Framing Literary Humour

Cells, Masks and Bodies as 20th-Century Sites of Imprisonment

Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501356568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contrary to what their oppressive design would lead us to believe, might structures of imprisonment actually incite humour? Starting from the most obvious areas of imprisonment (war camps, prison cells) and moving to the less obvious (masks, bodies), Framing Literary Humour demonstrates how 20th-century humour in theory and in fiction cannot be fully understood without a careful look at its connection with the notion of imprisonment. Understanding imprisonment as a concrete spatial setting or a metaphorical image, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard analyses selected works of Romain Gary, Giovannino Guareschi, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Luigi Pirandello to reconfigure confinement as an essential structural condition for the emergence of humour.

1

Humour and Imprisonment

To set the stage for the analysis of humour in confinement in fiction, this chapter develops a comparative framework out of five theories that connect humour and imprisonment. Since the theorists conceive and name humour differently, I map out the different meanings of the word and the variations within each theorist’s work in chronological order: from Bergson’s 1900 essay Le rire,¹ through Freud’s 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and his 1927 article ‘Der Humor’, Pirandello’s 1908 Umorismo (revised in 1920), Wyndham Lewis’s theories of laughter, humour and satire from the 1910s to the 1930s, up to Bakhtin’s theories of laughter, the carnival and dialogism from the 1930s to the 1970s. In bringing together these theories, I am particularly attentive to draw a distinction between the phenomena of the comic and of humour. While I clarify terminological differences, I am most interested in the conceptual application of the theories.

Bergson

Bergson’s theory is not one of humour but of the comic. He discusses humour only on two pages, describing it as a type of satire, itself a sub-category of the comic. However, it is essential to use it as a starting point in my discussion of the connection between humour and imprisonment in the twentieth century for several reasons. Firstly, its impact on other modern theories is indisputable. It has been referenced and debated throughout the twentieth century, and it is still quoted and used as a framework in literary analyses today (see Jardon 1988: 20–1). It has also influenced, directly or indirectly, most of the other authors and theorists I discuss, especially Wyndham Lewis. Second, Bergson’s theory of the comic acts as a foil to better understand humour. It highlights the properties of humour that are not present in the comic, an important difference being the presence of self-reflexivity in humour and its absence in the comic. Furthermore, the comic itself is not absent from the works I analyse, but it does not deal with imprisonment the same way humour does. Finally, Bergson’s theory is developed around the ideas of mechanicity, automatism, rigidity – that is around notions of individual, social and bodily confinement. For Bergson, comic laughter arises in a social group in direct reaction to the identification of forms of imprisonment, and it is posited as a way to free the imprisoned self from said imprisonment and to reintegrate this individual into the group. However, Le rire stages an inner contradiction between liberation and coercion, as laughter becomes both a possible tool for liberation and a coercive device.

The comic, satire, irony, humour

The crux of Bergson’s theory is the social role of laughter as a corrective. Having identified three essential characteristics of laughter (pertaining to humans, accompanied by an absence of feeling and necessarily social), the philosopher pictures laughter as a social gesture which corrects individual rigidity. ‘Toute raideur du caractère, de l’esprit et même du corps’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 15; original emphasis) [‘all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body’ ([1900] 1911: 19; original emphasis)],² interpreted by the social group as a menacing eccentricity, would call for collective repression:

Par la crainte qu’il inspire, [le rire] réprime les excentricités, tient constamment en éveil et en contact réciproque certaines activités d’ordre accessoire qui risqueraient de s’isoler et de s’endormir, assouplit enfin tout ce qui peut rester de raideur mécanique à la surface du corps social. Le rire ne relève donc pas de l’esthétique pure, puisqu’il poursuit (inconsciemment, et même immoralement dans beaucoup de cas particuliers) un but utile de perfectionnement général. (Bergson [1900] 1975: 15–16)

[By the fear which it inspires, [laughter] restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement. ([1900] 1911: 19–20)]

For Bergson, we laugh when we see a person behave as a thing. Someone behaving mechanically, rather than being fully alive, only imitates life: ‘Ce n’est plus la vie, c’est de l’automatisme installé dans la vie et imitant la vie. C’est du comique.’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 25) [‘This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic’ ([1900] 1911: 32)]. Automatism being perceived as an imprisonment in a predetermined form, laughter would lead to the individual’s liberation from that form and to increased flexibility. Bergson’s essay develops this core idea of punitive/liberating laughter for four categories of the comic: the comic in forms and movements, the comic in situations, the comic in words and the comic in character. For each of these categories, he shows the role of three processes: inversion, reciprocal interference and repetition/transposition.³

Bergson’s essay deals specifically with comic laughter. Yet his category of the comic – located at the intersection of life and art (Bergson [1900] 1975: 17, 103, [1900] 1911: 22, 135) – encompasses all sorts of manifestations, from comedies to novels, from caricature to everyday life. Moreover, the comic includes satire, irony and humour, all treated within the category of the comic in words. Bergson saw the artificiality of this category (Bergson [1900] 1975: 78, [1900] 1911: 103), but still distinguished between ‘le comique que le langage exprime et celui que le langage crée’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 79) [‘the comic expressed and the comic created by language’ ([1900] 1911: 103; original emphasis)]. The comic in words becomes the ‘projection’ of the comic of actions and situations ‘sur le plan des mots’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 85) [‘on to the plane of words’ ([1900] 1911: 111)].

Within the all-encompassing category of the comic, Bergson identifies subcategories such as satire, which enacts a transposition between the real and the ideal. Humour and irony would be two possible forms of satire, defined in opposition to one another. Irony is defined as stating what should be done and pretending to believe this is what is being done. Humour, on the other hand, is stating minutely what is being done, and pretending to believe this is what should be done: ‘Tantôt, au contraire, on décrira minutieusement et méticuleusement ce qui est, en affectant de croire que c’est bien là ce que les choses devraient être: ainsi procède souvent l’humour’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 97; original emphasis) [‘Sometimes, on the contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the method of humour’ ([1900] 1911: 127; original emphasis)]. Humour is also distinguished by its ‘scientific’ character. It is an act of transposition from the moral to the scientific, and the humorist is ‘un moraliste qui se déguise en savant’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 98) [‘a moralist disguised as a scientist’ ([1900] 1911: 128)]. This definition of humour, easily applicable to a tradition of humorists or satirists such as Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain, is, however, too specific to explain the structure of humour in the works discussed in this book. Bergson is conscious of the restrictiveness of his use of the term, specifying that he uses the word ‘au sens restreint’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 98) [‘in the restricted sense’ ([1900] 1911: 128)]. This narrow sense is not what I call humour.

Despite the micro-distinctions, Bergson explains all comic word transpositions (irony, humour, parody, exaggeration [Bergson [1900] 1975: 94–5, [1900] 1911: 123–5]) by going back to the notion of the stiffening of something that should be fluid. Laughter arises as a sign that something is mechanical (or appears to be mechanical), where it should be flowing with what will later be called the élan vital. In the comic in words, the comic ‘souligne les distractions du langage lui-même. C’est le langage lui-même, ici, qui devient comique.’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 79) [‘[the comic] lays stress on lapses of attention in language itself. In this case, it is language itself that becomes comic’ ([1900] 1911: 104)].

The comic and imprisonment

Therefore, the role of comic laughter is to be a weapon against rigidity, whatever that rigidity is. All types of mechanicity, or lack of elasticity, should be socially signalled by laughter in order to help the individual displaying them to realign with the élan vital.⁴ Pictured this way, laughter would be a tool to set free the individual trapped by automatism. Yet the relationship between Bergson’s laughter and imprisonment is ambivalent, if not paradoxical. While, on the one hand, laughter should set the individual free, on the other hand, this social corrective is exercised from outside, without access to the target’s interiority. It asserts the primacy of an external, collective perception of what individual flexibility should look like and is therefore, by definition, normative. What Bergson pictures as a way to liberate the individual from imprisonment in habit and mechanicity is also a coercive tool. This is the contradiction at the core of Bergson’s theory.

Part of this contradiction can be clarified by understanding the relationship between laughter and Bergson’s central notion of élan vital. Although Le rire does not use this concept, it is key to understanding laughter’s role. Explained as an ‘exigence de création’ (Bergson 1970: 708) [a ‘creative exigency’] that lies at the origin of life, the élan vital opposes itself to repetition. In Paul Douglass’s overview of Bergson’s concept, the necessity of change or creation in the élan vital is explained by a crucial line of Le rire:

If the universe is both creative and destructive, nonetheless its original and fundamental nature is the creative act implied in the phrase élan vital. Thus, Bergson argues that the vital energy of life is perpetually struggling to overcome materiality (or ‘matter’). The universe always seeks a return to its origin in pure energy and protean, radical change. ‘To cease to change would be to cease to live’, Bergson believes, and ‘the fundamental law of life … is the complete negation of repetition’.⁵ (Bergson [1900] 1911: 32) (Douglass 2013: 303; original emphasis)

Thus, life is opposed to repetition, and it is not surprising that Bergson sees repetition as one of the main processes of the comic. Social laughter wishes to correct something perceived by Bergson as un-natural and negative for the human being, a lack of fluidity (‘raideur du caractère, de l’esprit et même du corps’) (Bergson [1900] 1975: 15; original emphasis) [‘inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body’ ([1900] 1911: 19; original emphasis)]. Bergsonian laughter is thus a negative force, but a negative force applied to another negativity, and assumed to bring ‘perfectionnement général’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 16) [‘general improvement’ ([1900] 1911: 20)] to society and to the individual. It is an attempt to remove constraints (of automatism, of habits, of lack of life).

However, the improvement is always imposed on the individual by the group, and the place of the individual response in front of social laughter remains unclear. The question is therefore whether imposed freedom can be perceived as freedom. The role of individual laughter and its impact on the group are also unclear. The disconcerting aspect of Bergson’s theory is that the effect of the élan vital appears to be both predicted in time and observed from the outside. Indeed, if the social group is able to ‘correct’ a behaviour that has stepped out of the ‘natural’ order, it means that the flowing nature of the élan vital can be predicted. Moreover, the perception of what automatisms are and what they are not seems to be a matter of consensus among the ideal group depicted by Bergson. What pertains to the élan vital and what pertains to ‘du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 29; original emphasis) [‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ ([1900] 1911: 37; original emphasis)] does not seem to be open to debate. Finally, the idea that ‘nous ne commençons donc à devenir imitables que là où nous cessons d’être nous-mêmes’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 25) [‘we begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves’ ([1900] 1911: 33)] implies that there would be absolutely no automatism inherent in our ‘natural’ self, and that this ‘natural’ self is a given and can be clearly identified.

Bergson insists on several occasions on the absence of freedom within comic situations or in comic characters, an absence that laughter should signal. He compares comic characters to puppets controlled by a mechanism or by strings pulled by an entity they cannot see:

Tout le sérieux de la vie lui vient de notre liberté. Les sentiments que nous avons mûris, les passions que nous avons couvées, les actions que nous avons délibérées, arrêtées, exécutées, enfin ce qui vient de nous et ce qui est bien nôtre, voilà ce qui donne à la vie son allure quelquefois dramatique et généralement grave. Que faudrait-il pour transformer tout cela en comédie? Il faudrait se figurer que la liberté apparente recouvre un jeu de ficelles. (Bergson [1900] 1975: 60)

[All that is serious in life comes from our freedom. The feelings we have matured, the passions we have brooded over, the actions we have weighed, decided upon, and carried through, in short, all that comes from us and is our very own, these are the things that give life its ofttimes dramatic and generally grave aspect. What, then, is requisite to transform all this into a comedy? Merely to fancy that our seeming freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-jack. ([1900] 1911: 79)]

The initial opposition between life and automatism reveals a more elaborate set of contrasts between freedom, seriousness and drama on the one hand, and the comic and unfreedom on the other. Most crucially, the puppet’s unfreedom is concealed, or rather, the lack of freedom would stem precisely from the puppet’s inability to be conscious of its being manipulated. The comic would end as soon as a puppet realizes it is manipulated and modifies its behaviour in order to free itself.

The comic and humour

This points to the most important aspect of Bergson’s theory for my discussion: Bergson’s comic cannot be perceived by the comic target: ‘un personnage comique est généralement comique dans l’exacte mesure où il s’ignore lui-même. Le comique est inconscient. Comme s’il usait à rebours de l’anneau de Gygès, il se rend invisible à lui-même en devenant visible à tout le monde.’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 13; original emphasis) [‘a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world’ ([1900] 1911: 16–17)]. The type of correction provided by laughter is thus intimately related to a lack of self-consciousness. In Bergson’s theory, once comic characters are punished by laughter and understand why, they are not comic anymore. They are certainly not freed from imprisonment yet – if they can ever be – but, conscious of their own imprisonment, they can start changing their behaviour or at least hiding it from their group. It is in this way that laughter is a social corrective: ‘Disons-le dès maintenant, c’est en ce sens surtout que le rire “châtie les mœurs”. Il fait que nous tâchons tout de suite de paraître ce que nous devrions être, ce que nous finirons sans doute un jour par être véritablement.’ (Bergson [1900] 1975: 13) [‘Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter “corrects men’s manners”. It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being’ ([1900] 1911: 17)].

The humoristic phenomenon in which I am interested, however, implies self-consciousness on the part of the individual. In both cases, the voice of an individual author or an individual character is at the forefront. The most important difference between the comic (as intended by Bergson) and humour (as intended by Freud and Pirandello, among others) is therefore self-consciousness.⁶ In other words, both the comic and humour imply imprisonment, but comic characters do not recognize their own imprisonment, whereas humoristic characters do. This does not mean that being conscious of one’s imprisonment necessarily leads to the possibility or even the desire of liberation for the literary character.

Freud

Freud’s works on jokes, the comic and humour posit a desire for liberation. Out of the three phenomena, humour would be the most liberating. This liberating power, which might be present in literature but nevertheless cannot explain the form of literary humour, is born out of the context of imprisonment that is also at the core of Freud’s theory.⁷ To explain what he means by ‘humour’, Freud uses the example of a prisoner walking to the gallows on a Monday and exclaiming: ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely’ (Freud [1927] 1961: 162). In an unbearable situation such as the prisoner’s, a part of one’s self would enter in dialogue with another part to soothe it. Humour would be the dialogue between two parts of a sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Humour and Imprisonment
• 2 Humour in the Cell: Prison Cells and War Camps
• 3 Social Entrapment: Humoristic Characters vs. the World
• 4 Humour in the Cells: Configurations of the Body as Prison
• Conclusion: A Geometry of Humour
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint