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

formula. The formula

exists well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not

follow a straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of

deduction ought from time to time to stop and study certain

culminating effects, and that these effects each appear as models

round which new effects resembling them take their places in a

circle. These latter are not deductions from the formula, but are

comic through their relationship with those that are. To quote

Pascal again, I see no objection, at this stage, to defining the

process by the curve which that geometrician studied under the name

of roulette or cycloid,—the curve traced by a point in the

circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing in a

straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advances

like the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue such

as are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at

intervals to indicate the crossways: at each of these we shall walk

round the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before

us, and then return to our original course. Now, we have just

reached one of these mental crossways. Something mechanical

encrusted on the living, will represent a cross at which we must

halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in

different directions. What are these directions? There appear to be

three main ones. We will follow them one after the other, and then

continue our onward course.

 

1. In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the living

dovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image

of SOME RIGIDITY OR OTHER applied to the mobility of life, in an

awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness.

Here we perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous.

It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some

respect. Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we

are so accustomed to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form

one with the individual wearing it. We do not separate them in

imagination. The idea no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert

rigidity of the covering with the living suppleness of the object

covered: consequently, the comic here remains in a latent condition.

It will only succeed in emerging when the natural incompatibility is

so deep-seated between the covering and the covered that even an

immemorial association fails to cement this union: a case in point

is our head and top hat. Suppose, however, some eccentric individual

dresses himself in the fashion of former times: our attention is

immediately drawn to the clothes themselves, we absolutely

distinguish them from the individual, we say that the latter IS

DISGUISING HIMSELF,—as though every article of clothing were not a

disguise!—and the laughable aspect of fashion comes out of the

shadow into the light.

 

Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly

intricate difficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of

the reasons that must have given rise to many erroneous or

unsatisfactory theories of laughter is that many things are comic de

jure without being comic de facto, the continuity of custom having

deadened within them the comic quality. A sudden dissolution of

continuity is needed, a break with fashion, for this quality to

revive. Hence the impression that this dissolution of continuity is

the parent of the comic, whereas all it does is to bring it to our

notice. Hence, again, the explanation of laughter by surprise,

contrast, etc., definitions which would equally apply to a host of

cases in which we have no inclination whatever to laugh. The truth

of the matter is far from being so simple. But to return to our idea

of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been entrusted with

the special mandate of arousing laughter. It will not be out of

place to investigate the uses it makes of this power.

 

Why do we laugh at a head of hair which has changed from dark to

blond? What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one

laugh at a negro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing

one, for it has been asked by successive psychologists such as

Hecker, Kraepelin and Lipps, and all have given different replies.

And yet I rather fancy the correct answer was suggested to me one

day in the street by an ordinary cabby, who applied the expression

“unwashed” to the negro fare he was driving. Unwashed! Does not this

mean that a black face, in our imagination, is one daubed over with

ink or soot? If so, then a red nose can only be one which has

received a coating of vermilion. And so we see that the notion of

disguise has passed on something of its comic quality to instances

in which there is actually no disguise, though there might be.

 

In the former set of examples, although his usual dress was distinct

from the individual, it appeared in our mind to form one with him,

because we had become accustomed to the sight. In the latter,

although the black or red colour is indeed inherent in the skin, we

look upon it as artificially laid on, because it surprises us.

 

But here we meet with a fresh crop of difficulties in the theory of

the comic. Such a proposition as the following: “My usual dress

forms part of my body” is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet

imagination looks upon it as true. “A red nose is a painted nose,”

“A negro is a white man in disguise,” are also absurd to the reason

which rationalises; but they are gospel truths to pure imagination.

So there is a logic of the imagination which is not the logic of

reason, one which at times is even opposed to the latter,—with

which, however, philosophy must reckon, not only in the study of the

comic, but in every other investigation of the same kind. It is

something like the logic of dreams, though of dreams that have not

been left to the whim of individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt

by the whole of society. In order to reconstruct this hidden logic,

a special kind of effort is needed, by which the outer crust of

carefully stratified judgments and firmly established ideas will be

lifted, and we shall behold in the depths of our mind, like a sheet

of subterranean water, the flow of an unbroken stream of images

which pass from one into another. This interpenetration of images

does not come about by chance. It obeys laws, or rather habits,

which hold the same relation to imagination that logic does to

thought.

 

Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case

in hand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is

also comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic,

not only that of a man, but that of society also, and even the

disguise of nature.

 

Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped,

at a bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the

trees are plastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the

reason, and you will see that you are once more thinking of a

masquerade. Here, however, the comic element is very faint; it is

too far from its source. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go

back to the source itself and contrast the derived image, that of a

masquerade, with the original one, which, be it remembered, was that

of a mechanical tampering with life. In “a nature that is

mechanically tampered with” we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on

which fancy will be able to play ever so many variations with the

certainty of successfully provoking the heartiest hilarity. You may

call to mind that amusing passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in

which Bompard makes Tartarin—and therefore also the reader to some

slight extent—accept the idea of a Switzerland choke-full of

machinery like the basement of the opera, and run by a company which

maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and artificial crevasses.

The same theme reappears, though transposed in quite another key, in

the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome K. Jerome. An

elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of charity to

take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy hail of her

mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially

manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk

who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their

failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme is

audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether

sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an

instance, the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer,

had invited to see an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she

said, “M. de Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all

over again, to please me.” Or, take again the exclamation of one of

Gondiinet’s characters on arriving in a town and learning that there

is an extinct volcano in the neighbourhood, “They had a volcano, and

they have let it go out!”

 

Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot help

treating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of the

notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so

to speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we

perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the

surface of living society. There we have rigidity over again,

clashing with the inner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of

social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element,

which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view. It

might be said that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing

is to the individual body: they owe their seriousness to the fact

that they are identified, in our minds, with the serious object with

which custom associates them, and when we isolate them in

imagination, they forthwith lose their seriousness. For any

ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be

fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and that we neglect its

matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its form. Every one

knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its ingenuity on social

actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary prize-distribution

to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any form or formula is

a ready-made frame into which the comic element may be fitted.

 

Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to

its source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go

back to the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life.

Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests

to us an image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious

object of a solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us

the impression of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt

as a model the immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But

complete automatism is only reached in the official, for instance,

who performs his duty like a mere machine, or again in the

unconsciousness that marks an administrative regulation working with

inexorable fatality, and setting itself up for a law of nature.

Quite by chance, when reading the newspaper, I came across a

specimen of the