My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 19 страница

We therefore readily recall that many authorities do not recognize the sharp conceptual and material distinction between jokes and the comic to which we have found ourselves led, and that they regard jokes as simply ‘the comic of speech’ or ‘of words’. In order to test this view we will choose one example each of something intentionally and of something involuntarily comic in words to compare with jokes. We have remarked earlier that we believe ourselves very well able to distinguish a comic remark from a joke:

‘With a fork and much to-do

His mother dragged him from the stew’

is merely comic; Heine’s remark about the four castes among the inhabitants of Göttingen - ‘professors, students, philistines and donkeys’ is par excellence a joke.

For something intentionally comic I will take as a model Stettenheim’s ‘Wippchen’. People speak of Stettenheim as ‘witty’ because he possesses to a special degree the gift of evoking the comic. This capacity does in fact aptly determine the ‘wit’ that one ‘has’ in contrast to the ‘joke’ that one ‘makes’.¹ It cannot be disputed that the letters of Wippchen, the Correspondent from Bernau, are also ‘witty’ in so far as they are abundantly sprinkled with jokes of every kind, among them some that are genuinely successful (e.g. of a display by savages: ‘in ceremonial undress’). But what gives these productions their peculiar character is not these separate jokes but the almost too abundant comic of speech which flows through them. ‘Wippchen’ was no doubt originally intended as a satirical figure, a modification of Gustav Freytag’s ‘Schmock’, one of those uneducated people who misuse and trade away the nation’s store of culture; but the author’s enjoyment of the comic effects achieved in his picture of this character has evidently pushed the satirical purpose little by little into the background. Wippchen’s productions are for the most part ‘comic nonsense’. The author has made use of the pleasurable mood brought about by the piling up of these successes to introduce (justifiably, it must be said), alongside perfectly permissible material, all kinds of insipidities which could not be tolerated on their own account. Wippchen’s nonsense produces a specific effect on account of a peculiar technique. If one looks more closely at these ‘jokes’ one is specially struck by a few kinds which give the whole production its stamp. Wippchen makes use predominantly of combinations (amalgamations), modifications of familiar turns of speech and quotations and replacements of a few commonplace elements in them by more pretentious and weighty forms of expression. This incidentally is coming near to the techniques of jokes.

¹ [The same German word ‘Witz’ is used here for both ‘wit’ and ‘joke’.]0

Here, for instance, are some amalgamations (taken from the preface and the first pages of the whole series):

‘Turkey has money wie Heu am Meere.’ This is made up of the two expressions: ‘Money wie Heu’ and ‘Money wie Sand am Meer '.¹

Or, ‘I am no more than a column stripped of its leaves,² which bears witness to its vanished glory’ - condensed from ‘a tree stripped of its leaves’ and ‘a column which... etc.’

Or, ‘Where is the thread of Ariadne which will lead me from the Scylla of this Augean stable?’ to which three Greek legends have each contributed an element.

The modifications and substitutions can be summarized without much difficulty. Their nature can be seen from the following examples, which are characteristic of Wippchen and behind which we have a glimpse of another, more current and usually more commonplace wording, which has been reduced to a cliché:

‘Mier Papier und Tinte höher zu hängen.’ We use the phrase ‘einem den Brotkorb höher hängen ' metaphorically for ‘to put someone in more difficult circumstances’. So why should not the metaphor be extended to other material?

¹ [These are two common expressions in German, equivalent to ‘money like dirt’ or ‘oceans of money’.]

² [‘Eine entlaubte Säule’ - an echo of ‘Eine entleibte Seele’, ‘a disembodied spirit’.]1

‘Battles in which the Russians sometimes draw the shorter and sometimes the longer.’ Only the first of these expressions [‘den Kürzeren ziehen’, ‘draw the shorter’] is in common use; but in view of its derivation there would be no absurdity in bringing the second into use as well.

‘While I was still young, Pegasus stirred within me.’ If we put back ‘the poet’ instead of ‘Pegasus’ we find an autobiographical cliché well-worn by frequent use. It is true that ‘Pegasus’ is not a suitable substitute for ‘the poet’, but it has a conceptual relation with it and is a high-sounding word.

‘Thus I lived through the thorny shoes of childhood.’ A simile instead of a simple statement. ‘Die Kinderschuhe austreten’ [‘to wear out the shoes of childhood’, ‘to leave the nursery behind’] is one of the images connected with the concept of childhood.

From the profusion of Wippchen’s other productions some can be stressed as pure examples of the comic. For instance, as a comic disappointment: ‘For hours the fight fluctuated, until at last it remained undecided.’ Or, as a comic unmasking (of ignorance): ‘Clio, the Medusa of History.’ Or quotations such as: ‘Habent sua fata morgana.’¹ But our interest is more aroused by the amalgamations and modifications, because they repeat familiar joke-techniques. We may, for instance, compare with the modifications such jokes as ‘he has a great future behind him’, or ‘er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf’, or Lichtenberg’s modification joke ‘new spas cure well’, and so on. Are Wippchen’s productions which have the same technique now to be called jokes? or how do they differ from these?

¹ [Habent sua fata libelli (books have their destinies)' is a Latin saying attributed to Terence. ‘Fata Morgana’ is the Italian name for a particular kind of mirage seen in the Straits of Messina: from Morgan le Fey (fairy), King Arthur’s sister.]2

It is not difficult to answer. Let us recall that jokes present a double face to their hearer, force him to adopt two different views of them. In a nonsense joke, like the ones last mentioned, the one view, which only takes the wording into account, regards it as nonsense; the other view, following the hints that are given, passes through the hearer’s unconscious and finds an excellent sense in it. In Wippchen’s joke-like productions one face of the joke is blank, as though it were rudimentary: a Janus head but with only one face developed on it. If we allow the technique to lure us into the unconscious, we come upon nothing. The amalgamations lead us to no instance in which the two things that are amalgamated really yield a new meaning; if we attempt an analysis, they fall completely apart. The modifications and substitutions lead, as they do in jokes, to a usual and familiar wording; but the modification or substitution itself tells us nothing fresh and as a rule, indeed, nothing possible or serviceable. So that only the one view of these ‘jokes’ is left over - that they are nonsense. We can merely decide whether we choose to call such productions, which have freed themselves from one of the most essential characteristics of jokes, ‘bad’ jokes or not jokes at all.

Rudimentary jokes of this kind undoubtedly produce a comic effect, which we can account for in more than one way. Either the comic arises from the uncovering of the modes of thought of the unconscious, as in cases we considered earlier, or the pleasure comes from the comparison with a complete joke. Nothing prevents our supposing that both these ways of generating comic pleasure converge here. It is not impossible that here the inadequacy of support from a joke is precisely what makes the nonsense into comic nonsense.

For there are other easily intelligible cases in which inadequacy of this kind as compared with what ought to be effected makes the nonsense irresistibly comic. The counterpart of jokes - riddles - can perhaps offer us better examples of this than jokes themselves. For instance, here is a ‘facetious question’: ‘What is it that hangs on the wall and that one can dry one’s hands on?’ It would be a stupid riddle if the answer were ‘a hand-towel’. But that answer is rejected. - ‘No, a herring.’ - ‘But for heaven’s sake’, comes the infuriated protest ‘a herring doesn’t hang on the wall.’ - ‘You can hang it up there.’ - ‘But who in the world is going to dry his hands on a herring?’ - ‘Well’, is the soothing reply, ‘you don’t have to.’ This explanation, given by means of two typical displacements, shows how far this question falls short of a genuine riddle; and on account of its absolute inadequacy it strikes us as being - instead of simply nonsensically stupid - irresistibly comic. In this way, by failing to comply with essential conditions, jokes, riddles, and other things, which do not produce comic pleasure in themselves, are made into sources of comic pleasure.

There is still less difficulty in understanding the case of the involuntary comic of speech, which we can find realized as often as we please in, for instance, the poems of Friederike Kempner (1891):

Against Vivisection

Ein unbekanntes Band der Seelen kettet

Den Menschen an das arme Tier.

Das Tier hat einen Willen - ergo Seele -

Wenn auch 'ne kleinere als wir.¹

Or a conversation between a loving married couple:

The Contrast

‘Wie glücklich bin ich’, ruft sie leise,

‘Auch ich’, sagt lauter ihr Gemahl,

‘Es macht mich deine Art und Weise

Sehr stolz auf meine gute Wahl!’ ²

There is nothing here to make us think of jokes. But there is no doubt that it is the inadequacy of these ‘poems’ that makes them comic - the quite extraordinary clumsiness of their expression, which is linked with the tritest or most journalistic turns of phrase, the simple-minded limitation of their thought, the absence of any trace of poetic matter or form. In spite of all this, however, it is not obvious why we find Kempner’s poems comic. We find many similar products nothing but shockingly bad; they do not make us laugh but annoy us. But it is precisely the greatness of the distance that separates them from what we expect of a poem that imposes the comic view on us; if this difference struck us as smaller we should be more inclined to criticize than to laugh. Furthermore, the comic effect of Kempner’s poems is assured by a subsidiary circumstance - the authoress’s unmistakably good intentions and a peculiar sincerity of feeling which disarms our ridicule or our annoyance and which we sense behind her helpless phrases.

Here we are reminded of a problem whose consideration we have postponed. Difference in expenditure is undoubtedly the basic determining condition of comic pleasure; but observation shows that this difference does not invariably give rise to pleasure. What further conditions must be present or what disturbances must be kept back, in order that comic pleasure may actually arise from the difference in expenditure? Before we turn to answering this question, we will conclude this discussion with a clear assertion that the comic of speech does not coincide with jokes, and that jokes must therefore be something other than the comic of speech.

¹ [ Between mankind and poor dumb beasts there stretches

A chain of souls impossible to see.

Poor dumb beasts have a will - ergo a soul too -

E’en though they have a soul smaller than we.]

² [ ‘How fortunate am I!’ she softly cried.

‘I too’, declared her husband’s louder voice:

‘Your many qualities fill me with pride

At having made so excellent a choice.’]4 Now that we are on the point of approaching an answer to our last question, as to the necessary conditions for the generating of comic pleasure from the difference in expenditure, we may allow ourselves a relief which cannot fail to give us pleasure. An accurate reply to the question would be identical with an exhaustive account of the nature of the comic, for which we can claim neither capacity nor authority. We shall once more be content to throw light on the problem of the comic only so far as it contrasts clearly with the problem of jokes.

Every theory of the comic is objected to by its critics on the score that its definition overlooks what is essential to the comic; ‘The comic is based on a contrast between ideas.’ ‘Yes, in so far as the contrast has a comic and not some other effect.’ ‘The feeling of the comic arises from the disappointment of an expectation.’ ‘Yes, unless the disappointment is in fact a distressing one.’ No doubt the objections are justified; but we shall be over-estimating them if we conclude from them that the essential feature of the comic has hitherto escaped detection. What impairs the universal validity of these definitions are conditions which are indispensable for the generating of comic pleasure; but we do not need to look for the essence of the comic in them. In any case, it will only become easy for us to dismiss the objections and throw light on the contradictions to the definitions of the comic if we suppose that the origin of comic pleasure lies in a comparison of the difference between two expenditures. Comic pleasure and the effect by which it is known - laughter - can only come about if this difference is unutilizable and capable of discharge. We obtain no pleasurable effect but at most a transient sense of pleasure in which the characteristic of being comic does not emerge, if the difference is put to another use as soon as it is recognized. Just as special contrivances have to be adopted in the case of jokes in order to prevent the use elsewhere of the expenditure that is recognized as superfluous, so, too, comic pleasure can only appear in circumstances that guarantee this same condition. For this reason occasions on which these differences in expenditure occur in our ideational life are uncommonly numerous, but the occasions on which the comic emerges from those differences are relatively quite rare.

Two observations force themselves on anyone who studies even cursorily the conditions for the generation of the comic from difference in expenditure. Firstly, there are cases in which the comic appears habitually and as though by force of necessity, and on the contrary others in which it seems entirely dependent on the circumstances and on the standpoint of the observer. But secondly, unusually large differences very often break through unfavourable conditions, so that the comic feeling emerges in spite of them. In connection with the first of these points it would be possible to set up two classes - the inevitably comic and the occasionally comic - though one must be prepared from the first to renounce the notion of finding the inevitability of the comic in the first class free from exceptions. It would be tempting to enquire into the determining conditions for the two classes.

The conditions, some of which have been brought together as the ‘isolation’ of the comic situation, apply essentially to the second class. A closer analysis elicits the following facts:

(a) The most favourable condition for the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in which one is ‘inclined to laugh’. In a toxic mood of cheerfulness almost everything seems comic, probably by comparison with the expenditure in a normal state. Indeed, jokes, the comic and all similar methods of getting pleasure from mental activity are no more than ways of regaining this cheerful mood - this euphoria - from a single point of approach, when it is not present as a general disposition of the psyche.

(b) A similarly favourable effect is produced by an expectation of the comic, by being attuned to comic pleasure. For this reason, if an intention to make something comic is communicated to one by someone else, differences of such a low degree are sufficient that they would probably be overlooked if they occurred in one’s experience unintentionally. Anyone who starts out to read a comic book or goes to the theatre to see a farce owes to this intention his ability to laugh at things which would scarcely have provided him with a case of the comic in his ordinary life. In the last resort it is in the recollection of having laughed and in the expectation of laughing that he laughs when he sees the comic actor come on to the stage, before the latter can have made any attempt at making him laugh. For that reason, too, one admits feeling ashamed afterwards over what one has been able to laugh at the play.

(c) Unfavourable conditions for the comic arise from the kind of mental activity with which a particular person is occupied at the moment. Imaginative or intellectual work that pursues serious aims interferes with the capacity of the cathexes for discharge - cathexes which the work requires for its displacements - so that only unexpectedly large differences in expenditure are able to break through to comic pleasure. What are quite specially unfavourable for the comic are all kinds of intellectual processes which are sufficiently remote from what is perceptual to bring ideational mimetics to a stop. There is no place whatever left for the comic in abstract reflection except when that mode of thought is suddenly interrupted.

(d) The opportunity for the release of comic pleasure disappears, too, if the attention is focused precisely on the comparison from which the comic may emerge. In such circumstances what would otherwise have the most certain comic effect loses its comic force. A movement or a function cannot be comic for a person whose interest is directed to comparing it with a standard which he has clearly before his mind. Thus the examiner does not find the nonsense comic which the candidate produces in his ignorance; he is annoyed by it, while the candidate’s fellow students, who are far more interested in what luck he will have than in how much he knows, laugh heartily at the same nonsense. A gymnastic or dancing instructor seldom has an eye for the comic in his pupils’ movements; and a clergyman entirely overlooks the comic in the human weaknesses which the writer of comedies can bring to light so effectively. The comic process will not bear being hypercathected by attention; it must be able to take its course quite unobserved in this respect, incidentally, just like jokes. It would, however, contradict the nomenclature of the ‘processes of consciousness’ of which I made use, with good reason, in my Interpretation of Dreams if one sought to speak of the comic process as a necessarily unconscious one. It forms part, rather, of the preconscious; and such processes, which run their course in the preconscious but lack the cathexis of attention with which consciousness is linked, may aptly be given the name of ‘automatic’. The process of comparing expenditures must remain automatic if it is to produce comic pleasure.

(e) The comic is greatly interfered with if the situation from which it ought to develop gives rise at the same time to a release of strong affect. A discharge of the operative difference is as a rule out of the question in such a case. The affects, disposition and attitude of the individual in each particular case make it understandable that the comic emerges and vanishes according to the standpoint of each particular person, and that an absolute comic exists only in exceptional instances. The contingency or relativity of the comic is therefore far greater than that of a joke, which never happens of its own accord but is invariably made, and in which the conditions under which it can find acceptance can be observed at the time at which it is constructed. The generation of affect is the most intense of all the conditions that interfere with the comic and its importance in this respect has been nowhere overlooked.¹ For this reason it has been said that the comic feeling comes easiest in more or less indifferent cases where the feelings and interests are not strongly involved. Yet precisely in cases where there is a release of affect one can observe a particularly strong difference in expenditure bring about the automatism of release. When Colonel Butler answers Octavio’s warnings by exclaiming ‘with a bitter laugh’: ‘Thanks from the House of Austria!’, his embitterment does not prevent his laughing. The laugh applies to his memory of the disappointment he believes he has suffered; and on the other hand the magnitude of the disappointment cannot be portrayed more impressively by the dramatist than by his showing it capable of forcing a laugh in the midst of the storm of feelings that have been released. I am inclined to think that this explanation would apply to every case in which laughter occurs in circumstances other than pleasurable ones and accompanied by intensely distressing or strained emotions.

(f) If we add to this that the generating of comic pleasure can be encouraged by any other pleasurable accompanying circumstance as though by some sort of contagious effect (working in the same kind of way as the fore-pleasure principle with tendentious jokes), we shall have mentioned enough of the conditions governing comic pleasure for our purposes, though certainly not all of them. We can then see that these conditions, as well as the inconstancy and contingency of the comic effect, cannot be explained so easily by any other hypothesis than that of the derivation of comic pleasure from the discharge of a difference which, under the most varying circumstances, is liable to be used in ways other than discharge.

¹ ‘It is easy for you to laugh; it means nothing more to you.’7 The comic of sexuality and obscenity would deserve more detailed consideration; but we can only touch upon it here with a few comments. The starting-point would once more be exposure. A chance exposure has a comic effect on us because we compare the ease with which we have enjoyed the sight with the great expenditure which would otherwise be required for reaching this end. Thus the case approaches that of the naïvely comic, but is simpler. Every exposure of which we are made the spectator (or audience in the case of smut) by a third person is equivalent to the exposed person being made comic. We have seen that it is the task of jokes to take the place of smut and so once more to open access to a lost source of comic pleasure. As opposed to this, witnessing an exposure is not a case of the comic for the witness, because his own effort in doing so does away with the determining condition of comic pleasure: nothing is left but the sexual pleasure in what is seen. If the witness gives an account to someone else, the person who has been witnessed becomes comic once more, because there is a predominant sense that the latter has omitted the expenditure which would have been in place for concealing his secret. Apart from this, the spheres of sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic pleasure alongside pleasurable sexual excitement; for they can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs (degradation) or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love (unmasking).

8 An invitation to us to look for an understanding of the comic in its psychogenesis is also to be found, surprisingly enough, in Bergson’s charming and lively volume Le rire. We have already made the acquaintance of Bergson’s formulas for grasping the characteristics of the comic: ‘mécanisation de la vie’, ‘substitution quelconque de l’artificial au naturel’.¹ He proceeds by a plausible train of thought from automatism to automata, and tries to trace back a number of comic effects to the faded recollection of a children’s toy. In this connection he reaches for a moment a point of view, which, it is true, he soon abandons: he endeavours to explain the comic as an after-effect of the joys of childhood. ‘Peut-être même devrions-nous pousser la simplification plus loin encore, remonter à nos souvenirs les plus anciens, chercher dans les jeux qui amusèrent l’enfant la première ébauche des combinaisons qui font rire l’homme... Trop souvent surtout nous méconnaissons ce qu’il y a d’encore enfantin, pour ainsi dire, dans la plupart de nos émotions joyeuses.’ (Bergson, 1900, 68 ff.)² Since we have traced back jokes to children’s play with words and thoughts which has been frustrated by rational criticism we cannot help feeling tempted to investigate the infantile roots which Bergson suspects in the case of the comic as well.

¹ [‘Mechanization of life’ - ‘some kind of substitution of the artificial for the natural.’]

² [‘Perhaps we should even carry simplification further still, go back to our oldest memories, and trace in the games that amused the child the first sketch of the combinations which make the grown man laugh... Above all, we too often fail to recognize how much of childishness, so to speak, there still is in most of our joyful emotions.’]9

And, in fact, if we examine the relation of the comic to the child we come upon a whole number of connections which seem promising. Children themselves do not strike us as in any way comic, though their nature fulfils all the conditions which, if we compare it with our own nature, yield a comic difference: the excessive expenditure on movement as well as the small intellectual expenditure, the domination of the mental functions by the bodily ones, and other features. A child only produces a comic effect on us when he conducts himself not as a child but as a serious adult, and he produces it then in the same way as other people who disguise themselves. But so long as he retains his childish nature the perception of him affords us a pure pleasure, perhaps one that reminds us slightly of the comic. We call him naïve, in so far as he shows us his lack of inhibition, and we describe as naïvely comic those of his utterances which in another person we should have judged obscenities or jokes.

On the other hand, children are without a feeling for the comic. This assertion seems to say no more than that the comic feeling, like such a number of other things, only starts at some point in the course of mental development; and this would be by no means surprising, especially as it has to be admitted that the feeling already emerges clearly at an age which has to be counted as part of childhood. But it can nevertheless be shown that the assertion that children lack the feeling of the comic contains more than something self-evident. In the first place, it is easy to see that it could not be otherwise if our view is correct which derives the comic feeling from a difference in expenditure that arises in the course of understanding another person. Let us once again take the comic of movement as an example. The comparison which provides the difference runs (stated in conscious formulas): ‘That is how he does it’ and ‘This is how I should do it, how I did it’. But a child is without the standard contained in the second sentence; he understands simply by mimicry: he does it in just the same way. The child’s upbringing presents him with a standard: ‘this is how you ought to do it.’ If he now makes use of this standard in making the comparison, he will easily conclude: ‘he did not do it right’ and ‘I can do it better’. In this case he laughs at the other person, he laughs at him in the feeling of his own superiority. There is nothing to prevent our deriving this laughter too from a difference in expenditure; but on the analogy of the cases of laughing at people that we have come across we may infer that the comic feeling is not present in a child’s superior laughter. It is a laughter of pure pleasure. In our own case when we have a clear judgement of our own superiority, we merely smile instead of laughing, or, if we laugh, we can nevertheless distinguish this becoming conscious of our superiority from the comic that makes us laugh.

It is probably right to say that children laugh from pure pleasure in a variety of circumstances that we feel as ‘comic’ and cannot find the motive for, whereas a child’s motives are clear and can be stated. For instance, if someone slips in the street and falls down we laugh because the impression - we do not know why - is comic. A child laughs in the same case from a feeling of superiority or from Schadenfreude: ‘You’ve fallen down, I haven’t.’ Certain motives for pleasure in children seem to be lost to us adults, and instead in the same circumstances we have the ‘comic’ feeling as a substitute for the lost one.

If one might generalize, it would seem most attractive to place the specific characteristic of the comic which we are in search of in an awakening of the infantile - to regard the comic as the regained ‘lost laughter of childhood’. One could then say: ‘I laugh at a difference in expenditure between another person and myself, every time I rediscover the child in him.’ Or, put more exactly, the complete comparison which leads to the comic would run: ‘That is how he does it - I do it in another way - he does it as I used to do it as a child.’

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23