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Representations 4 (Fall
1983)
. . . The fabliaux in some basic sense
inscribe their own origin in such a way as to render absurd the questions of
source, authorial identity, and destination. The text’s resistance to
traditional literary historical categories does, however, take us in another
direction altogether, one that has hovered in the margins of our discussions
from the beginning. Its recalcitrance enables us to move beyond the struggle against
“philological windmills,” beyond even the light which a tale like “The Knight
who Made Cunts Speak” sheds upon the status of poetry at the end of the Middle
Ages. For the issues which have shaped our reading throughout—a certain playing
with the power of representation both to reveal and to conceal, bodily
dismemberment, loss of linguistic property, the inscription of sexual desire
within such a problematic of loss—suggest a link between the fabliaux and that
peculiarly modern solicitation of speech and cash: psychoanalysis. Indeed, the
reader the least bit familiar with psychoanalytic thought must long before now
have sensed explicitly—and naturally—the fabliaux seem “to speak” and “to make
speak” questions central to Freudian and post-Freudian analysis. The
setting of the medieval text against the contemporary discourse which it seems
not so much to reflect as to animate is, moreover, a critical move whose own
meaning lies less in the domain of illustration of something like a universal
of “human nature” than in the displacements which a textual corpus like the
fabliaux is itself capable of working upon the canons of modernism. Here again,
the thematics which I have solicited from even such a partial grouping of tales
suggests a powerful connection between the kind of narrative elaboration
characteristic of the fabliaux, the “castration complex,” fetishism, and the
comic.
There is, first of all,
a long historic association beginning with Aristotle between the comic and the
phallic, comedy or “low songs” and the ithyphalloi or phallophoroi.
There is, further, and this again from the very beginning, a tendency to
associate comedy and bodily deformity. Plato emphasizes the “kinship of the
ridiculous with what is morally or physically faulty”; Aristotle claims it
represents “a kind of failing or deformity which is not painful or injurious to
others.” Later rhetoricians such as Demetrius and the author of the Coislinian
Treatise insist that in Aristotle’s “representation of men as worse than
they are”—in the partial and particular as opposed to the universal of tragedy.
More important, that which provokes laughter always involves a cutting short, a
foreshortening. This is a point stressed persistently by those who have
undertaken seriously the task of writing about humor. The Shakespearian adage
according to which “Brevity is the soul of wit” is echoed over and over again.
Kant claims in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment that “laughter is an
‘affection’ arising from a strained expectation suddenly reduced to nothing.”
George Meredith (The Egoist) maintains that comedy is the function that
allows compression of whole sections of the Book of Ego into a sentence,
volumes into a chapter; it is “a means of reading quickly.” Freud insists at
considerable length that jokes are economical; they imply a certain
short-circuiting of psychic energy.
Nor can such
foreshortening be detached from the slippages, displacements, condensations,
and substitutions that are the property of jokes. The joke cuts, and it cuts
short, which is why Freud loves jokes about tailors and why the one about the
displaced blacksmith, repeated both in Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious and in The Ego and the Id, takes on such exemplary
status. This is the tale of a Hungarian town in which the blacksmith had been
guilty of a capital offense. “The Burgomaster, however, decided that as a
penalty a tailor should be hanged, because there were two tailors in the
village but no second blacksmith, and the crime must be expiated” (Jokes,
p. 206). The replacement of the blacksmith by the tailor captures the essence
of the “joke-work” (itself a joke?), which implies a short-cut, a diversion,
the displacement of an initial topic by a second one, as well as a
substitution. But what, it may be asked, is displaced? What slips? What is the
nature of the substitute?
A partial answer to
these questions lies in Freud’s assertion that, “the brevity of jokes is often
the outcome of a particular process which has left behind in the wording of the
joke a second trace—the formation of a substitute. By making use of the
procedure of reduction . . . we can also find, however, that the joke depends
entirely on its verbal expression as established by the process of
condensation” (Jokes, p. 28). Not only does a cutter of cloth replace a
forger, but such a replacement implies a linguistic replacement as well: “. . .
a joke contains nothing more than a word capable of multiple meaning, which
allows the hearer to find the transition from one thought to another” (Jokes,
p. 54).
In its cutting the joke
involves a loss operative both at the level of the person about whom it is told
and the process of telling. The question of what is lost is thus more
complicated than at first glance. The answer cannot be the blacksmith, for he survives.
Nor can it be the tailor, since this is a joke which turns around the fact that
tailors are expendable; and as long as one survives, they are also
interchangeable. What is lost in the splitting of individual fate along the
lines of social usefulness rather than according to actual guilt is something
like an assumed notion of proper justice. Which raises the question: Can there
be a proper substitution of the type contained in the tailor joke? Is the
joke—any joke—thinkable without this or an equivalent substitution? If the joke
“depends entirely upon verbal expression,” is language not ultimately its
proper object, or a certain assumption of verbal propriety, which is displaced,
lost, substituted for?
. . .
Alongside the unusual
cuts, condensations, and substitutions that jokes work at the level of the
letter are the displacements of sense or breaks in reference which are
synonymous with humor as word play. These include: double meaning as a word and
as a thing, e.g., “De la male honte” and “Estula” (see above, p. 10); double
meaning arising from literal and metaphorical understanding, e.g., the priest’s
invocation to charity in “Brunain la vache au prestre”; double entendre,
e.g., “Have you taken a bath? No, is one missing?”; and double meaning proper,
e.g., the famous remark concerning Napoleon III’s disappropriation, upon
assuming power, of the property of the House of Orleans: “C’est le premier vol
de l’aigle.”
In the substitution of
one proper for another, of the improper for the proper, in the cutting of words
in unexpected places, and in their unusual combination, the joke displaces an
assumed linguistic propriety characteristic of its initial premise; and in this
replacement of the expectation of sense by a “second trace” it is logic that is
implicated. Indeed, there is a long tradition which perceives logic and
laughter as mutually exclusive. This incompatibility, again present from the
beginning in the Greek association of the phallophoroi and the sophistai,
is perhaps best expressed by Schopenhauer who maintains (The World as Will
and Idea) that laughter originates in the incongruity between conception
and perception, between abstraction (or belief) and experience, which can
itself be reduced to the following logical (and unfunny) terms: Everything
funny can be traced to a certain syllogism in the first figure, “or an
undisputed major [thesis] and an unexpected minor, which to a certain
extent is only sophistically valid, in consequence of which connection the
conclusion partakes of the quality of the ludicrous.” Comedy is, then, a kind
of exemplification of the perception that nothing actual is wholly logical,
nothing finite infinite, nothing limited ideal.
. . .
Rather, [the joke] maintains a
double logic according to which it is no longer possible to distinguish the
presupposition of the beginning from the only “sophistically valid” defenses
which contradict it as well as each other. The joke cuts, and it cuts both
ways, which is why it so often gives the impression of a superior logic capable
of recuperating even its own contradiction:
An impoverished
individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many
asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his
benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in
front of him. The benefactor reproached him: “What? You borrow money from me
and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my
money for?” “I don’t understand you,” replied the object of the attack; “if I haven’t
any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I musn’t eat
salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?”
The double logic of the
joke betrays a persistent tension between the independent validity of each defense
(whether against the charge of breaking pots or of profligacy) despite their
mutual incompatibility; and it suggests a willful forgetting or blindness that
in the course of the telling becomes apparent. Jokes, in fact, produce in the
hearer the feeling of “having failed to see,” of “having always known,” or at
least of “having been capable of knowing.” This is the point of the one that
Theodor Reik claims to have heard from Freud:
A certain patient
in a mental institution had argued long and hard that he must be served only
kosher food. Finally, unable to avoid the extra work and expense, the director
of the institution acquiesced. A few days later, or the Sabbath, the director
was strolling around the grounds, when he came upon the same patient sitting in
a chair and smoking a cigar. “Wait a minute, Schwartz,” he said. “I thought you
were so religious that we had to bring in special food for you. And now, here
you are smoking on the Sabbath!” “But doctor,” Schwartz replied. “Did you
forget? I’m meshugah!”
The secret of the “joke-work” is
that it makes us work to see that which is visible from the beginning. Like the
doctor, the hearer forgets that which he clearly knew all along—that the joke,
like the patient, is meshugah.
In the course of the
history of writing on the comic, thinkers have maintained that humor implies
both blindness and something akin to total vision. Vico, for instance, claims
that to see the truth is to see nothing humorous; “but second-rate minds, which
see things only partially, are inclined to recognize the ludicrous.” For
Nietzsche, on the other hand, Zarathustra laughs as deeply as he does because
he is able on high to see all. What our analysis suggests, in contrast, is that
the joke implies neither in any absolute sense. Rather, it sustains an always
uneasy balance between the expectation of continuity, of sense, and the
discovery of the limits of this initial premise; both of which are recuperated
finally by the reinscription of a “logic of the joke” based upon the intrinsically
irreconcilable copresence of conception and perception.
Now what is intriguing
about this particular logical configuration is that it seems surprisingly
connected to another and deadly serious area of Freudian thought—that is, the
oedipal complex. More precisely, it points to a link between the comic, primary
narcissism, and fetishism that is susceptible to only the most tentative
development within the bounds of the present essay.
To begin, the ego’s
expectation of a meaningful whole that we have identified with the initial
premise of the joke represents an essentially narcissistic investment in the
continuity of the Self and the Other based upon the child’s belief that “all
persons that he knows are possessed of genitals like his own.” A belief in the
ubiquity of the phallus by analogy accounts for the presupposition of logic.
And where the joke is concerned it is just such an expectation of linguistic
and logical continuity—of sense—that is displaced—cut short, foreclosed—by the
substitution of a “second trace.” Thus the joke serves less to enable a
regressive tapping of infantile pleasure through the aggression of others (as
Freud would have it) than to disrupt the narcissistic belief in the lack of
difference between the Self and the Other. This means that when we say that the
joke cuts, we mean it castrates (this despites Freud’s effort “to combine the disjecta
membra” of previous theories of humor into “an organic whole” [Jokes,
p. 14]); and when we say the joke cuts both ways, we posit the comic as a
cultural model akin to fetishism.
Fetishism and the comic
encroach upon one another at two points in Freud’s writings. Three Essays on
Sexuality and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious were
written simultaneously; the essay entitled “Fetishism” and the small article
entitled “Humour” were produced in successive weeks of August, 1927. Such a
coincidence of preoccupations is, however, anecdotal next to the fact that the
key moment in the discovery of fetishism is the moment at which Freud understood
that the fetish is linked to the forgetting of a maternal tongue:
The most
remarkable case was that of a man who had created as a condition of the fetish
a certain “shine on the nose.” The surprising explanation was the fact that,
raised in an English nursery, this patient later came to Germany where he
forgot almost completely his maternal tongue [Muttersprache]. The fetish
whose origin was situated in early childhood was not to be understood in German
but in English. The “shine on the nose” [Glanz auf der Nase] was in
reality a “glance at the nose.”
Fetishism, a forgetting of what is
known from the beginning, implies the displacement of a proper designation by a
“second trace,” a castration of language and substitution for the proper par
excellence: “The fetish is a substitute for the penis . . . a substitute for
the phallus of the woman (the mother) in which the child once believed and
which, as we know well why, he does not want to give up.”
Fetishism is synonymous
with hiding, obfuscation, a scotomization or blindness associated at least in
Freudian terms with a specific blind spot—the disavowal of knowledge of the
mother’s castration, the dismemberment of the original “Dame escouillée” as well as the forgetting of a mother tongue. The
fetish is a stigma indelebile of repression, a cover whose own source
lies not only in the magic of the supernatural coat (a mantel mautaillié),
but in the very notion of fiction. Over and above the original
anthropological—totemic—function of the fetish, the semantic field of the word
(from the Portugues feitiso and the equivalent of the Latin factitius)
transmits the notion of a “construction,” “artifice,” “fabrication,” as well as
the idea of an “imitation by signs.” As a “second trace” and substitute for the
phallus of the mother, the fetish becomes “the first model of all repudiations
of reality” (O. Mannoni). It is, further, the attempt to maintain the
conceptual fiction of the feminine phallus despite the perceptual knowledge of
its absence that accounts for the defining drama of socialization, the
“resolution” of the oedipal struggle, or the renunciation of the object of
narcissistic desire (as well as the presupposition that the Other is the Same)
and the installation of a third term—the superego—to “cover” the other two.
Through a substitution of the partial object for the feminine phallus and of a
symbolic order for an imaginary one, fetishism represents the means by which
the entire body is castrated or genitally focused and by which the law of the
father is incorporated. Like the 300 ladies of the fabliau, the child is both
covered and exposed by an internalized fiction—an ill-fitting coat—synonymous
with a cleavage between an inner and outer, private and public, self which is
the sine qua non of social life. This splitting also removes fetishism
from the narrow realm of perversion or of psychosis and makes of the process a
general model of the defenses “coextensive with the psychoanalytic definition
of the self” (J.-B. Pontalis). The fetishist, and everyone is in this respect a
fetishist, maintains a double truth: “His act reconciles two incompatible
affirmations: the woman has kept her penis and the father has castrated her”
(Freud). He is a doubleur who, like the peasant couple in “Brunain,”
gets two for one; he both has his lie and believes it too.
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