounter, 121, 123; tragic dynamic, the clown embodying, 18, 20, 22, 31; Valentin performing as a clown, 91, 97; white makeup associated with, 21, 97, 98 Cohen, Sacha Baron, 31 comedian comedy, 134, 137, 141, 150; ethical dimension of, 142; as a film genre, 140, 161n33; Jerry Lewis,

Index

role in, 139, 147–49, 152, 165n75; The Ladies Man and, 154, 157; protagonists not included in the humour of, 151 comic theory of inelasticity, 93, 95, 98, 103; Bergson focus on, 100–101, 104–5; comic character and inelasticity of mind, 118–19; mechanical inelasticity, 17, 90, 92, 94 commedia dell’ arte tradition, 31, 56, 221, 223; Badiou as inspired by, 40, 42, 47, 55; the clown, link to, 20–21; mask-work in, 219, 220, 222; Molière, commedia components of, 39, 41 Connelly, Frances, 211 Coolen, Maarten, 73–75 Copeau, Jacques, 222, 230n40, 232n54; cabotinage, refuting, 219, 220–21, 230n37, 232n54; on the monstrous, 210–11, 218 Corngold, Stanley, 201 Le Corps poétique (Lecoq), 20 “A Country Doctor” (Kafka), 196 Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, 152, 164n75 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 93 Critchley, Simon, 173–74 Crozza, Mario, 31 cruel and tragic laughter, 18, 20, 24, 25 cuckolding, 169, 171, 185 Curtis, Tony, 167 deformity, comic use of, 25, 26, 28, 29, 99, 174, 217 degradation, 154, 174, 203, 204 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 201 Der komische Kafka (Stolzenberger), 199–200 Derrida, Jacques, 51 Descartes, René, 44 “Description of a Struggle” (Kafka), 193–96, 199, 200, 203–4 diagonal characters, 44, 45, 48 Diamant, Dora, 192

235

Diderot, Denis, 67, 209–10, 220, 221– 22, 224, 226n2 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Anders), 203 diegesis, 140, 142, 153 DiFrisco, James, 93 Dionysus, 2, 6, 22, 25 Dionysus I of Syracuse, 4 La Distance politique (Badiou), 42 Dolar, Mladen, 11 The Doll (film), 178, 181 A Doll House (play), 135–36, 142 Don Juan, 179, 180 Don Quixote, 95, 129n48, 176, 177, 196, 202 Douglas, Melvyn, 184 Drums in the Night (play), 96 Duck Soup (film), 1, 11 Dürer, Albrecht, 212, 224 Ebinger, Blandine, 102 Eco, Umberto, 3 L’Eloge du théâtre (Badiou), 44 Else, Gerald F., 4–5, 14n9 encounter, philosophy of, 113–15, 121 Epictetus, 169 Ethics (Aristotle), 115 Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 114 eudaimonia (happiness), 115, 126n14 fairground aesthetic, 95–96, 102 Fields, W. C., 134, 151 the flop (le bide), 21, 22, 24, 117, 120, 124 the fool, 24–26, 30, 217 forbidden montage, law of, 156 Foucault, Michel, 103, 201 Les Fourberies de Scapin (play), 38, 42 Francis, Saint, 216–18, 219, 223 Freeman Kathleen, 153 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 114, 120, 148, 151, 174, 180, 183, 205; on complicity between men, 149; film form, understanding through Freudian lens, 152–53; impotency, patient

236

Index

consultations on, 167–68; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 117, 173; Laughter, as a fan of, 118, 185; on the social function of laughter, 182; theory of the uncanny, 213; “On The Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” 170 The Frogs (play), 6, 39, 59n16 Fusetti, Giovanni, 20, 22–24, 27–30, 31, 34n12 Galas, Didier, 45 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 212 Garland, Judy, 121 Garrick, David, 67 genre: myth and genre, relation between, 138–39, 140–41; saturation of genre conventions, 137, 138–39, 150; shared inheritance of genre films, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140; silent films, remarriage genre following, 133–34. See also comedian comedy; remarriage comedies Ghelderode, Michel de, 25 Giovanzana, Davide, 22 God’s Pauper (Kazantzakis), 217 Gray, Josephine, 11, 156, 223 “The Great Swimmer” (Kafka), 200 Greiner, Ludwig, 95 the grotesque, 217; aesthetics of, 174, 198; Bakhtin’s grotesque liberation, 212, 213; the bouffon, use of, 28, 29, 30, 35; Brechtian use of, 98, 99; Comic Grotesque, 196, 201; grottesche style in arts and literature, 211, 223; the mask and, 210, 215–16, 223; as “a sick man’s dream,” 212, 214; St. Francis, employing, 217–18; the theatre as transformed by, 218–24 The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (Connelly), 211 Guattari, Félix, 201 Guénoun, Dénis, 19

Halliwell, Stephen, 7, 10 Hamlet, 121, 229n30 Hammer, Emil Eduard, 95 Handbook of Inaesthetics (Badiou), 41, 44, 55 Happy Days (play), 113–14, 115–16 Happy Endings (play), 113–14, 115, 119–24 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 211, 212–13 Havelock, Eric A., 8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 99 Heidegger, Martin, 64 Heißerer, Dirk, 97 Heraclitus, 94, 198 “The Hero with the Wing” (etching), 196 Hiroshige (artist), 196 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 174, 175 Hollywood comedies, 133, 151, 152, 181 Hollywood realism, 134, 140, 152 Holtzman, Harry, 113, 115, 119–24, 130n56, 130nn58–59, 131nn61–62 Homer Simpson, 117, 128n35 Hopkins, Anthony, 27 Hopkins, Miriam, 181 Horace, 212, 214 How to Do Things with Words lecture series, 115 Hyperion (periodical), 193, 196 Ibsen, Henrik, 135–36 impotence: Christian response to, 169–70, 171–72, 188n13; comedic inspiration from, 173, 175, 180, 186; Ovid on, 168, 182–83; in Some Like It Hot, 167–68; in Tristram Shandy, 177–78; witchcraft, blaming on, 172, 183–84 “Investigations of a Dog” (Kafka), 193, 202 Is That Kafka? (Stach), 200 It Happened One Night (film), 135, 136 James I, King, 183, 184

Index

Janouch, Gustav, 191–92, 205 the jester, 24, 25–26 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud), 117, 173 “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (Kafka), 202, 203 Joseph K. (fictional character), 195, 202, 203 Kafka, Franz, 196, 203, 205; grotesque aspect in writings of, 198–99, 201; “In Front of the Law” parable, 200, 202; Janouch on wit and wordplay of, 191–92; on self-oblivion, 192–93; vulture motif, employing, 194–95, 204 Kafka: Pro et Contra (Anders), 201–2 Karlstadt, Liesl, 91–92, 95–96, 97, 102 Kayser, Wolfgang, 211–12, 227n9 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 217 Keaton, Buster, 145, 147; comicality of Keaton’s cinema, 142–43; remarriage comedies, comparing to Keaton films, 134, 150; Shandyism, in the case for, 176–77; in Sherlock, Jr., 143, 153, 157, 163n66 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 180 King Lear (play), 21, 24 Klee, Paul, 196, 197, 198 komastai dancers, 210, 214–16, 218, 220, 223, 229n27 Körper/Leib tension, 73, 74, 79, 85n54 Kott, Jan, 21 Krutnik, Frank, 147–48, 164n75 Kubin, Alfred, 196 Label Brut theatre company, 113, 119, 120–23, 130n56 Lacan, Jacques, 114, 117, 184; Lacanian mise-en-scène, 124, 130n56; Lacanian sense of the Real, 146, 157 Lachen und Weinen (Plessner), 66 The Ladies Man (film), 139, 148, 149, 157; Freudian lens, viewing through, 152–53; movie stills, 133,

237

146, 155–56; opening gag, 144–45; romantic comedy, engaging with tenets of, 134–35, 154 The Landlord of Monstrosities (play), 98–99 laughing and crying behaviour, 65–66, 69–72, 76–81 Laughter (Bergson), 89, 114, 128– 29nn43–52, 130n57; Freud as a fan of, 118, 185; froth, on laughter as, 131n62, 182; as a philosophical account of comedy, 3, 18, 84n37; on the social function of laughter, 17–18, 174–75 Laurel and Hardy, 199 Lecoq, Jacques: the bouffon, interest in, 24–26, 35nn24–25; the clown, working with concept of, 20–22, 31, 117, 120; Fusetti on, 20, 23, 28–30, 34n12; on laughter as tragic and cruel, 18, 20; pedagogy of, 20, 22, 23, 33n2, 34n13, 34n21 Leib (lived body), 64, 73, 74, 79, 85n54 Le Rire. See Laughter Lester, Buddy, 154, 155 Levels of Organic Life and the Human (Plessner), 63, 64, 72, 83n12 Lewis, Jerry, 134, 139, 145, 150, 154; comedian comedy and, 147–49; in The Ladies Man set photos, 149, 153, 155–56; Lewis persona, low enthusiasm for, 151–52, 163n61; as a total filmmaker, 144, 149, 164n75 The Life of Edward II of England (play), 97 Lloyd, Harold, 140, 147, 161n36, 164n68 Logics of Worlds (Badiou), 43, 52, 55, 56 Lorre, Peter, 98 Lubitsch, Ernst, 178–81, 184–86 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 169 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 41, 44

238

Index

Man Equals Man (play), 91, 94, 98, 102–3 marionettes, 95, 105, 130n57 The Marriage Circle (film), 180 Marshall, Herbert, 179, 181 Martin, Dean, 146, 148–49, 164n75 Marx, Groucho, 11, 163n63 Marx Brothers, 1, 134, 147, 151, 163n63 Marxism, 42, 54, 90, 91, 105 masculinity, 150, 151, 179, 185; normative masculinity, 146, 147–48; sexual prowess and, 171, 172; stakes of masculinity, 138, 160n30 the mask, 67, 98, 181, 210, 218, 228n24; Aristotle on the comic mask, 4, 217; Badiou’s use of, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42–43, 44, 45–48; the bouffon as utilizing, 25, 26, 29, 31; Brecht’s use of, 99–100, 105; comedy mask as ontological marker of change, 49–56; commedia dell’ arte mask-work, 20–21, 40, 219, 220; Diderot on the actor’s use of masks, 221–22; Kafka, the mask in works of, 198, 201; the neutral mask, 23–24, 29, 34n21; Old Comedy, use of masks in, 215–16, 223, 229n27 McCarey, Leo, 1, 134 McDowell, William Stuart, 90, 103, 108n11 McElroy, Bernard, 211, 213, 228n21 Meech, Tony, 98 Menjou, Adolph, 179, 180 Meredith, Burgess, 185 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 64–65, 73–74, 75–76, 79, 84n40, 86n60, 87n67 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 222, 231– 232nn52–57; cabotinage, on the trope of, 218–19, 230nn37–38, 230n42; commedia dell’ arte, on mask-work in, 220; Copeau as inspired by, 221 mimesis, 1, 8, 28, 71; alternative genealogy of, 3, 6, 7, 10; Aristotle

on, 3, 4, 7, 10; in Clouds, 9–10; milestones of mimesis, 2–3, 4; Platonic mimesis, 5, 6, 10, 11 Mimesis (Auerbach), 216 Molière, 18, 33n7, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 49, 119, 176, 231n50 Monroe, Marilyn, 167 monstrosity, 213, 217; of the actor, 214, 216, 218, 221, 223; the comedic as allied with, 210–11 Mother Courage and Her Children (play), 104 motor preparations, 117–18 Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (play), 91, 99, 103–4, 108n12 Mul, Jos de, 72 Münsterer, Hans Otto, 96 Myers, Mike, 147, 161n35 Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop (film), 90, 99, 102, 103 naturalistic theatre, 219, 232n57 The Navigator (film), 143, 163n66, 163n68 Neveux, Olivier, 42 New Comedy, 135 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 22, 34n20, 175, 179, 180, 195 Nodé-Langlois, Adèll, 21 nonsense jokes, 148, 149 North, Michael, 94, 103 Oberon, Merle, 184 object theatre, 113–15, 119, 125n4, 130n56 Oktoberfestschau (film), 95–96, 102 Old Comedy, 135, 172, 214, 215–16, 220, 223, 229n27 Orsola, Saint, 172 Oswalda, Ossi, 178 The Other Side (Kubin), 196 Ovid, 168, 182–83, 185 The Oyster Princess (film), 178, 181 panopticons, 95–96

Index

Paradoxe sur le comédien (Diderot), 67, 209 Paul, Saint, 170, 171 Pepys, Samuel, 172 Peut-on penser la politique? (Badiou), 42 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 73, 74, 75, 79 philosophical anthropology, 63, 64, 70 Plato, 1, 9, 41; intertextuality between Aristophanes and, 3–4, 6–7, 11; Laws dialogue on tragedy, 2–3; Platonic mimesis, 5, 6, 10, 11; The Republic, 2, 3, 10, 19; Symposium, 4, 7–8, 13n13, 18, 19 pleasure principle, 173, 178 Plessner, Helmuth, 67; on excentric positionality, 66, 69, 72–73, 76, 83n12, 85n51, 87n76; on “is-body”/”has-body” duality, 73, 74–76; on laughing and crying behavior, 65–66, 69–72, 76–81; as a philosophical anthropologist, 63, 64; on the split in relating to the body, 68, 69, 76, 79–80 Poetics (Aristotle), 3, 4, 5, 10 “Poseidon” (Kafka), 196, 198 premarriage comedies, 150–57 Pritchard, H. A., 115 Promethean shame, 203 “Prometheus” (Kafka), 204 Protagoras, 8, 13–14n14 psychological realism, 30, 97 Pursuits of Happiness (Cavell), 133–34, 135, 139, 140, 160n25 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 114, 191 Rabelais, François, 212 Raft, George, 154–55 Rancière, Jacques, 41 red nose, use of, 21, 23–24, 29 Red Raisin revue, 96, 101 Reich, Bernhard, 97, 180 Reinhard, Kenneth, 38

239

remarriage comedy, 140, 142, 148, 159n3; Cavell on clauses of the remarriage myth, 137–39; It Happened One Night as a model for, 135–36; premarriage comedies as a type of, 150–57; silent films, as successor to, 133–34 The Republic (Plato), 2, 3, 10, 19 reversed morality technique, 31 “Rhapsody for the Theatre” (Badiou), 37, 41, 43, 44–45, 46, 48, 52, 54, 61n78 Le Rire. See Laughter Rochester, Earl of, 168–69, 183, 184 romantic comedy, 134, 135, 139, 150, 151, 154, 157, 159n3 Ruskin, John, 212, 219 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 64 satire, 40, 108n11, 175, 179, 184, 192; of ancient Greece, 25, 29; the bouffon as creating, 30; degradation as connected with, 174; pretentious behaviour as material for, 172–73 Scarface (film), 155 Schechter, Joel, 103 Scheler, Max, 63, 64 Scholem, Gerschom, 199, 202 School for Buffoons (play), 25 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 230n41 Second Manifesto for Philosophy (Badiou), 50, 56 Seidman, Steve, 140–42, 147, 150, 161nn35–42 Sennett (Keystone) comedies, 150, 161n33 Shakespeare, William, 21, 24, 33n7, 135, 229n30 the shaman, 25–26 Shandyism, 176–81 Shapiro, Carolyn, 157 Shaviro, Steven, 151 Sherlock Jr. (film), 143, 150, 153, 157, 163n66

240

Index

“Short Organon for the Theatre” (Brecht), 91 Silberman, Marc, 89–90, 108n12 silent films, 89, 134, 151, 162n48, 178 slapstick, 134, 141, 161n34, 162n48, 200; Lewis films as nominally slapstick, 152; remarriage comedies and, 139, 159n3; senex as blocking character in, 150 smutty jokes, 148 Socrates, 1, 4; in The Clouds, 3, 7, 8, 9, 19; comedy and tragedy, placing on same level, 18–19; in The Republic, 2, 10, 19 Some Like It Hot (film), 167–68 Sophist (Plato), 3–4, 7–8 Sophron, 5, 14n19 the spectre, 67, 210, 220, 226n2, 227n4; magic/uncanny sense of, 214; mask, spectre use of, 216, 221–23, 228n24; traumwerk and the spectre, 224 speech-act theory, 115, 125– 26n4, 126n12 Stach, Reiner, 200 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 18 Sterne, Lawrence, 176, 177–78, 179, 180, 186 Stiefel, Erhard, 39 Stolzenberger, Günter, 199–200 Straus, Erwin, 70 Strauss, Leo, 6, 10, 14n22 Strehler, Giorgio, 20, 34nn16–17, 97 subjective well-being, 115, 116 superiority theory of humour, 174–75 Talbot factory strike, 42, 43, 54, 60n31 Teatteri Metamorfoosi, 22 That Uncertain Feeling (film), 184 “Théâtre et Philosophie” (Badiou), 41 “A Theatre of Operations” (Badiou), 43 Totò (comedian), 18 Trahair, Lisa, 174 transference, act of, 114 Traubel, Helen, 153

traumwerk (dream study), 212, 224, 231n52 The Trial (Kafka), 195, 198, 199, 201–2, 203 the trickster, 30, 35n29 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 177–78 Trouble in Paradise (film), 180, 181 tuché (encounter), 113, 114, 157 Tucholsky, Kurt, 95 Tyche (Greek goddess), 113 Uncle Toby (fictional character), 176, 177 Valentin, Karl, 89, 94, 97, 104, 105, 108n11, 110n41; in The Christmas Tree Stand, 98, 101; class struggle, Brecht using Valentin to illuminate, 91–92; machine-age comedy of, 103; masquerade, employing, 95, 98–99; Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop and, 90, 99, 102; The Red Raisin revue, collaborating on, 96, 101 Varakis, Angeliki, 215 vitalism, 92–93 Vogl, Joseph, 201 Waiting for Godot (play), 21, 127n25 Wallace, David Foster, 198, 199 waxworks, 95, 97, 105 West, Mae, 147, 161n33 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze/ Guattari), 201 whiteface, 21, 97–98 Wilder, Billy, 167, 172 Wilson, Michael, 101 Winterson, Jeanette, 173 womanizers, 167, 179, 180 Women at the Thesmophoria (play), 10 Woolf, Virginia, 201 The World Viewed (Cavell), 135 Zarilli, Phillip B., 64, 86n61, 86n66 Žižek, Slavoj, 145

Index

Zupančič, Alenka, 127n26, 127n31, 129n55; on comic character and the material frame, 119; on the comic subject, 116–17, 128n36;

241

on happiness, 126nn18–19; on mechanical movement, 114, 129n53 “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers” (Plessner), 65, 66

About the Authors

Caterina Angela Agus obtained her master’s degree in cultural anthropology and ethnology from the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of Turin University in 2012. Her thesis focused on the carnival figure of the bear in the Western Alps and on the traditions related to it. Her research interests include the field of carnival rites, customs and masquerades, ritual objects and folk festivals. She has written articles on cultural history and taken part in international scientific conferences in Italy and Finland. Fred Dalmasso is lecturer in drama at Loughborough University, UK, where he teaches across the School of Design and Creative Arts and the Storytelling Academy. He is a multidisciplinary scholar, screenwriter and theatre practitioner. He has worked in the theatre industry in both France and Ireland and is now the artistic director of collect-ifs. His publications focus on practice-based theatre translation, performance philosophy, and include Syncope in Performing and Visual Arts (2017) and Derrida | Benjamin, Two Plays for the Stage (2021). Lisabeth During lives in Brooklyn where she teaches philosophy at the Pratt Institute of Art and Design and occasionally dabbles in film writing (Bresson, Bazin, Rossellini, Cukor). Her book The Chastity Plot came out in 2021, and her current book projects are She Did It in Her Sleep: Interpreting Comatose Rape and Modernity as Catastrophe: The Weimar Files, with Hannes Charen. Xavier Escribano is senior lecturer in philosophical anthropology at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona. He is the author of the monograph Sujeto encarnado y expresión creadora: Una aproximación al pensamiento de Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2004). His main interests are centred on the phenomenology of embodiment and the contribution of anthropological reflection to the health sciences. In this field he has edited the collective work Territoris humans de la salut: Societat, cultura i valors 243

244

About the Authors

(2008). Since 2012, he has coordinated Sarx, an interdisciplinary research group in the Anthropology of Corporeality, whose last edited work was De pie sobre la tierra: Caminar, correr, danzar: Ensayos filosóficos e interdisciplinares de antropología de la corporalidad (2019). Giovanni Fusetti is an artist, natural scientist and pedagogue—a multi-disciplinary fool. He encountered pedagogy and social theatre while receiving his MA in agriculture and ecology at the University of Padova (1985–1989). This encounter led to a pedagogic and artistic search that has been unfolding for over twenty-five years. He trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre de Jacques Lecoq (1992–1994), where he subsequently returned to follow the pedagogic training and the L.E.M. (Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement), after which he was invited by Jacques Lecoq to teach improvisation. While in Paris, Giovanni also trained in Gestalt at the Ecole Parisienne de Gestalt (1992–1999). In 1999, he directed the Scuola Internazionale di Creazione KIKLOS and then HELIKOS, developing the vision of a school rooted in tradition and free to create and re-create new poetic paths. Alongside his pedagogic work in training professional theatre artists, Giovanni has worked with children of all ages, homeless persons, activists, teachers, therapists, hospital clowns and human beings in research, using theatre as a pedagogic paradigm of personal healing and poetic awakenings. Davide Giovanzana is an Italian and Swiss theatre director, theatre pedagogue and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. He has been working in several countries with different theatres and theatre academies. He concluded his doctoral artistic research in 2015 at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki, Finland. His doctoral thesis Theatre Enters! investigated the phenomenon of play within the play and the performative disruption of normative discourse. In 2017 he received the title of honorary professor of the Latvian Culture Academy for his pedagogical input on physical theatre. From 2017 to 2019, he conducted postdoc artistic research The Imagination of Violence, examining the representation of violence on stage. In 2020 he was nominated visiting professor in artistic research at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. In 2021 he started work as lecturer in acting at the Tampere University (Näty). He is the artistic director of the theatre company Teatteri Metamorfoosi, and in 2019, with David Kozma, founded New Theatre Helsinki. Josephine Gray is co-artistic director of Iraqi Bodies, a theatre group that explores the link between movement and gesture, between dance and physical theatre. She has been performing on stage for more than fifteen years while developing the dramaturgy and philosophy of Iraqi Bodies. She trained

About the Authors

245

at the École Internationale de Théâtre de Jacques Lecoq in Paris and holds post-graduate degrees in philosophy (KU Leuven) and English literature (University of Sheffield). María J. Ortega Máñez is a postdoctoral researcher and translator. She obtained a master of philosophy and a PhD in comparative literature from Paris-Sorbonne University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Vienna and at KU Leuven. Currently she is developing her own research project at the Universitat de les Illes Balears thanks to a María Zambrano talent-attraction grant. She has taught philosophy, Spanish literature and theatre studies in France (Paris Institute of Political Studies, Paris-Sorbonne University), Austria (University of Vienna) and Spain (Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Castilla y León). Her research is mainly focused on the relationship between philosophy and theatre, which she has been analysing through fields of study such as theories of literature, aesthetics, ancient Greek studies, baroque Spanish theatre and Spanish 20th-century philosophy. Meg Mumford is senior lecturer in theatre and performance studies in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the way in which theatre responds to sociohistorical contexts, ideologies and habitual modes of perception. She has published widely on the work of Bertolt Brecht, including the award-winning volume on his theatre in the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series (2009; second edition 2018). Her other publications include Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond, coauthored with Ulrike Garde (2016), and the coedited volume Rimini Protokoll Close-Up: Lektüren (2015). She has also written on Marieluise Fleisser, Pina Bausch, and Australian verbatim and documentary theatre. Jean-Michel Rabaté is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992 and is one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature. He is cofounder of the Slought Foundation, where he organises exhibitions, conferences and public conversations. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008 and is author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include Kafka L.O.L. (2018); After Derrida (2018); Rire au Soleil (2019); Understanding Derrida / Understanding Modernism (2019); Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of literature and film (2020); Beckett and Sade (2020); and Rires Prodigues (2021). Carolyn Shapiro is associate professor of visual culture at Falmouth School of Art at Falmouth University, UK, where she has been a lecturer since 2002.

246

About the Authors

She received a PhD in performance studies from New York University in 2004. Specialising in critical theory and philosophy, Carolyn teaches in the BA and MA courses in illustration, in addition to supervising PhD students. Publications include a chapter for the Wiley Blackwell Companion Guide to Illustration on “Historical and Philosophical Relations between Illustration and the Uncanny,” as well as a chapter in the book Jeremy Bentham and the Arts titled “Bentham’s Image: the Corpo-Reality Check,” which considers Bentham’s Image (his “Auto-Icon”) in light of his theories on language and the body, his support of homosexuality and his writings on religion. Her article “Vicissitudes and Their Inscriptions” was published in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal History of the Present. Lisa Trahair is senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research interests include early cinema, cinematic comedy, the philosophy of comedy, cinema and psychoanalysis, and film and philosophy. She is the author of Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (2007). She is currently working on cinematic thinking, the spiritual automaton, and Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves.