Laughter by Henri Bergson (best way to read an ebook txt) 📖

have already

remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realise this

more fully, it need only be noted that 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. A character in a tragedy will make no

change in his conduct because he will know how it is judged by us;

he may continue therein, even though fully conscious of what he is

and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But a defect that

is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to

modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon

to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he would get

rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it differently.

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.

 

It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the

runner who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of

being hoaxed to one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to

wild enthusiasm, from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of

character and will, we have followed the line of progress along

which the comic becomes more and more deeply imbedded in the person,

yet without ceasing, in its subtler manifestations, to recall to us

some trace of what we noticed in its grosser forms, an effect of

automatism and of inelasticity. Now we can obtain a first glimpse—a

distant one, it is true, and still hazy and confused—of the

laughable side of human nature and of the ordinary function of

laughter.

 

What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert

attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation,

together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to

adapt ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two

forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If

these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent,

we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they

are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency,

every variety of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the

character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social

life, which are the sources of misery and at times the causes of

crime. Once these elements of inferiority that affect the serious

side of existence are removed—and they tend to eliminate themselves

in what has been called the struggle for life—the person can live,

and that in common with other persons. But society asks for

something more; it is not satisfied with simply living, it insists

on living well. What it now has to dread is that each one of us,

content with paying attention to what affects the essentials of

life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way to the easy

automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear is that

the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an

increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and

more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to

respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a

cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it

insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society

will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of

mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a

slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist

tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round

which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an

eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by

material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion.

It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a

symptom—scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture,

therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this

kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which it inspires, it

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. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the

comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed

from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as

works of art. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions

and dispositions—implied in individual or social life—to which

their natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains

outside this sphere of emotion and struggle—and within a neutral

zone in which man simply exposes himself to man’s curiosity—a

certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would

still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the

greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This

rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.

 

Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic.

It is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and

perfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we

offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you

will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We

must ever keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much,

somewhat as a skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous

movements of the lesson whilst his body is given up to the

continuity of the fencing-match. We will now endeavour to

reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking up again the thread

that leads from the horseplay of a clown up to the most refined

effects of comedy, following this thread in its often unforeseen

windings, halting at intervals to look around, and finally getting

back, if possible, to the point at which the thread is dangling and

where we shall perhaps find—since the comic oscillates between life

and art—the general relation that art bears to life.

III

Let us begin at the simplest point. What is a comic physiognomy?

Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? And what

is, in this case, the distinction between the comic and the ugly?

Thus stated, the question could scarcely be answered in any other

than an arbitrary fashion. Simple though it may appear, it is, even

now, too subtle to allow of a direct attack. We should have to begin

with a definition of ugliness, and then discover what addition the

comic makes to it; now, ugliness is not much easier to analyse than

is beauty. However, we will employ an artifice which will often

stand us in good stead. We will exaggerate the problem, so to speak,

by magnifying the effect to the point of making the cause visible.

Suppose, then, we intensify ugliness to the point of deformity, and

study the transition from the deformed to the ridiculous.

 

Now, certain deformities undoubtedly possess over others the sorry

privilege of causing some persons to laugh; some hunchbacks, for

instance, will excite laughter. Without at this point entering into

useless details, we will simply ask the reader to think of a number

of deformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one

hand, those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on

the other, those which absolutely diverge from it. No doubt he will

hit upon the following law: A deformity that may become comic is a

deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate.

 

Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance

of a person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have

contracted an ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by

rigidity, in a word, it persists in the habit it has contracted. Try

to see with your eyes alone. Avoid reflection, and above all, do not

reason. Abandon all your prepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh,

direct and primitive impression. The vision you will reacquire will

be one of this kind. You will have before you a man bent on

cultivating a certain rigid attitude—whose body, if one may use the

expression, is one vast grin.

 

Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning

down a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness

that is comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that

will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated,

in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an

ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. It may be objected that

every habitual expression of the face, even when graceful and

beautiful, gives us this same impression of something stereotyped?

Here an important distinction must be drawn. When we speak of

expressive beauty or even expressive ugliness, when we say that a

face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable,

but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of

its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed

all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses, just as the

sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in the haze of a spring

morning. But a comic expression of the face is one that promises

nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent grimace.

One would say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallised

into this particular cast of features. This is the reason why a face

is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the idea of

some simple mechanical action in which its personality would for

ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping,

others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing

an imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all.

Here again is exemplified the law according to which the more

natural the explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect.

Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and

maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But

this effect gains in intensity when we are able to connect these

characteristics with some deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental

absentmindedness, as though the soul had allowed itself to be

fascinated and hypnotised by the materiality of a simple action.

 

We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However

regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines

and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether

perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some

impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short

some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be

particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in

detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering

it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes his models

grimace, as they would do themselves if they went to the end of

their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the

deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He realises disproportions and

deformations which must have existed in nature as mere inclinations,

but which have not succeeded in coming to a head, being held in

check by a higher force. His art, which has a