Laughter, Henri Bergson [good novels to read txt] 📗

from

that. Life cannot be recomposed; it can only be looked at and

reproduced. Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of reality. If

the characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it

is only because they are the poet himself,—multiplication or

division of the poet,—the poet plumbing the depths of his own

nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays

hold of the potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left

as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a

finished work of art.

 

Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedy

springs. It is directed outwards. However interested a dramatist may

be in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I

imagine, to the extent of trying to discover his own. Besides, he

would not find them, for we are never ridiculous except in some

point that remains hidden from our own consciousness. It is on

others, then, that such observation must perforce be practised. But

it; will, for this very reason, assume a character of generality

that it cannot have when we apply it to ourselves. Settling on the

surface, it will not be more than skin-deep, dealing with persons at

the point at which they come into contact and become capable of

resembling one another. It will go no farther. Even if it could, it

would not desire to do so, for it would have nothing to gain in the

process.

 

To penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer

effect with causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger

and in the end to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect. In

order that we may be tempted to laugh at it, we must localise its

cause in some intermediate region of the soul. Consequently, the

effect must appear to us as an average effect, as expressing an

average of mankind. And, like all averages, this one is obtained by

bringing together scattered data, by comparing analogous cases and

extracting their essence, in short by a process of abstraction and

generalisation similar to that which the physicist brings to bear

upon facts with the object of grouping them under laws. In a word,

method and object are here of the same nature as in the inductive

sciences, in that observation is always external and the result

always general.

 

And so we come back, by a roundabout way, to the double conclusion

we reached in the course of our investigations. On the one hand, a

person is never ridiculous except through some mental attribute

resembling absentmindedness, through something that lives upon him

without forming part of his organism, after the fashion of a

parasite; that is the reason this state of mind is observable from

without and capable of being corrected. But, on the other hand, just

because laughter aims at correcting, it is expedient that the

correction should reach as great a number of persons as possible.

This is the reason comic observation instinctively proceeds to what

is general. It chooses such peculiarities as admit of being

reproduced and consequently are not indissolubly bound up with the

individuality of a single person,—a possibly common sort of

uncommonness, so to say,—peculiarities that are held in common. By

transferring them to the stage, it creates works which doubtless

belong to art in that their only visible aim is to please, but which

will be found to contrast with other works of art by reason of their

generality and also of their scarcely confessed or scarcely

conscious intention to correct and instruct. So we were probably

right in saying that comedy lies midway between art and life. It is

not disinterested as genuine art is. By organising laughter, comedy

accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys an

impulse of social life. And in this respect it turns its back upon

art, which is a breaking away from society and a return to pure

nature.

II

Now let us see, in the light of what has gone before, the line to

take for creating an ideally comic type of character, comic in

itself, in its origin, and in all its manifestations. It must be

deep-rooted, so as to supply comedy with inexhaustible matter, and

yet superficial, in order that it may remain within the scope of

comedy; invisible to its actual owner, for the comic ever partakes

of the unconscious, but visible to everybody else, so that it may

call forth general laughter, extremely considerate to its own self,

so that it may be displayed without scruple, but troublesome to

others, so that they may repress it without pity; immediately

repressible, so that our laughter may not have been wasted, but sure

of reappearing under fresh aspects, so that laughter may always find

something to do; inseparable from social life, although insufferable

to society; capable—in order that it may assume the greatest

imaginable variety of forms—of being tacked on to all the vices and

even to a good many virtues. Truly a goodly number of elements to

fuse together! But a chemist of the soul, entrusted with this

elaborate preparation, would be somewhat disappointed when pouring

out the contents of his retort. He would find he had taken a vast

deal of trouble to compound a mixture which may be found ready-made

and free of expense, for it is as widespread throughout mankind as

air throughout nature.

 

This mixture is vanity. Probably there is not a single failing that

is more superficial or more deep-rooted. The wounds it receives are

never very serious, and yet they are seldom healed. The services

rendered to it are the most unreal of all services, and yet they are

the very ones that meet with lasting gratitude. It is scarcely a

vice, and yet all the vices are drawn into its orbit and, in

proportion as they become more refined and artificial, tend to be

nothing more than a means of satisfying it. The outcome of social

life, since it is an admiration of ourselves based on the admiration

we think we are inspiring in others, it is even more natural, more

universally innate than egoism; for egoism may be conquered by

nature, whereas only by reflection do we get the better of vanity.

It does not seem, indeed, as if men were ever born modest, unless we

dub with the name of modesty a sort of purely physical bashfulness,

which is nearer to pride than is generally supposed. True modesty

can be nothing but a meditation on vanity. It springs from the sight

of others’ mistakes and the dread of being similarly deceived. It is

a sort of scientific cautiousness with respect to what we shall say

and think of ourselves. It is made up of improvements and after-touches. In short, it is an acquired virtue.

 

It is no easy matter to define the point at which the anxiety to

become modest may be distinguished from the dread of becoming

ridiculous. But surely, at the outset, this dread and this anxiety

are one and the same thing. A complete investigation into the

illusions of vanity, and into the ridicule that clings to them,

would cast a strange light upon the whole theory of laughter. We

should find laughter performing, with mathematical regularity, one

of its main functions—that of bringing back to complete self-consciousness a certain self-admiration which is almost automatic,

and thus obtaining the greatest possible sociability of characters.

We should see that vanity, though it is a natural product of social

life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certain slight

poisons, continually secreted by the human organism, would destroy

it in the long run, if they were not neutralised by other

secretions. Laughter is unceasingly doing work of this kind. In this

respect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is

laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is

vanity.

 

While dealing with the comic in form and movement, we showed how any

simple image, laughable in itself, is capable of worming its way

into other images of a more complex nature and instilling into them

something of its comic essence; thus, the highest forms of the comic

can sometimes be explained by the lowest. The inverse process,

however, is perhaps even more common, and many coarse comic effects

are the direct result of a drop from some very subtle comic element.

For instance, vanity, that higher form of the comic, is an element

we are prone to look for, minutely though unconsciously, in every

manifestation of human activity. We look for it if only to laugh at

it. Indeed, our imagination often locates it where it has no

business to be. Perhaps we must attribute to this source the

altogether coarse comic element in certain effects which

psychologists have very inadequately explained by contrast: a short

man bowing his head to pass beneath a large door; two individuals,

one very tall the other a mere dwarf, gravely walking along arm-in-arm, etc. By scanning narrowly this latter image, we shall probably

find that the shorter of the two persons seems as though he were

trying TO RAISE HIMSELF to the height of the taller, like the frog

that wanted to make itself as large as the ox.

III

It would be quite impossible to go through all the peculiarities of

character that either coalesce or compete with vanity in order to

force themselves upon the attention of the comic poet. We have shown

that all failings may become laughable, and even, occasionally, many

a good quality. Even though a list of all the peculiarities that

have ever been found ridiculous were drawn up, comedy would manage

to add to them, not indeed by creating artificial ones, but by

discovering lines of comic development that had hitherto gone

unnoticed; thus does imagination isolate ever fresh figures in the

intricate design of one and the same piece of tapestry. The

essential condition, as we know, is that the peculiarity observed

should straightway appear as a kind of CATEGORY into which a number

of individuals can step.

 

Now, there are ready-made categories established by society itself,

and necessary to it because it is based on the division of labour.

We mean the various trades, public services and professions. Each

particular profession impresses on its corporate members certain

habits of mind and peculiarities of character in which they resemble

each other and also distinguish themselves from the rest. Small

societies are thus formed within the bosom of Society at large.

Doubtless they arise from the very organisation of Society as a

whole. And yet, if they held too much aloof, there would be a risk

of their proving harmful to sociability.

 

Now, it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist

tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to

readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the

corners wherever they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a

species of the comic whose varieties might be calculated beforehand.

This we shall call the PROFESSIONAL COMIC.

 

Instead of taking up these varieties in detail, we prefer to lay

stress upon what they have in common. In the forefront we find

professional vanity. Each one of M. Jourdain’s teachers exalts his

own art above all the rest. In a play of Labiche there is a

character who cannot understand how it is possible to be anything

else than a timber merchant. Naturally he is a timber merchant

himself. Note that vanity here tends to merge into SOLEMNITY, in

proportion to the degree of quackery there is in the profession

under consideration. For it is a remarkable fact that the more

questionable an art, science or occupation is, the more those who

practise it are inclined to regard themselves as invested with