Laughter, Henri Bergson [good novels to read txt] 📗
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is often the method of HUMOUR. Humour, thus denned, is the
counterpart of irony. Both are forms of satire, but irony is
oratorical in its nature, whilst humour partakes of the scientific.
Irony is emphasised the higher we allow ourselves to be uplifted by
the idea of the good that ought to be: thus irony may grow so hot
within us that it becomes a kind of high-pressure eloquence. On the
other hand, humour is the more emphasised the deeper we go down into
an evil that actually is, in order t o set down its details in the
most cold-blooded indifference. Several authors, Jean Paul amongst
them, have noticed that humour delights in concrete terms, technical
details, definite facts. If our analysis is correct, this is not an
accidental trait of humour, it is its very essence. A humorist is a
moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who
practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with
disgust; so that humour, in the restricted sense in which we are
here regarding the word, is really a transposition from the moral to
the scientific.
By still further curtailing the interval between the terms
transposed, we may now obtain more and more specialised types of
comic transpositions. Thus, certain professions have a technical
vocabulary: what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by
transposing the ideas of everyday life into this professional
jargon! Equally comic is the extension of business phraseology to
the social relations of life,—for instance, the phrase of one of
Labiche’s characters in allusion to an invitation he has received,
“Your kindness of the third ult.,” thus transposing the commercial
formula, “Your favour of the third instant.” This class of the
comic, moreover, may attain a special profundity of its own when it
discloses not merely a professional practice, but a fault in
character. Recall to mind the scenes in the Faux Bonshommes and the
Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt with as a business affair,
and matters of sentiment are set down in strictly commercial
language.
Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of language
really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of
which we must hold over to the next chapter. Thus, as might have
been expected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words
follows closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged,
along with the latter, in the comic in character. Language only
attains laughable results because it is a human product, modelled as
exactly as possible on the forms of the human mind. We feel it
contains some living element of our own life; and if this life of
language were complete and perfect, if there were nothing stereotype
in it, if, in short, language were an absolutely unified organism
incapable of being split up into independent organisms, it would
evade the comic as would a soul whose life was one harmonious whole,
unruffled as the calm surface of a peaceful lake. There is no pool,
however, which has not some dead leaves floating on its surface, no
human soul upon which there do not settle habits that make it rigid
against itself by making it rigid against others, no language, in
short, so subtle and instinct with life, so fully alert in each of
its parts as to eliminate the ready-made and oppose the mechanical
operations of inversion, transposition, etc., which one would fain
perform upon it as on some lifeless thing. The rigid, the ready—
made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing
and the living, absentmindedness in contrast with attention, in a
word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the
defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct. We
appealed to this idea to give us light at the outset, when starting
upon the analysis of the ludicrous. We have seen it shining at every
decisive turning in our road. With its help, we shall now enter upon
a more important investigation, one that will, we hope, be more
instructive. We purpose, in short, studying comic characters, or
rather determining the essential conditions of comedy in character,
while endeavouring to bring it about that this study may contribute
to a better understanding of the real nature of art and the general
relation between art and life.
We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in an
endeavour to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or
a gesture; a situation, an action, or an expression. The analysis of
comic CHARACTERS has now brought us to the most important part of
our task. It would also be the most difficult, had we yielded to the
temptation of defining the laughable by a few striking—and
consequently obvious—examples; for then, in proportion as we
advanced towards the loftiest manifestations of the comic, we should
have found the facts slipping between the over-wide meshes of the
definition intended to retain them. But, as a matter of fact, we
have followed the opposite plan, by throwing light on the subject
from above. Convinced that laughter has a social meaning and import,
that the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of
adaptability to society, and that, in short, there is nothing comic
apart from man, we have made man and character generally our main
objective. Our chief difficulty, therefore, has lain in explaining
how we come to laugh at anything else than character, and by what
subtle processes of fertilisation, combination or amalgamation, the
comic can worm its way into a mere movement, an impersonal
situation, or an independent phrase. This is what we have done so
far. We started with the pure metal, and all our endeavours have
been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. It is the metal
itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier, for this
time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine it
closely and see how it reacts upon everything else.
There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we
perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions
and vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in
the beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental
overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of
life. All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only
begin at the point where our neighbour’s personality ceases to
affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing
callousness to social life. Any individual is comic who
automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about
getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. It is the
part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him out of
his dream. If it is permissible to compare important things with
trivial ones, we would call to mind what happens when a youth enters
one of our military academies. After getting through the dreaded
ordeal of the examination, he finds the has other ordeals to face,
which his seniors have arranged with the object of fitting him for
the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say, of “breaking him
into harness.” Every small society that forms within the larger is
thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise some method of
discipline or “breaking in,” so as to deal with the rigidity of
habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to undergo a
partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceeds in
exactly the same way. Each member must be ever attentive to his
social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in
short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar
character as a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society
holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of
correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which,
although it is slight, is none the less dreaded. Such must be the
function of laughter. Always rather humiliating for the one against
whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social
“ragging.”
Hence the equivocal nature of the comic. It belongs neither
altogether to art nor altogether to life. On the one hand,
characters in real life would never make us laugh were we not
capable of watching their vagaries in the same way as we look down
at a play from our seat in a box; they are only comic in our eyes
because they perform a kind of comedy before us. But, on the other
hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an
unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively
esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or
unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of
society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention
to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in
his will, at least in his deed. This is the reason a comedy is far
more like real life than a drama is. The more sublime the drama, the
more profound the analysis to which the poet has had to subject the
raw materials of daily life in order to obtain the tragic element in
its unadulterated form. On the contrary, it is only in its lower
aspects, in light comedy and farce, that comedy is in striking
contrast to reality: the higher it rises, the more it approximates
to life; in fact, there are scenes in real life so closely bordering
on high-class comedy that the stage might adopt them without
changing a single word.
Hence it follows that the elements of comic character on the stage
and in actual life will be the same. What are these elements? We
shall find no difficulty in deducing them. It has often been said
that it is the TRIFLING faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh.
Evidently there is a considerable amount of truth in this opinion;
still, it cannot be regarded as altogether correct. First, as
regards faults, it is no easy matter to draw the line between the
trifling and the serious; maybe it is not because a fault is
trifling that it makes us laugh, but rather because it makes us
laugh that we regard it as trifling, for there is nothing disarms us
like laughter. But we may go even farther, and maintain that there
are faults at which we laugh, even though fully aware that they are
serious,—Harpagon’s avarice, for instance. And then, we may as well
confess—though somewhat reluctantly—that we laugh not only at the
faults of our fellow-men, but also, at times, at their good
qualities. We laugh at Alceste. The objection may be urged that it
is not the earnestness of Alceste that is ludicrous, but rather the
special aspect which earnestness assumes in his case, and, in short,
a certain eccentricity that mars it in our eyes. Agreed; but it is
none the less true that this eccentricity in Alceste, at which we
laugh, MAKES HIS EARNESTNESS LAUGHABLE, and that is the main point.
So we may conclude that the ludicrous is not always an indication of
a fault, in the moral meaning of the word, and if critics insist on
seeing a fault, even though a trifling one, in the ludicrous, they
must point out what it is here that exactly distinguishes the
trifling from the serious.
The truth is, the comic character may, strictly speaking, be quite
in accord with stern morality. All it has to do is to bring itself
into accord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a
thoroughly honest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very
account,
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