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

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kind of priesthood and to claim that all should bow before its

mysteries. Useful professions are clearly meant for the public, but

those whose utility is more dubious can only justify their existence

by assuming that the public is meant for them: now, this is just the

illusion that lies at the root of solemnity. Almost everything comic

in Moliere’s doctors comes from this source. They treat the patient

as though he had been made for the doctors, and nature herself as an

appendage to medicine.

 

Another form of this comic rigidity is what may be called

PROFESSIONAL CALLOUSNESS. The comic character is so tightly jammed

into the rigid frame of his functions that he has no room to move or

to be moved like other men. Only call to mind the answer Isabelle

receives from Perrin Dandin, the judge, when she asks him how he can

bear to look on when the poor wretches are being tortured: Bah! cela

fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.

 

[Footnote: Bah! it always helps to while away an hour or two.]

 

Does not Tartuffe also manifest a sort of professional callousness

when he says—it is true, by the mouth of Orgon: Et je verrais

mourir frere, enfants, mere et femme, Que je m’en soucierais autant

que de cela!

 

[Footnote: Let brother, children, mother and wife all die, what

should I care!]

 

The device most in use, however, for making a profession ludicrous

is to confine it, so to say, within the four corners of its own

particular jargon. Judge, doctor and soldier are made to apply the

language of law, medicine and strategy to the everyday affairs of

life, as though they had became incapable of talking like ordinary

people. As a rule, this kind of the ludicrous is rather coarse. It

becomes more refined, however, as we have already said, if it

reveals some peculiarity of character in addition to a professional

habit. We will instance only Regnard’s Joueur, who expresses himself

with the utmost originality in terms borrowed from gambling, giving

his valet the name of Hector, and calling his betrothed Pallas, du

nom connu de la Dame de Pique; [Footnote: Pallas, from the well-known name of the Queen of Spades.] or Moliere’s Femmes

savantes, where the comic element evidently consists largely in

the translation of ideas of a scientific nature into terms of feminine

sensibility: “Epicure me plait…” (Epicurus is charming), “J’aime les

tourbillons” (I dote on vortices), etc. You have only to read the third

act to find that Armande, Philaminte and Belise almost invariably

express themselves in this style.

 

Proceeding further in the same direction, we discover that there is

also such a thing as a professional logic, i.e. certain ways of

reasoning that are customary in certain circles, which are valid for

these circles, but untrue for the rest of the public. Now, the

contrast between these two kinds of logic—one particular, the other

universal—produces comic effects of a special nature, on which we

may advantageously dwell at greater length. Here we touch upon a

point of some consequence in the theory of laughter. We propose,

therefore, to give the question a wider scope and consider it in its

most general aspect.

IV

Eager as we have been to discover the deep-seated cause of the

comic, we have so far had to neglect one of its most striking

phenomena. We refer to the logic peculiar to the comic character and

the comic group, a strange kind of logic, which, in some cases, may

include a good deal of absurdity.

 

Theophile Gautier said that the comic in its extreme form was the

logic of the absurd. More than one philosophy of laughter revolves

round a like idea. Every comic effect, it is said, implies

contradiction in some of its aspects. What makes us laugh is alleged

to be the absurd realised in concrete shape, a “palpable

absurdity”;—or, again, an apparent absurdity, which we swallow for

the moment only to rectify it immediately afterwards;—or, better

still, something absurd from one point of view though capable of a

natural explanation from another, etc. All these theories may

contain some portion of the truth; but, in the first place, they

apply only to certain rather obvious comic effects, and then, even

where they do apply, they evidently take no account of the

characteristic element of the laughable, that is, the PARTICULAR

KIND of absurdity the comic contains when it does contain something

absurd. Is an immediate proof of this desired? You have only to

choose one of these definitions and make up effects in accordance

with the formula: twice out of every three times there will be

nothing laughable in the effect obtained. So we see that absurdity,

when met with in the comic, is not absurdity IN GENERAL. It is an

absurdity of a definite kind. It does not create the comic; rather,

we might say that the comic infuses into it its own particular

essence. It is not a cause, but an effect—an effect of a very

special kind, which reflects the special nature of its cause. Now,

this cause is known to us; consequently we shall have no trouble in

understanding the nature of the effect.

 

Assume, when out for a country walk, that you notice on the top of a

hill something that bears a faint resemblance to a large motionless

body with revolving arms. So far you do not know what it is, but you

begin to search amongst your IDEAS—that is to say, in the present

instance, amongst the recollections at your disposal—for that

recollection which will best fit in with what you see. Almost

immediately the image of a windmill comes into your mind: the object

before you is a windmill. No matter if, before leaving the house,

you have just been reading fairy-tales telling of giants with

enormous arms; for although common sense consists mainly in being

able to remember, it consists even more in being able to forget.

Common sense represents the endeavour of a mind continually adapting

itself anew and changing ideas when it changes objects. It is the

mobility of the intelligence conforming exactly to the mobility of

things. It is the moving continuity of our attention to life. But

now, let us take Don Quixote setting out for the wars. The romances

he has been reading all tell of knights encountering, on the way,

giant adversaries. He therefore must needs encounter a giant. This

idea of a giant is a privileged recollection which has taken its

abode in his mind and lies there in wait, motionless, watching for

an opportunity to sally forth and become embodied in a thing. It IS

BENT on entering the material world, and so the very first object he

sees bearing the faintest resemblance to a giant is invested with

the form of one. Thus Don Quixote sees giants where we see

windmills. This is comical; it is also absurd. But is it a mere

absurdity,—an absurdity of an indefinite kind?

 

It is a very special inversion of common sense. It consists in

seeking to mould things on an idea of one’s own, instead of moulding

one’s ideas on things,—in seeing before us what we are thinking of,

instead of thinking of what we see. Good sense would have us leave

all our memories in their proper rank and file; then the appropriate

memory will every time answer the summons of the situation of the

moment and serve only to interpret it. But in Don Quixote, on the

contrary, there is one group of memories in command of all the rest

and dominating the character itself: thus it is reality that now has

to bow to imagination, its only function being to supply fancy with

a body. Once the illusion has been created, Don Quixote develops it

logically enough in all its consequences; he proceeds with the

certainty and precision of a somnambulist who is acting his dream.

Such, then, is the origin of his delusions, and such the particular

logic which controls this particular absurdity. Now, is this logic

peculiar to Don Quixote?

 

We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy

of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short,

through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of

rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to

follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.

In Moliere’s plays how many comic scenes can be reduced to this

simple type: A CHARACTER FOLLOWING UP HIS ONE IDEA, and continually

recurring to it in spite of incessant interruptions! The transition

seems to take place imperceptibly from the man who will listen to

nothing to the one who will see nothing, and from this latter to the

one who sees only what he wants to see. A stubborn spirit ends by

adjusting things to its own way of thinking, instead of

accommodating its thoughts to the things. So every comic character

is on the highroad to the above-mentioned illusion, and Don Quixote

furnishes us with the general type of comic absurdity.

 

Is there a name for this inversion of common sense? Doubtless it may

be found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of

insanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But

neither insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are

provocative of laughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity.

 

Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there

exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible

with the general health of the mind,—a sane type of madness, one

might say. Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles

madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of

ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed

idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is

incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following

theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.

 

The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have

just been describing. The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in

the outer world nothing more than a pretext for realising its

imaginations. A confused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear,

colours enter the field of vision, the senses are not completely

shut in. But the dreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his

recollections for the interpretation of what his senses perceive,

makes use of what he perceives to give substance to the particular

recollection he favours: thus, according to the mood of the dreamer

and the idea that fills his imagination at the time, a gust of wind

blowing down the chimney becomes the howl of a wild beast or a

tuneful melody. Such is the ordinary mechanism of illusion in

dreams.

 

Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic of

the comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in the

logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic. Here,

again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are

well acquainted: given one form of the laughable, other forms that

are lacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their

outward resemblance to the first. Indeed, it is not difficult to see

that any PLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back

to mind, more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland.

 

We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of the

rules of reasoning. The reasonings at which we laugh are those we

know to be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear

them in a