Art, Criticism and Laughter: Terry Eagleton
on Aesthetics
This paper was given at the conference `Aesthetics, Gender
Nation', a day of discussion of the work of Terry Eagleton,
organised by the Raymond Williams Trust, Oxford, March 1998.
Laughter consists in the fact that the blood,
which proceeds from the right orifice in the heart by the
arterial vein, inflating the lungs suddenly and repeatedly,
causes the air which they contain to be constrained to pass
out from them with an impetus by the windpipe, where it
forms an inarticulate and explosive utterance; and the
lungs in expanding equally with the air as it rushes out,
set in motion all the muscles of the diaphragm from the
chest to the neck, by which means they cause motion in the
facial muscles, which have a certain connection with them.
And it is just this action of the face with this
inarticulate and explosive voice that we call
laughter.
René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Part II,
Article 124.
It is almost de rigueur to begin any serious philosophical
account of the functions of comedy and laughter with an
embarrassed and self-exculpatory reference to the story of the
acquaintance of Doctor Johnson, who, on hearing of Johnson's
reputation as a philosopher, said: `I have tried in my time, too,
to be a philosopher, but I don't know how; cheerfulness was
always breaking through'. The humourlessness that may derisively
be conceded of philosophy as a whole would seem to be true in
spades of Marxism. Is it not odd that the most deeply and
heroically optimistic philosophy that humanity has succeeded in
wringing out for itself from the nightmare of history should be
so conspicuously lacking in cheerfulness? With some notable
exceptions, to whom I shall come to a little later, none of the
great Marxist thinkers of last century or of this - Marx himself,
Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno - can be said to have been
exactly masters of the arts of wit and hilarity. The Bumper Book
of Marxist Jokes, one suspects, would slide easily into an inside
pocket.
Since Weber, we have been schooled to think of capitalism as a
matter of Protestant self-renunciation and stern devotion to duty
and the reality principle. Late in his life, the most Weberian
of Marxists, Theodor Adorno, wrote an essay which exemplifies the
Puritan streak in Marxism. Adorno's essay `Free Time' was written
in the very midst of the rise of that pleasure-centred counter-
culture to which Adorno himself was able to react only with
bewilderment and scorn. In it, Adorno offers at one point to
elucidate his subject with the help of what he calls `a trivial
experience' of his own. `Time and time again', he writes, `when
questioned or interviewed, one is asked about one's hobbies.'
There is a moment of delicious anticipation here, as one prepares
oneself for Hello-esque revelations about the private life of the
great Marxist aesthetician: to discover, perhaps, that, after a
hard day's negative dialectics, Teddy Adorno likes nothing better
than to snip happily at his collection of bonsai trees, or
disappear into the garage to tinker with his Harley Davidson.
But, of course, this reverie has scarcely had time to form before
it is met by Adorno's scorching response:
I am shocked by the question when I come up against
it. I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who
is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself
industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities
beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I
take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so that
I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to
do with hobbies - preoccupations with which I had become
mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time - had I
not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now
widespread, barbarous mentality.{1}
Adorno's judgement on hobbies and free time
will in fact turn out to be another version of the grim verdict
supplied in his long, contemptuous condemnation of `The Culture
Industry' of two decades earlier, that `Laughter is the fraud
practised on happiness'. For Adorno, the very distinction between
the seriousness of work and the irresponsibility of free time is
to be understood as an extension of the remorseless drilling of
the bourgeois subject into the required rhythms of modern life.
For Adorno, just as much as for an Origen or a John Chrysostomos,
the sound of laughter in the era of what he did not live to see
called postmodernism was the cackling of the damned.
The recent history of Marxism poses the question of the relations
between pleasure, austerity and truth with a particular
intensity. If the revival of Marxism from the late 1960s onwards
was propelled by the libertarian embrace of hedonism within the
counter-culture of the 1960s, that powerful association between
pleasure and revolution has been blunted off in the era of
postmodernism to which 60s culture has turned out to be one kind
of prelude; an era in which pleasure has been repressively
desublimated into the grotesquely compulsive and compulsory
pleasures that form the subject of so much postmodernist
`celebration', from the alleged ecstasies of the cyber-body
through to the stern delights of fin-de-siècle sadomasochism,
with its recruitment to the pleasure principle of every possible
form of consensual assault and battery. Adorno is surely right
to have seen how consumer capitalism has meant the crossing over
of the Protestant ethic into a kind of duty of hilarity. But
while acknowledging how right he is, and sympathising with his
exasperation at Benjamin's own dubious interest in Charlie
Chaplin and the stinkbomb dissidence of surrealism, one must feel
that some vital element must be missing from a political and
ethical philosophy that has been able to make so little
accommodation to the powers of laughter.
Some of my memories of Terry Eagleton as my tutor at Wadham College between 1973 and 1976 (when, I realise with a complicated kind
of shock, that he was ten years younger than I am now), feed into
this question of the difficulty of integrating pleasure and
commitment. For a long time, I and my peers had wondered quite
how it was that the man who could while away so many hours in
song and, shall we say, cordiality in The Greyhound, outlasting
any mere undergraduate - as we mumbled our lame apologies about
essays to finish and slipped away exhausted into the night, we
would hear behind us, the sounds of Terry launching into another
chorus of `Wild Mountain Thyme' - quite how it was that he
managed to find the time to crank out all this writing. For a
long time, I suspected that he was employing a body double who
came on duty at 9 o'clock, as his dissolute alter ego snored away
the forenoon. Then I discovered the mundane truth, as I stumbled
past his room on the only occasion that I ever succeeded in
getting up in time to assist at those parodic, so-called
revelries which take place on May morning under Magdalen Tower,
and heard the furious clicking of his typewriter vying with the
twitters of the birds. I knew then that all the legends were
true: no matter what epic condition of intoxication he had
achieved the night before, or whatever conveyance it took to get
him to his desk, whether ambulance or wheelbarrow, it was he
himself, and not some Jekyll to his Hyde, who was always there
the morning so shortly after the night before. The hilarity and
the austerity formed a complex, but still, at this period, so
to speak, underground continuum.
The adjacency of play to work now seems very appropriate given
the way that, unlike any other Marxist theorist I can think of,
Eagleton has striven to bring the question of comedy to the
forefront of his work. One relatively straightforward and in many
ways very attractive option here would be to explicate the
explication of comedy, laughter and the ludicrous which Eagleton
develops through his various works, for example in the dazzling
chapter on Marxism and comedy in his book on Walter Benjamin. If
all goes well, I will indeed succeed in doing something of this
kind. I will try to say that Terry Eagleton's attempts to
associate Marxism not only in principle with happiness but
performatively and in practice with laughter sends him on a route
through a sort of buried tradition within Marxism. But I have two
other aims in mind too. I want to try to persuade you that
Eagleton's most important work, his book on The Ideology of
the Aesthetic, and the works which have fed into and have
been released by it, involve a sustained attempt to read the
history of Marxism, the history of philosophy itself, sideways
through its concern, or failure to concern itself with, the
comic. If you buy that, then you might be sufficiently softened
up to buy the further suggestion that the topic of comedy, can
in a sense be seen as the internal mirror or mis-en-abyme of the
whole argument of The Ideology of the Aesthetic; even to
the point of licensing a perverse, arsy-versy reading of the
whole of the book, as no more than the alibi or excuse for
the investigation of its true, disguised subject, the comic.
Secondly, though, I want to suggest that the comic and the
aesthetic become so bound up for Eagleton, that the question of
comedy somehow melts away from view, like Alice passing through
the mirror, becoming part of the very style and substance of his
engagement with the aesthetic. Eagleton's theoretical encounter
with the aesthetic in The Ideology of the Aesthetic marks
the last heroic effort to keep comedy in its place, in his
sights, as the intermittent subject of his work. Thereafter, the
lessons that Eagleton has attempted in earlier work like the
Walter Benjamin chapter to spell out, spill across into
his own relation to his subject. Eagleton tells us in his preface
to The Ideology of the Aesthetic that he had planned at
one point to interleave his historical analysis of aesthetic
ideology with an account of the development of Irish cultural
nationalism, from Thomas Davis through to Seamus Heaney.
The result of this ambitious venture would have
been a volume which only readers in regular weight-training
would have been able to lift; and I will therefore reserve
this work either for a patented board game, in which
players would be awarded points for producing the most
fanciful possible connections between European philosophers
and Irish writers, or for some future study. {2}
Eagleton made at least one move in this game. I chaired a lecture
at a conference on Walter Benjamin in which he elected to speak
on the intriguing topic of Benjamin and Ireland, which had
seasoned Benjaminians in the audience scratching their heads and
jealously wondering if Eagleton had somehow got his hands on some
great, hitherto unsuspected work of Benjamin's on Finnegans
Wake and the Irish Free State. That unwritten complement to
The Ideology of the Aesthetic turned into Heathcliff
and the Great Hunger; but, first of all, and perhaps more
significantly for my purposes, it took the form of a turn to the
theatre, with the writing of Saint Oscar at around the
same time as The Ideology of the Aesthetic was being
assembled. Saint Oscar and the plays and screenplays that
have followed it, though certainly no simple move from theory to
practice, from touchline to penalty area, are the fruit of a
willingness to allow that thinking is not something you do in
advance of or to the side of your writing, but something that
occurs through it.
Saint Oscar and the plays were actually preceded by a
novel, Saints and Scholars, which appeared in 1987. If
some of Eagleton's writing for the theatre appears at times like
literary theory masquerading as drama, then Saints and
Scholars reads very much like a drama on the run from itself
in the disguise of a novel. The central donné of the novel
is that, had James Connolly somehow magically escaped the bullets
that blazed towards him in his execution cell, he might have
ended up in hiding in the West of Ireland. With a bit of
manipulation of time, he might have run into the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived for a while in a cottage on the
west coast of Ireland, who might well have been there with his
Cambridge friend Count Nikolai Bakhtin, the elder brother of the
Russian critic Mikhail. Once you've granted all this, nothing
could be more natural than for them to be joined for a debate
about language, history and revolution by a portly Jewish
commercial traveller whose wife had recently run off to Paris
with a young poet almost half her age, to whom he had ironically
himself introduced her 12 years before - a man named Leopold
Bloom. The book is about four characters on the run and in
hiding, but is itself perhaps a way of going undercover for a
while, for example in the wonderful parody of a Bloomian interior
monologue on the anti-Beckettian predicament of not being able
to stop writing:
Wittgenstein returned to the living room,
leaving Bloom sunk in thought at the table. Can't stop
writing, he says. That's a queer one. Could always try
wearing boxing gloves. Get someone to tie them on, lots of
knots, can't get one off with the other. Or a tablet maybe,
some kind of contrascriptive. Dry up your ink. Or treat the
paper chemically so the ink doesn't take, fades as you
write, write all you want and damn all to show for
it. {3}
Wittgenstein's predicament sounds a bit like
Eagleton's own at this period: asked by Donal Tierney ` "And who
might these gobshites be who are coming after you?" ',
Wittgenstein replies contemptuously `Dons...Vultures, parasites.
They may arrive any moment.' " {4}
Eagleton has treated Saints and
Scholars subsequently as a source book or secret bank
account, raiding it at intervals for turns of phrase, dramatic
ideas and runs of argument. His dramatisation of the life of
Wittgenstein for Derek Jarman derives from the Wittgenstein
passages, especially the hilarious dialogue between Wittgenstein
and Bertrand Russell; Saint Oscar seems to open out from
some of the dandaical self-dramatising discourse of Nikolai
Bakhtin; the idea of using drama to effect a daring last-minute
rescue of James Connolly from history has been re-used in the
play The White, the Gold and the Gangrene, first
produced in 1993, which ends as a kind of Brechtian burlesquing
of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. That whole sequences of
argument should also have commuted across from Saints and
Scholars to The Ideology of the Aesthetic should be
seen as evidence, not of Eagleton's incapacity to stop writing
theory even on his days off, but rather of a fundamentally comic
and theatrical motivation that comes to characterise The
Ideology of the Aesthetic and Eagleton's critical writing
thereafter. It is as though Lenin should turn out to have been
merely another pseudonym or cat's-paw for Mikhail
Bakhtin.
The Ideology of the Aesthetic depends upon a restated
analogy between organicist thinking in political and aesthetic
orders of thought. The terms of this analogy are stated early in
The Ideology of the Aesthetic. `The mystery of the
aesthetic object is that each of its sensuous parts, while
appearing wholly autonomous, incarnates the "law" of the
totality. Each aesthetic particular, in the very act of
determining itself, regulates and is regulated by all other self-
determining particulars' (IA, 25). The theory of the balancing of particular and
generality in the art work provides a `dream of reconciliation
- of individuals woven into intimate unity with no detriment to
their specificity, of an abstract totality suffused with the
flesh-and-blood reality of the individual being' (IA, 25)
for an emergent middle class that has dismantled absolutist power
and traditional forms of religious authority, but has nothing yet
to put in its place. Even if there are moments of rush and
forcing in the book, as Eagleton moves too neatly or
precipitately from arguments about the nature of the work of art
to corresponding arguments about the nature of the State; still
the great triumph of the work is to have shown the many ways in
which the aesthetic acted as a kind of doodlepad allowing the sketching of imaginary or dreamwork solutions to
tenacious and sometimes unresolvable political
contradictions.
The key to The Ideology of the Aesthetic is to be found
in some sentences of Adorno concerning the ways in which the work
of art encodes and enacts relations of domination.
The origin of domination is always the
paradoxical, and thus unexpected, subsumption of an object
under a concept that is in other respects heterogeneous to
it. Accordingly, the phenomenon of aesthetic form always
signifies the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between
such a concept and the real object thought through it, and
hence between what is abstract and perceptive.
This is a passage which prototypically fuses relations of power
and aesthetic processes, lacing together all of the problems and
possibilities of the aesthetic, as well as providing Eagleton
with the central dynamic of his argument: the aesthetic as the
utopian possibility of what escapes identity thinking, even as
it serves as the very occasion for the enlargement of the domain
of identity thinking, for that way of taking into theoretical
custody the errant, libidinously unassimilable particular which
Eagleton names the ideology of the aesthetic. This quotation
demonstrates in its very form the relationship between
dialectical thinking and the workings of style, a relationship
that Eagleton both points to, and himself imitates in pointing
to it, when he says that Adorno's is
a style of philosophizing which frames the
object conceptually but manages by some cerebral acrobatics
to glance sideways at what gives such generalized identity
the slip. Every sentence of his texts is thus forced to
work overtime; each phrase must become a little masterpiece
or miracle of dialectics, fixing a thought in the second
before it disappears into its own contradictions
(IA, 342).
Actually, that is not strictly speaking true. I don't mean that
what Eagleton says about Adorno is mistaken; and I don't mean
that I haven't got things quite right, I'm not acknowledging a
theoretical error or coarseness. I mean that it is untrue in a
grosser, more vernacular, less parliamentary sort of way: I'm
owning up to a fib, a fabrication, a porky, a whopper. You will
search Adorno's Aesthetic Theory in vain for the paragraph
I have just quoted. Where you will find it is in chapter 8 of the
second volume of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and
Representation, where it runs as follows (my replacements are
indicated in square brackets):
The origin of the ludicrous [domination] is
always the paradoxical, and thus unexpected, subsumption of
an object under a concept that is in other respects
heterogeneous to it. Accordingly, the phenomenon of
laughter [aesthetic form] always signifies the sudden
apprehension of an incongruity between such a concept and
the real object thought through it, and hence between what
is abstract and perceptive. {5}
The point of this forgery, or application of
Benjaminian dynamite
to the tedious continuities of history, is, I hope, by now
becoming obvious. Indeed, my act of forgery is motivated by the
fact that Schopenhauer's discussion of jokes indeed comes in for
extended discussion in Eagleton's The Ideology of the
Aesthetic, a discussion which seems to demonstrate plumply
enough my own rather slender point, which is that the question
of laughter and the ludicrous attracts to itself and replicates
all of the terms in which the problem of the aesthetic is
posed.
It is a striking fact that the period which Eagleton takes as his
subject, the period during which the concept of the aesthetic
gets substantiated (one might say invented) also saw the
development for the first time of something like sustained
philosophical curiosity about the workings of laughter and the
comic. As John Morreall has suggested in his useful volume The
Philosophy of Laughter and Humour, the systematic inattention
to laughter and the comic, at least up to mid-eighteenth century,
has made for a an extraordinary conservatism about the subject.
Insofar as they have paid any inattention at all to comedy,
philosophers have only ever managed to come up with two kinds of
explanation for how it is produced. These are what Morreall calls
the Superiority Theory and the Incongruity Theory (Morreall
actually proposes a third category, which he calls, somewhat
dubiously for British ears accustomed to contemporary sexual
slang, the Relief Theory, but I set this aside, perhaps
precipitately, as merely a rewriting of the Incongruity Theory
in terms of a sort of physiological hydraulics). {6}
Up until the middle of the eighteenth century,
an Aristotelian
conception governed theories of laughter. Not that Aristotle had
much to say on the subject. It may be that the medieval rumour
that Aristotle had written a now lost book on comedy is true: but
judging from the little that Aristotle has to say on the subject
of comedy in the rest of his work, it does not seem likely to
have been a very substantial work. Aristotle shares with Plato
the idea that laughter is derision, or the expression of
superiority. Aristotle saw laughter as proceeding from `the joy
we have in observing the fact that we cannot be hurt by the evil
at which we are indignant'. Insofar as we tend to laugh at the
lowly and the undignified (what is ugly without being offensive,
as Aristotle says, in an interesting prefiguring of aesthetic
language), laughter should be kept within bounds, since laughing
too much at what is ridiculous or unbecoming starts to put your
own dignity on the line. Aristotle is here in concord with Plato,
who recommended the banning of depictions of gods or heroes
doubled up in laughter on the grounds that it was unbecoming and
conducive to disrespect for the divine.
The Superiority theory was still the best that Hobbes could do
with the topic: `The passion of laughter', he wrote in his
Human Nature, `is nothing else but sudden glory arising
from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by
comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own
formerly.' During the period with which Eagleton concerns
himself, however, the emphasis began to shift from this agonistic
or political reading of comedy as a kind of assertion of
superiority, to the cooler, more cerebral, more formalist kind
of explanation that Morreall characterises as the Incongruity
Theory. One of the most important mediators of this shift was the
Scottish philosopher of common sense, Frances Hutcheson. It is
Hutcheson who, finding Hobbes's account of laughter as aggressive
self-assertion repulsively antisocial, began the long work of
socialising laughter and the pleasures of the body, a work that
parallels the development of aesthetic discourse from the mid-
eighteenth-century onwards. Stung by Addison's repetition of
Hobbes's argument in The Spectator, Hutcheson published
three letters on comedy and laughter, which he gathered together
with a parallel critique of the Hobbesian aspects of Mandeville's
Fable of the Bees in a volume he published in 1758
entitled Thoughts on Laughter. The attempt to
associate or as it were bind in laughter with the binding effects
of sympathy and fellow feeling, is accomplished through a shift
from the Superiority Theory to the Incongruity Theory. Laughter
results from `the bringing together of images which have contrary
additional ideas as well as some resemblance in the principal
idea'. {7} To be sure, the
most common kinds of incongruity still
involve differences in social rank: `this contrast between ideas
of grandeur, dignity, sanctity, perfection, and ideas of
meanness, baseness, profanity, seems to be the very spirit of
burlesque; and the greatest part of our raillery and jest are
founded upon it'. {8} But
Hutcheson's essay, which is acknowledged
by Schopenhauer in his chapter on the ludicrous, has begun the
work of evacuating ideas of power from ideas of laughter, that
process of formalising and aestheticising laughter which makes
it so apt a mirror for the emergent discourse of aesthetics
itself.
It is in these terms that the topic of laughter gets into Kant's
Critique of Judgement. In taking it at its own
earnest self-estimate Eagleton's discussion of Kant in The
Ideology of the Aesthetic rather lets it off the hook. On the
other hand, it must be said that Kant's discussion of laughter
is easy to miss. It comes right at the
end of Book II, the `Analytic of the Sublime', and its subject
is modestly veiled by the title of the section which is simply
`Remark'. Kant wishes to show that laughter comes about as a kind
of mechanical or purely physiological version of the
disinterested play of the understanding that is involved in the
contemplation of the beautiful. Instead of the disinterested play
of the understanding, we have the play as it were of sensation.
While allowing the analogy between jokes and works of art, Kant
carefully empties out any kind of cognitive content from his
account of the stimulation of laughter:
it is readily intelligible how ... shifting the
mind now to one standpoint and now to the other, to enable
it to contemplate its object, may involve a corresponding
and reciprocal straining and slackening of the elastic
parts of our intestines, which communicates itself to the
diaphragm (and resembles that felt by ticklish people), in
the course of which the lungs expel the air with rapidly
succeeding interruptions, resulting in a movement conducive
to health. This alone, and not what goes on in the mind, is
the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at
bottom represents nothing. {9}
A joke, for Kant, offers the same kind of
`intricately wrought
composure' that a poem does for I.A. Richards, only somehow
bypassing the intellect in a form of bodily contemplation. If
this account of laughter as mechanical process resembles not only
Descartes's hilariously hapless attempt to get at the essence of
laughter by describing its physiological effects, it also seems
to look forward to Bergson's account of laughter as resulting
from the diminution of a living creature to the condition of an
object or a machine. This is no accident. For Bergson's
Laughter climaxes with a discussion of the relations
between art and laughter, which insists that, since art has to
do with the individual and the particular, and comedy with what
is typical and general, art can have nothing to do with the
comic. Comedy, he concludes, `turns its back upon art, which is
a breaking away from society and a return to pure nature.' {10}
Bergson here completes the dissociation that
Kant begins but does
not carry through. Kant therefore both digests laughter
into the notion of the aesthetic and carefully distinguishes
laughter from aesthetic understanding. We can say that, following
Kant, culture, in the Arnoldian sense of a free play of the mind,
is the damping down of laughter, a way of learning how not to
giggle in church or fart in art galleries. (The work of
Bakhtin will later suggest the undecidability of the question of
whether laughing is bad because it is a kind of farting or vice
versa.) Art and the aesthetic mean the kind of seemly, self-
including, self-limiting continence that Kant prefigures here in
his account of the comic; they mean that act of simultaneous
inclusion and exclusion that Kant himself practises with respect
to laughter. Jokes and laughter are allowed into the saloon, so
to speak, only on condition that they leave their guns at the
door, and obey the rules of the establishment, which is to say,
submit to the kind of formalist account which allows them to be
assigned their modest role as a minor version of the free play
of judgement.
The interesting feature about Kant's version of the Incongruity
Theory as here set out is that it is actually contradicted by the
example he gives. Here, is Kant's Joke:
Suppose that some one tells the following
story: an Indian at an Englishman's table in Surat, saw a
bottle of ale opened, and all the beer turned into froth
and flowing out. The repeated exclamations of the Indian
showed his great astonishment. `Well, what is so wonderful
in that?' asked the Englishman. `Oh, I'm not surprised
myself,' said the Indian, `at its getting out, but at how
you ever managed to get it all in.' {11}
`At this', declares the Sage of Regensburg,
`we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure'. He is instantly at
pains to make it clear that there is no crude triumphing in
disadvantage: our
laughter `is not because we think ourselves, maybe, more quick-
witted than this ignorant Indian. It is rather that the bubble
of our expectation was extended to the full and suddenly went off
into nothing.' {12} Our
contemporary discomfort with this joke - it
is, after all, an Irish joke - is the mark of the inadequacy of
any formalist account of humour - and of art - which attempts to
drain out from it power and politics.
Schopenhauer's account of the ludicrous, to which I have already
referred to, breaks with Kant's, and in a sense, makes it
possible for us to see how unintentionally comic Kant's whole
enterprise in the Critique of Judgement is. For
Schopenhauer, the comic impulse does not come from a pure,
disinterested play between alternative frames of judgement on the
same plane, but a struggle between epistemological levels, namely between a concept and a particularity. For Schopenhauer, we might
say, Hegel's dialectic of history would be comic, where
Kant is merely ridiculous. (It was in response to precisely this
sense of what Kant left out precisely by trying to cram
everything grotesquely in, that Schopenhauer's theory of the
ludicrous was developed.)
The difference between interested and disinterested laughter
(which is really the difference between laughter and the absence
of laughter) is illustrated in some of Schopenhauer's own jokes.
Here is what I believe to be the unfunniest joke ever propounded:
Bearing in mind that for an angle two lines
meeting each other are required which when produced
intersect each other; that the tangent, on the other hand,
touches the circle only at one point, but at this point
really runs parallel to it; and if we thus have present in
our mind the abstract conviction of the impossibility of an
angle between the circumference of a circle and the
tangent, but yet have such an angle visibly before us on
paper, all this will easily make us smile. In this case, of
course, the ludicrous is extremely feeble. {13}
A moment later, we get a more effective
example of the
interference of concept and particular, in an anecdote told of the
famous German actor Unzelmann.
After he had been strictly forbidden to
improvise at all in the Berlin theatre, he had to appear on
the stage on horseback. Just as he came on the stage, the
horse dunged, and at this the audience were moved to
laughter, but they laughed much more when Unzelmann said to
his horse: `What are you doing? don't you know that we are
forbidden to improvise?' {14}
The `subsumption of the heterogeneous under
the more general
concept' which Schopenhauer observes in this last example is
powerful and provocative of laughter to the degree that something
is at stake in the imposition of a law and resistance to it.
Depressingly, but not surprisingly, Schopenhauer, like Kant,
finds his most natural example in a racist joke that insists on
the actuality of relations of power in the abrasion of the
concept and the particular:
one of the free Negroes in North America, who
endeavour to imitate the whites in all respects, recently
placed an epitaph over his dead child, which begins:
`Lovely, early broken lily.' {15}
It is striking how regularly such dynamics of racial or ethnic
power and disadvantage creep into those abstract or aestheticised
theories of laughter that began to predominate during the later
eighteenth century. The preface to a pseudonymous verse account
of The Art of Joking, which appeared around 1780,
proclaimed that `Laughing is that noble faculty which
distinguishes man from beast, which shews the rationality of the
soul, that can be moved independent of the sense'. {16} But a centrepiece of its
evocation of the contemporary conditions of wit involves the
degradation of reason into blundering foolishness which is
characteristic both of the Irish and the English who make
themselves ridiculous in imitating them:
The vulgar ear Hibernia's jests delights,
Who turns to blunder all her merry flights;
She knew incongruous jests wou'd please the croud,
So gave her sanction, and those bulls allow'd.
Behold her sons perpetually mistake,
And one idea for another take;
But of [sic] ungrateful to avoid the slur,
They gave to us what they derive from her.
Imported bulls the grinning rabble please,
Hibernian lawyers blunder for their fees;
Hibernian actors blunder on the stage,
And, while derided, look immensely sage.
The English, proud what's bad to imitate,
In Irish accent British blunders prate;
Against Hibernia's sons her weapons turn,
And at the mighty blunder-masters spurn;
So where a master-painter shews his skill,
Vile daubers copy, and expression kill. {17}
That this laughing cruelty survives into our
own time is
indicated by the very similar use made by Bergson of race: we
find Negroes funny, says Bergson, because they look to us like
objects. Why do they look like objects? Because the blackness of
their skin makes it look as though they have been
painted.
Eagleton's own embrace of the affirmative power of laughter comes
from its own acknowledgement and activation of something more
like a Schopenhauerian than a Kantian perspective. Not that
Eagleton has not had his own Kantian methodological moment with
respect to comedy. In an essay published in 1983 entitled
`Poetry, Pleasure and Politics', Eagleton undertook an analysis
of a single line of Yeats's `Easter 1916', with the aim, he says
of articulating the different levels at which pleasure is derived
from poetry; this in turn, he suggests would lead to a
theoretical knowledge of how it is that the mechanisms of
pleasure might be harnessed to political objectives. Fortunately,
this grim extension of the technological mode of Criticism and
Ideology to the question of pleasure is subject to a parodic
explosion from the start. The essay is comically poised between
convincing its reader of the possibility of subsuming pleasure
within cultural politics and acknowledging that such a work of
analysis could never be complete or sufficient, would always
remain comically, laboriously retarded with respect to its
object.
Not that there isn't something a little formulaic about the uses
of pleasure and the comic as they are claimed and enacted in
The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Eagleton's own comedy is
on the whole the comedy of derisive desublimation: it works often
by a kind of personification, which reduces the play of concepts
to the slapstick actions and struggles of imagined types or
situations. Take, for example, this colourful account of the
Nietzschean creed of self-overcoming:
In contempt for the timorous bourgeois, he
[Nietzsche] unveils as his ideal that violently self-
willing creature, conjuring himself up anew at every
moment, who was for Kierkegaard the last word in
`aesthetic' futility. But this ferocious new creation,
stamping his overbearing shape on the world with all the
hauteur of the old transcendental ego, is hardly as
new as he appears. If the furious dynamism of the
Übermensch terrifies the stout metaphysical citizen,
he may also figure as his fantastic alter ego, in
the sphere of production if not in the sacred precincts of
family, church and state. (IA, 259)
Or take these two versions of a judgement regarding the
importance of the flâneur for Benjamin, taken from
Walter Benjamin and its reworked form in the chapter on
Benjamin in The Ideology of the Aesthetic:
The flâneur's every dallying step speaks
ideological volumes; in the very poise of his head and
rhythm of his gait Benjamin reads the imprint of the class
struggle itself. Peerlessly self-composed, resisting the
dismembered crowd, the flâneur moves majestically
against that historical grain that would decompose his body
into an alien meaning, reduce his numinous presence to an
allegory of loss. {18}
The flâneur, or solitary city
stroller, stepping out
with his turtle on a lead, moves majestically against the
grain of the urban masses who would decompose him to some
alien meaning; in this sense his style of walking is a
politics all in itself. (IA, 335-6)
The second version thins out the camp, flâneurial self-regard,
parodic to be sure, but perhaps too self-indulgently so, of the
first; and that detail of the turtle gives the sentence a
derisive comic stab that opens up a gap of hostility between the
parody and what it parodies. In it Villiers de L'Isle Adam is
suddenly diminished to a kind of Quentin Crisp. glimpsed, as it
were, from the top deck of a number 19. There is enormous energy
in these personifications, but it is an energy that can become
routine.
There is something rather fixated, too, about the way in which
the comic is identified with the force of the body in The
Ideology of the Aesthetic, the ways in which the comic can
become the guarantee of the `ineffably particular'. Here, The
Ideology of the Aesthetic can I think be accused of the same
kind of over-estimation of the work of Bakhtin as is to be found
in the chapter on comedy in Walter Benjamin. The evidence
of this overestimation is, I think, to be found in the curious
fact of his absence in The Ideology of the Aesthetic;
although Eagleton declares, at the end of his chapter on Adorno,
that Adorno himself, Benjamin and Bakhtin are `the three most
creative, original cultural theorists Marxism has yet produced'
(IA, 364), there is no chapter devoted to Bakhtin. It is
as though Eagleton in a certain sense might not wish to diffuse
the impact of Bakhtinian assumptions about the redeeming comic
openness of the body upon which he depends too much to want to
subject it to analysis. But here, Eagleton appears to miss a
chance of disentangling his own Bakhtinianism from that of the textual-
libidinists who during the 1980s seized on Bakhtin's work as the
best hope for gingering up what had become the pallidly
predictable procedures of deconstruction. And such an act of
disentangling was surely necessary. One might say that the
difference between Eagleton's Marxist-materialist-corporealism
and libidinal-textualist corporealism amounts to little more than
a disagreement about whether bums are funnier than the word `bums'.
Actually, there are two slightly different views of the claims
and powers of laughter which pull against each other in
Eagleton's work. The first is to be found in Eagleton's reference
to Benjamin's judgement that `there is no better starting point
for thought than laughter; speaking more generally, spasms of the
diaphragm generally offer better chances for thought than spasms
of the soul. Epic theatre is lavish only in the occasions it
offers for laughter.' {19} The
second is to be found in the suggestion made in Walter
Benjamin that `Marxism has the humour of dialectics because
it reckons itself into the historical equations it writes; like
the great heritage of Irish wit from Swift and Sterne to Joyce,
Beckett and Flann O'Brien, it has the comedy of all "texts" that
write about themselves in the act of writing history.' {20}
Part of the power and fascination of The
Ideology of the
Aesthetic is that it offers itself and its own procedures to
be read in terms of the very arguments it offers about and
against the aesthetic. The aesthetic appears as just that realm
of troublingly unassimilated particularity for which materialist
analysis must articulate the law, without merely abolishing it
into politics. For Eagleton's own antagonists throughout this
book are those post-Marxists and postmodernist theorists who
would see the aesthetic as pure self-determination, excessive to
all law, politics or ethics. The kind of lawfulness, the
articulation of the aesthetic into larger historical and
political totalities, which Eagleton's argument generates, asks
to be read in terms of the aesthetic lawfulness which is its
subject. As one might expect, it is in the chapter on Marx, right
at the heart of the book, that this reflexivity becomes clearest;
this is a chapter which, as I once tried to argue in a book of
my own, runs into a problem when it tries to argue that Marx's
own theoretical writings represent a kind of compromise between
a totalising aesthetics of the beautiful and an open, excessive
aesthetics of the sublime. For how are we then to judge the
aesthetics of the blending, which certainly sounds like it trumps
the sublime with the beautiful? {21} This question could be reformulated in terms of
the tragic and the comic.
Perhaps the most telling question raised by Eagleton's account
of the workings of aesthetic ideology, and raised in particular
by the distinctively comic manner of his account is how far one
should allow the aesthetic to dictate the terms in which it is
read and understood. Arguably, Eagleton allows a particular,
dominant tradition of thinking about the aesthetic to appear to
determine the nature of the aesthetic itself, when it may be just
as important to insist that there is no more an essence of the
aesthetic than there is for Wittgenstein an essence of language,
or a way of isolating from the forms of behaviour we gather
together with the term language some uniquely and intrinsically
`linguistic' quiddity. It turns out that, as we should have known
all along, the aesthetic is everywhere.
If that is Eagleton's point, it is a point that runs the danger
of getting lost in a discourse that can be accused of treating
the aesthetic too aesthetically. In one sense, comedy and
laughter are what wrench us dialectically out of this tautology.
And yet, since the comic appears to be thought so much in
parallel to the aesthetic, precisely the same point could and
should be made, and for precisely the same reasons, about
laughter and the comic as I have just made about the aesthetic,
namely that it is thought too systematically, again too
aesthetically. For all the subtlety of Eagleton's
discussions of the problems of how to keep the liberating
corporeal force of laughter safe from the danger of
incorporation, one wonders whether this very characteristically
aesthetic problematic is not part of the problem. To treat the
comic as either so thoroughly assimilated as to have been
abolished within Romantic aesthetics, or as that which remains
troublingly outside its precincts, as the very essence of the
inessential, as the category of the `free particular' or the
noncategorial, is to have constrained the comic within a
suspiciously invariant formal structure that it might have been
the point of the exercise to kick away from. If the discourse of
the aesthetic is a kind of ideological switchboard, then the
comic is a parasitic but still structural noise on the line,
which hotwires the aesthetic across into questions of power, as
they are expressed in concerns with, for example, gender, and
nationality.
We just do not need to know what the comic is; as with the
aesthetic, we could do most of all with knowing what it is we do
with laughter and what it does with us. The fact that our failure
to do this, to pick up the tongs with that same pair of tongs,
as Eagleton puts it in Saints and Scholars, is so
irresistibly comic, is also part of the point. But there is one
feature of comedy and laughter to which I have paid no attention to
at all, even though it is the enabling condition for everything
I have been able to say, and the way in which I have been able
to say it. The identification of this feature is the one
absolutely new contribution which Freud makes to the
understanding of laughter, when he observes that laughter is
always social. He does not mean by this another version of the
Superiority Theory, that laughter always involves social
relations, between high and low, dominators and dominated. Rather
it is the fact that nobody can laugh alone, without wanting to
let some other in on the joke, that attracts Freud's attention.
We can no more laugh alone, than we can be in company for long
without laughing. We laugh as we live, in company; and our
laughter is one of the ways in which we make the company we keep.
For laughter is a way of making, of taking thought, a creative,
companionable labour, the kind of labour we cannot choose to do
without, because it is the labour out of which we are ourselves
made and remade, and make and remake each other. Laughter, in
short, and at last, is the labour, as this has been today, for
me, of love.
Notes
1. `Free Time', in The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 163. Back to
Text
2. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 11. References hereafter to IA,
in the text. Back to Text
3. Saints and Scholars (London: Verso,
1987), p. 121. Back to Text
4. Ibid, p. 77. Back to
Text
5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, Vol. 2, p. 91. Back to
Text
6. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour, ed.
John Morreall (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1987). Back to Text
7. Frances Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter
and Observations on the Fable of the Bees In Six Letters
(Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1758; facsimile reprint
Bristol: Thoemmes, 1989), p. 24. Back to
Text
8. Ibid. Back to
Text
9. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of
Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957), p. 201. Back to Text
10. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the
Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred
Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 171. Back
to Text
11. Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp.
199-200. Back to Text
12. Ibid, p. 200. Back to
Text
13. World as Will and Representation,
Vol. 2, p. 92. Back to Text
14. Ibid, p. 93. Back to
Text
15. Ibid. Back to
Text
16. Walter Benjamin: Or Towards A
Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 154. Back to Text
17. `Samuel Smilewell', The Art of Joking: or an Essay On
Witticism; In the Manner of Mr Pope's Essay on Criticism: With
Proper Examples to the Risible Rules (London: for Joseph
Deveulle, c. 1780), p. 51. Back to
Text
18. Walter Benjamin, p. 154.Back to
Text
19. Walter Benjamin, Understanding
Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Books, 1973),
p. 101. Back to Text
20. Walter Benjamin, p. 161. Back to Text
21. See my Theory and Cultural Value
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 135-48, esp. p. 140. Back to Text
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