My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 9 страница

‘Even though the Muses do not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the free love of that Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which, despite their lovely curves never speak nobly.’

‘He is like the ostrich, which believes he is well hidden if he sticks his head in the sand, so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his head.’9 Allusion is perhaps the commonest and most easily manageable method of joking and is at the bottom of the majority of short-lived jokes which we are accustomed to weaving into our conversations and which will not bear being uprooted from their original soil and kept in isolation. But it precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique, eludes us there once again.

I have occasionally described allusion as ‘indirect representation’; and we may now observe that the various species of allusion, together with representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which ‘indirect representation’ would be the most comprehensive name. ‘Faulty reasoning’, ‘unification’, ‘indirect representation’ - these, then, are the headings under which we can classify those techniques of conceptual jokes which we have come to know.

If we examine our material further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect representation which can be precisely characterized but of which few examples can be adduced. This is representation by something small or very small - which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of ‘allusion’, if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it. For instance:

‘A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: "Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)?" "Oho!", said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering.’

It cannot be denied that this representation by something small is related to the ‘tendency to economy’ which we were left with as the last common element after our investigation of verbal technique.

Here is a very similar example:

‘The doctor, who had been asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounced that the moment had not come, and suggested to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness struck the ears of the two men: "Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!" Her husband sprang up, but the doctor signed to him to sit down: "It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!" A little later there were again sounds from the pregnant woman: "Mein Gott, mein Gott, what terrible pains!" - "Aren’t you going in, Professor?" asked the Baron. - "No, no. It’s not time yet." - At last there came from next door an unmistakable cry of "Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!" The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed: "Now it’s time."'

This successful joke demonstrates two things from the example of the way in which the cries of pain uttered by an aristocratic lady in child-birth changed their character little by little. It shows how pain causes primitive nature to break through all the layers of education, and how an important decision can be properly made to depend on an apparently trivial phenomenon.1 There is another kind of indirect representation used by jokes, namely the ‘analogy’. We have kept it back so long because the consideration of it comes up against new difficulties, or makes particularly evident difficulties that we have already come up against in other connections. We have already admitted that in some of the examples we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of analogy. There is a feeling - and this is probably true of a large number of other people under the same conditions - which tells me ‘this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke’ even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way - by limiting myself to the best and most effective examples of a species.

It is easy to demonstrate that there are remarkably fine and effective examples of analogies that do not in the least strike us as being jokes. The fine analogy between the tenderness in Ottilie’s diary and the scarlet thread of the English navy (p. 1629 n.) is one such. And I cannot refrain from quoting in the same sense another one, which I am never tired of admiring and the effect of which I have not grown out of. It is the analogy with which Ferdinand Lassalle ended one of his celebrated speeches for the defence (‘Science and the Workers’): ‘Upon a man such as I have shown you this one to be, who has devoted his life to the watchword "Science and the Workers", being convicted, if it were his lot, would make no more impression than would the bursting of a retort upon a chemist deep in his scientific experiments. As soon as the interruption is past, with a slight frown over the rebelliousness of his material, he will quietly pursue his researches and his labours.’

A rich selection of apt and joking analogies are to be found among Lichtenberg’s writings (the second volume of the Göttingen edition of 1853), and it is from there that I shall take the material for our investigation.

‘It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.’

No doubt that seems to be a joke; but on closer examination we, notice that the joking effect does not arise from the analogy itself but from a subsidiary characteristic. ‘The torch of truth’ is not a new analogy but one that has been common for a very long time and has become reduced to a cliché - as always happens when an analogy is lucky and accepted into linguistic usage. Though we scarcely notice the analogy any longer in the phrase ‘the torch of truth’, it is suddenly given back its full original force by Lichtenberg, since an addition is now made to the analogy and a consequence is drawn from it. But we are already familiar with a process like this of giving its full meaning to a watered-down expression as a technique of joking. It finds a place in the multiple use of the same material (p. 1639 f.). It might quite well be that the joking impression produced by Lichtenberg’s remark arises only from its dependence on this joke-technique.

The same judgement may certainly apply as well to another joking analogy by the same author:

‘To be sure, the man was not a great light [Licht], but a great candlestick [Leuchter]... He was a Professor of Philosophy.’

To describe a man of learning as a great light, a lumen mondi, has long ceased to be an effective analogy, whether or not it originally had an effect as a joke. But the analogy is refreshed, it is given back its full force, if a modification is derived from it and a second, new, analogy is thus obtained from it. The way in which this second analogy comes about seems to be what determines the joke, not the two analogies themselves. This would be an instance of the same joke-technique as in the example of the torch.

The following example seems to have the character of a joke for another reason, but one that must be judged similarly:

‘Reviews seem to me to be a kind of childish illness to which new-born books are more or less liable. There are examples of the healthiest dying of it; and the weakest often get through it. Some escape it altogether. Attempts have often been made to guard against it by the amulets of preface and dedication, or even to inoculate against it by judgements of one’s own. But this does not always help.’

The comparison of reviews to a childish illness is founded in the first instance on the fact of being exposed to them shortly after first seeing the light of day. I cannot venture to decide whether up to this point the comparison has the character of a joke. But it is then carried further: it turns out that the subsequent fate of new books can be represented within the framework of the same analogy or through related analogies. A prolongation like this of an analogy is undoubtedly in the nature of a joke, but we already know what technique it has to thank for this - it is a case of unification, the making of an unsuspected connection. The character of the unification is not altered by the fact that here it consists in making an addition to a previous analogy.

In another group of analogies one is tempted to shift what is undoubtedly an impression that has the character of a joke on to another factor, which once again has in itself nothing to do with the nature of the analogy. These are analogies which contain a striking juxtaposition, often a combination that sounds absurd, or which are replaced by something of the sort as the outcome of the analogy. The majority of the Lichtenberg examples belong to this group.

‘It is a pity that one cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what they have eaten.’ The ‘learned’ entrails is a bewildering and indeed absurd epithet, which is only explained by the analogy. What if the impression of its being a joke were due entirely to the bewildering character of the juxtaposition? If so, it would correspond to a method of joking with which we are quite familiar - ‘representation by absurdity’

Lichtenberg has used the same analogy between the ingestion of reading and instructive matter and the ingestion of physical nourishment for another joke:

‘He thought very highly of learning at home, and was therefore entirely in favour of learned stall-feeding.’

Other analogies by the same author exhibit the same absurd, or at least remarkable, assignment of epithets, which, as we now begin to see, are the true vehicles of the joke:

‘That is the weather side of my moral constitution; I can stand things there quite well.’

‘Everyone has his moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.’

‘Moral backside’ - the assignment of this remarkable epithet is the outcome of an analogy. But in addition, the analogy is continued further with an actual play upon words - ‘need’ - and a second even more unusual juxtaposition (‘the breeches of respectability’), which is perhaps a joke in itself; for the breeches, since they are the breeches of respectability, themselves, as it were, become a joke. We need not be surprised, then, if the whole gives us the impression of being an analogy that is a very good joke. We begin to notice that we are inclined, quite generally, where a characteristic attaches only to a part of a whole, to extend it in our estimation to the whole itself. The ‘breeches of respectability’, incidentally, recall some similarly bewildering lines of Heine’s:

... Bis mir endlich,

endlich alle Knopfe rissen

an der Hose der Geduld.¹

There can be no doubt that these last two analogies have a characteristic that we do not find in every good (that is to say, in every apt) analogy. They are to a great degree ‘debasing’, as we might put it. They juxtapose something of a high category, something abstract (in these instances, ‘respectability’ and ‘patience’), with something of a very concrete and even low kind (‘breeches’). We shall have to consider in another connection whether this peculiarity has anything to do with the joke. Here we will try to analyse another example in which this disparaging characteristic is quite specially plain. Weinberl, the clerk in Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen [He wants to have a spree], pictures to himself how one day, when he is a respectable old business man, he will remember the days of his youth: ‘When the ice in front of the warehouse of memory has been hacked up like this in a friendly talk’, he says, ‘when the arched doorway of old times has been unlocked again and the showcase of the imagination is fully stocked with goods from the past....’ These are, to be sure, analogies between abstract and very commonplace concrete things; but the joke depends - whether entirely or in part - on the fact that a clerk is making use of analogies taken from the domain of his everyday activities. But the bringing of these abstractions into connection with the ordinary things with which his life is normally filled is an act of unification.

¹ [... Till at last,

at last every button bursts

on my breeches of patience.]4

Let us return to the Lichtenberg analogies:

‘The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds [= points of the compass] and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, "bread-bread fame" or "fame-fame-bread". As is so often the case with Lichtenberg’s jokes, the impression of something apt, witty and shrewd is so prominent that our judgement upon the nature of what constitutes the joke is misled by it. If some amount of joke is admixed with the admirable meaning in a remark of this kind, we are probably led into declaring that the whole thing is an excellent joke. I should like, rather, to hazard the statement that everything in it that is really in the nature of a joke arises from our surprise at the strange combination ‘bread bread-fame’. As a joke, therefore, it would be a ‘representation by absurdity’.

A strange juxtaposition or the attribution of an absurd epithet can stand by itself as the outcome of an analogy:

‘A zweischläfrige woman.’ ‘An einschläfriger church-pew.’¹ (Both by Lichtenberg.) Behind both these there is an analogy with a bed; in both of them, besides the ‘bewilderment’ the technical factor of ‘allusion’ is in operation - an allusion in one case to the sleepy effects of sermons and in the other to the inexhaustible topic of sexual relations.

So far we have found that whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques that are familiar to us. But a few other examples seem at last to provide evidence that an analogy can in itself be a joke.

This is how Lichtenberg describes certain odes:

‘They are in poetry what Jakob Böhme’s immortal works are in prose - a kind of picnic, in which the author provides the words and the reader the sense.’

‘When he philosophizes, he throws as a rule an agreeable moonlight over things, which pleases in general but shows no single thing clearly.’

¹ [These two German words - meaning literally ‘that can sleep two’ and ‘that can sleep one’ - are ordinarily applied to beds, i.e. ‘double’ and ‘single’. Einschläfrig, however, can also mean ‘soporific’.]

Or here is Heine:

‘Her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love poem.’

Or let us take the lengthy analogy, with a highly degrading purpose, in the ‘Bäder von Lucca’

‘A catholic cleric behaves rather like a clerk with a post in a large business house. The Church, the big firm, of which the Pope is head, gives him a fixed job and, in return, a fixed salary. He works lazily, as everyone does who is not working for his own profit, who has numerous colleagues and can easily escape notice in the bustle of a large concern. All he has at heart is the credit of the house and still more its maintenance, since if it should go bankrupt he would lose his livelihood. A protestant cleric, on the other hand, is in every case his own principal and carries on the business of religion for his own profit. He does not, like his catholic fellow-traders, carry on a wholesale business but only retail. And since he must himself manage it alone, he cannot be lazy. He must advertise his articles of faith, he must depreciate his competitors’ articles, and, genuine retailer that he is, he stands in his retail shop, full of business envy of all the great houses, and particularly of the great house in Rome, which pays the wages of so many thousands of book-keepers and packers and has its factories in all four quarters of the globe.’

In the face of this and many other examples, we can no longer dispute the fact that an analogy can in itself possess the characteristic of being a joke, without this impression being accounted for by a complication with one of the familiar joke techniques. But, that being so, we are completely at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include analogy among the species of ‘indirect representation’ used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in analogies than in other forms of expression.

6 This gap in our understanding gives us no grounds, however, for complaining that this first investigation has been without results. In view of the intimate connection which we must be prepared to attribute to the different characteristics of jokes, it would be imprudent to expect that we could completely explain one side of the problem before we have so much as cast a glance at the others. We shall no doubt have now to attack the problem from another direction.

Can we feel sure that none of the possible techniques of jokes has escaped our investigation? Of course not. But a continued examination of fresh material can convince us that we have got to know the commonest and most important technical methods of the joke-work - at all events as much as is required for forming a judgement on the nature of that psychical process. So far we have not arrived at any such judgement; but on the other hand we are now in possession of an important indication of the direction from which we may expect to receive further light upon the problem. The interesting processes of condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute, which we have recognized as the core of the technique of verbal jokes, point towards the formation of dreams, in the mechanism of which the same psychical processes have been discovered. This is equally true, however, of the techniques of conceptual jokes - displacement, faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation, representation by the opposite - which re-appear one and all in the technique of the dream-work. Displacement is responsible for the puzzling appearance of dreams, which prevents our recognizing that they are a continuation of our waking life. The use of absurdity and nonsense in dreams has cost them the dignity of being regarded as psychical products and has led the authorities to suppose that a disintegration of the mental activities and a cessation of criticism, morality and logic are necessary conditions of the formation of dreams. Representation by the opposite is so common in dreams that even the popular books of dream-interpretation, which are on a completely wrong tack, are in the habit of taking it into account. Indirect representation - the replacement of a dream-thought by an allusion, by something small, a symbolism akin to analogy - is precisely what distinguishes the mode of expression of dreams from that of our waking life.¹ So far-reaching an agreement between the methods of the joke-work and those of the dream-work can scarcely be a matter of chance. To demonstrate this agreement in detail and to examine its basis will be one of our later tasks.

¹ Cf. Chapter VI (‘The Dream-Work’) of my Interpretation of Dreams.7

III THE PURPOSES OF JOKES

When at the end of my last chapter I wrote down Heine’s comparison of a catholic priest to an employee in a wholesale business and of a protestant one to a retail merchant, I was aware of an inhibition which was trying to induce me not to make use of the analogy. I told myself that among my readers there would probably be a few who felt respect not only for religion but for its governors and assistants. Such readers would merely be indignant about the analogy and would get into an emotional state which would deprive them of all interest in deciding whether the analogy had the appearance of being a joke on its own account or as a result of something extra added to it. With other analogies - for instance, the neighbouring one of the agreeable moonlight which a particular philosophy throws over things - there seemed to be no need for worry about the disturbing effect they might have on a section of my readers. The most pious man would remain in a state of mind in which he could form a judgement on our problem.

It is easy to divine the characteristic of jokes on which the difference in their hearers’ reaction to them depends. In the one case the joke is an end in itself and serves no particular aim, in the other case it does serve such an aim - it becomes tendentious. Only jokes that have a purpose run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them.

Non-tendentious jokes were described by Vischer as ‘abstract’ jokes. I prefer to call them ‘innocent’ jokes.

Since we have already divided jokes into ‘verbal’ and ‘conceptual’ jokes according to the material handled by their technique, it devolves on us now to examine the relation between that classification and the new one that we are introducing. The relation between verbal and conceptual jokes on the one hand and abstract and tendentious jokes on the other is not one of mutual influence; they are two wholly independent classifications of joking products. Some people may perhaps have gained an impression that innocent jokes are predominantly verbal jokes, but that the more complex technique of conceptual jokes is mostly employed for definite purposes. But there are innocent jokes that work with play upon words and similarity of sound, and equally innocent ones that employ all the methods of conceptual jokes. And it is just as easy to show that a tendentious joke need be nothing other than a verbal joke as regards its technique. For instance, jokes that ‘play about’ with proper names often have an insulting and wounding purpose, though, needless to say, they are verbal jokes. But the most innocent of all jokes are once more verbal jokes; for instance, the Schüttelreime¹, which have recently become so popular and in which the multiple use of the same material with a modification entirely peculiar to it constitutes the technique:

Und weil er Geld in Menge hatte,

lag stets er in der Hängematte.²

It may be hoped that no one will question that the enjoyment derived from these otherwise unpretentious rhymes is the same as that by which we recognize jokes.

¹ [Literally, ‘shaking-up rhymes’.]

² [And because he had money in quantities

He always lay in a hammock.]9 Good examples of abstract or innocent conceptual jokes are to be found in plenty among the Lichtenberg analogies, with some of which we have already become acquainted. I add a few more:

‘They had sent a small octavo volume to Göttingen, and had got back something that was a quarto in body and soul.’

‘In order to erect this building properly, it is above all necessary that good foundations shall be laid; and I know of none firmer than if, upon every course of masonry pro, one promptly lays a course contra.’

‘One person procreates a thought, a second carries it to be baptized, a third begets children by it, a fourth visits it on its deathbed and a fifth buries it.’ (Analogy with unification.)

‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ Here the joke lies entirely in the nonsensical form of representation, which puts what is commonly thought less of into the comparative and uses the positive for what is regarded as more important. If this joking envelope is removed, we have: ‘it is much easier to get rid of a fear of ghosts intellectually than to escape it when the occasion arises.’ This is no longer in the least a joke, though it is a correct and still too little appreciated psychological discovery - the same one which Lessing expressed in a well-known sentence:

‘Not all are free who mock their chains.’

I may take the opportunity that this affords of getting rid of what is nevertheless a possible misunderstanding. For ‘innocent’ or ‘abstract’ jokes are far from having the same meaning as jokes that are ‘trivial’ or ‘lacking in substance’; they merely connote the opposite of the ‘tendentious’ jokes that will be discussed presently. As our last example shows, an innocent - that is, a non-tendentious - joke may also be of great substance it may assert something of value. But the substance of a joke is independent of the joke and is the substance of the thought which is here, by means of a special arrangement, expressed as a joke. No doubt, just as watch-makers usually provide a particularly good movement with a similarly valuable case, so it may happen with jokes that the best achievements in the way of jokes are used as an envelope for thoughts of the greatest substance.

If now we draw a sharp distinction in the case of conceptual jokes between the substance of the thought and the joking envelope, we shall reach a discovery which may throw light of much of our uncertainty in judging jokes. For it turns out - and this is a surprising thing - that our enjoyment of a joke is based on a combined impression of its substance and of its effectiveness as a joke and that we let ourselves be deceived by the one factor over the amount of the other. Only after the joke has been reduced do we become aware of this false judgement.

Moreover, the same thing is true of verbal jokes. When we are told that ‘experience consists in experiencing what one does not wish to experience’, we are bewildered and think we have learnt a new truth. It is a little time before we recognize under this disguise the platitude of ‘Injury makes one wise’. (Fischer.) The apt way in which the joke succeeds in defining ‘experience’ almost purely by the use of the word ‘to experience’ deceives us into overvaluing the substance of the sentence. Just the same thing is true of Lichtenberg’s ‘January’ joke of unification (p. 1667), which has nothing more to tell us than something we have already long known - that New Year’s wishes come true as seldom as other wishes. So too in many similar cases.

And we find just the contrary with other jokes, in which the aptness and truth of the thought tricks us into calling the whole sentence a brilliant joke - whereas only the thought is brilliant and the joke’s achievement is often feeble. Precisely in Lichtenberg’s jokes the kernel of thought is frequently far more valuable than the joking envelope to which we unjustifiably extend our appreciation. Thus, for instance, the remark about the ‘ torch of truth’ (p. 1682) is an analogy that scarcely amounts to a joke, but it is so apt that we are inclined to insist that the sentence is a particularly good joke.

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