The Act of Creation
When F.W.H. Myers became interested in people's attitudes to religion he questioned an elderly widow on what she thought about the whereabouts of her departed husband's soul. She replied: 'Oh well, I suppose he is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects.' I would call this an illustration of the peaceful coexistence of the tragic and trivial planes in our humble minds. Equally convincing is this statement made by a schoolboy to his mathematics master:
Infinity is where things happen which don't. [2]
Caricature and Satire
The political cartoon, at its best, is a translation into visual imagery of a witty topical comment; at its worst, a manipulation of symbols -- John Bull, Uncle Sam, the Russian bear -- which, once comic, have degenerated into visual clichés. The symbols trigger off memories and expectations; the narrative content of the cartoon is taken in by visual scanning, with possibly a delayed-action effect due to the time needed for 'seeing the joke'. The analysis of such mixed forms is a lengthy affair.*
The portrait caricature, on the other hand, relies for its effects on purely visual means. Its method recalls the distorting mirrors at fun-fairs, which reflect the human form elongated into a candle-shape, or absurdly compressed, or as a vague phantom with wavy outlines. As a result we see ourselves and yet something else; our familiar ahapes being transformed as if the body were merely an elastic surface that can be stretched in all directions.
The mirror distorts by exaggerating mechanically in one spatial direction at the expense of others; the caricaturist distorts by exaggerating features which he considers characteristic of his victim's appearance or personality. His second main trick is over-simplification: he minimizes or leaves out features which are not relevant for his purpose. A prominent nose, for instance, such as General de Gaulle's, can be exploited to the extent that the rest of the face shrinks to insignificance: the part has been detached from the whole and has become a nose 'an sich'. The product of the clever caricaturist's distortions is something physiologically impossible, yet at the same time visually convincing -- he has superimposed his frame of perception on our own. For a caricature is comic only if we know something of the victim, if we have a mental image, however vague, of the person, or type of person, at which it is aimed -- even if it is an Eskimo, a cave-man, or a Martian robot. The unknown cannot be distorted or misrepresented. The caricature of the more ferocious type is the rape of an image, an optical debunking of the victim; in its gender form, a semi-affectionate kick at the heel of Achilles.
Thus the malicious pleasure derived from a good caricature originates in the confrontation of a likeness, distorted according to the artist's rules of the game, with reality or our image thereof. But it is a rather harmless form of malice because we know that the caricaturist's monster with the cucumber nose or enormous belly is a biological impossibility, that it is not real . Illustrations of elephantiasis and pathological obesity are not comic because these distortions of the human shape are known to be real, and therefore arouse pity. The knowledge that the deformities of the caricature are merely pretence acquits us of all charitable obligations and allows us to laugh at the victim's expense.
The exaggeration and simplification of features selected according to his judgement of what is to be considered relevant is a technique shared by both the caricaturist and the artist -- who calls it stylization. (Needless to say, a caricature is also a form of art; but for convenience' sake I am using throughout this book the term 'art' to refer to its non-comic varieties.) Stylization has been carried to extreme length in a number of ancient and modern art forms without destroying the aesthetic effect: that is to say, without sliding from art into caricature. The elongated skulls of certain Egyptian sculptures reflect a contemporary practice of deforming the princely babies' heads, but they obviously exaggerate the result. Nevertheless it would hardly occur to one to call Tutankhamen an egghead -- because one feels that the sculptor exaggerated not with a hostile but with a worshipful intent, and this attitude is communicated to the spectator. Once more the polarity between comic and aesthetic experience is seen to derive from the polarity between the self-assertive and self-transcending tendencies.
This still holds true even when communication between artist and spectator breaks down. In the eyes of the Philistine all experimental art is ludicrous, because the Philistine's attitude is aggressive-defensive. When Picasso shuffles round the eyes and limbs of his figures in a manner which is biologically impossible and yet has a visual logic of its own, he juxtaposes the seen and the known -- he is walking, precariously balanced, on the borderline between two universes of experience, each governed by a different code. The conservative-minded spectator, unable to follow, suspects the artist of pulling his leg by deliberately distorting the human shape as the caricaturist does; and so the two-faced woman with three breasts becomes in his eyes a caricature. The ambiguity is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in some of the character-studies by Leonardo, Hogarth, and Daumier. The passions reflected in them are so violent, the grimaces so ferocious, that it is impossible to tell whether they were meant as portraits or caricatures, and the distinction becomes a purely theoretical one. If you feel that such distortions of the human face do not really exist, that Daumier, deliberately exaggerating, merely pretended that they exist, then you are absolved from horror and pity and can laugh at his grotesques. But if you feel that this is indeed what Daumier saw in those de-humanized faces, then you are looking at a work of art. The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image.
The technique of exaggerating the relevant and simplifying or ignoring the irrelevant aspects of reality is shared not only by the artist and caricaturist but is equally indispensable to the scientist. The motivations of each of the three differ, of course, and with them their criteria of relevance. The humorist's motives are aggressive, the artist's participatory, the scientist's exploratory. The scientist's criteria of relevance are 'objective' in the sense of being emotionally neutral, but they still depend on the particular aspect of reality in which he is interested. Every drawing on the blackboard -- whether it is meant to represent the wiring diagram of a radio set or the circulation of the blood, the structure of a molecule or the weather over the Atlantic -- is based on the same method as the cartoonist's: selective emphasis on the relevant factors and omission of the rest. A map bears the same relation to a landscape as a character-sketch to a face; every chart, diagram, or model, every schematic or symbolic representation of physical or mental processes, is an unemotional caricature of reality. At least, 'unemotional' in the sense that the bias is not of an obvious kind; although some models of the universe as a rigid, mechanical clockwork which, once wound up, must follow its unalterable course, or of the human mind as a slot-machine, have turned out to be crude caricatures inspired by unconscious bias.
The satire is a verbal caricature which distorts characteristic features of an individual or society by exaggeration and simplification. The features picked out for enlargement by the satirist are, of course, those of which he disapproves: 'If Nature's inspiration fails', wrote Juvenal, 'indignation will beget the poem.' The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflection in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focusses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd.
The same effect is achieved if, instead of magnifying objectionable features in customs and institutions, the satirist projects them by means of the allegory onto a different background, such as an animal society -- e.g. Aristophanes, Swift, Orwell. In either case we are made suddenly conscious of conventions and prejudices which we have unquestioningly accepted, which were tacitly implied in the codes in control of our thinking and behaviour. The confrontation with an alien matrix rev
eals in a sharp, pitiless light what we failed to see in following our dim routines; the tacit assumptions hidden in the rules of the game are dragged into the open. The bisociative shock shatters the frame of complacent habits of thinking; the seemingly obvious is made to field its secret.
'In this world of perfect justice, rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under bridges.' Anatole France's classic epigram is a confrontation of abstract democracy with the brutal facts of life; it conjures up the image of a well-dressed bourgeois making use of his constitutional rights to doss down, in the name of "Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité," under the arches of the Pont de la Concorde. In its higher reaches the satirist's art merges into the social scientist's quest for truth; Brave New World and 1984 are extrapolations of present trends into the future; Gulliver's Travels and Erewhon, on the other hand, follow the method of the anthropologist, who deepens our understanding of our own society by confronting it with the equally 'self-evident' beliefs and customs of exotic civilizations.
Thus, as we travel across the triptych, satire shades into social science; and this, in turn, branches out into the tragic allegory -- Plato's Cave and Kafka's Castle -- or into poetic Utopia. The artistic hazards of the latter are perhaps due to a conflict of emotions. Writers of Utopias are motivated by revulsion against society as it is, or at least by a rejection of its values; and since revulsion and rejection are aggressive attitudes, it comes more naturally to them to paint a picture of society with a brush dipped in adrenalin than in syrup or aspirin. Hence the contrast between Huxley's brilliant, bitter Brave New World and the goody-goody bores on his Island.
The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premisses, his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are stupid or vicious. It is a subtle weapon, because the person who wields it must have the imaginative power of seeing through the eyes of his opponent, of projecting himself into the other's mental world. The psychiatrist who goes patiently along with the patient's fantasies, the teacher who adapts his language to the level of comprehension of the child, the dramatist who speaks through his characters' voices, employ the same procedure with the opposite intent and effect.
The Misfit
Both Cicero and Francis Bacon gave deformity a high place on their lists of causes for laughter. The princes of the Renaissance collected midgets, hunchbacks, monsters, and Blackamoors for their merriment. We have become too civilized for that kind of thing, but children still jeer and laugh at people with a limp or a stammer, at foreigners with a funny pronunciation, at people oddly dressed -- at any form of appearance or behaviour which deviates from the familiar norm. The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.
Consider for a moment the curious fact that to a civilized person a stutterer causes sympathetic embarrassment, whereas a person of normal speech giving an imitation of stuttering makes us laugh. So does the youngster in love who stutters only under the effect of a momentary surge of emotion. Again, a person with a foreign accent is accepted with tolerance, but the imitation of a foreign accent is comic. The explanation is that we know the imitator's stutter or misprononundation to be mere pretence; this makes sympathy both unnecessary and impossible, and enables us to be childishly cruel with a clear conscience. We have met the same phenomenon (page 71) in our attitude towards the bodily deformities imputed by the caricaturist to his victim.
The tolerant acceptance of physical or mental malformations in our fellow creatures, though of relatively recent origin, has become deeply engrained in Western society; we are no longer aware of the fact that it requires a certain imagination and a good deal of empathy to recognize in a dwarf, or a 'thick-lipped Blackamoor', a human being which, though different in appearance, exists and feels as oneself does. In the small child this kind of projective mechanism is absent or rudimentary. Piaget, among others, has strikingly shown how late the child accords to its fellow beings a conscious ego like its own. The more a person deviates from the familiar norm of the child's surroundings, the more difficult it is for the child to project into him life and feelings, to grant him the faculty of having experiences like his own. The same applies to the attitudes shown by tribal or parochial societies to foreigners, slaves, members of the 'lower classes' (almost inevitably treated as comic figures in literature up to and including Dickens); as well as to criminalg, the mentally disordered and physically deformed. The creature who does not 'belong' to the tribe, clan, caste, or parish is not really human; he only aspires or pretends to be 'like us'. To civilized man, a dwarf is comic only if he struts about pretending to be tall, which is he not; in the primitive's eye the dwarf is comic because he pretends to be human, which he is not. The Greek word 'barbarian' means both foreigner and stutterer (bar-bar-ous); the uncouth, repetitive, barking sounds he uttered were a grotesque imitation of true human speech. Bodily and functional deformities are laughable to the uncouth mind for the same reasons as impersonation and caricature.
The Paradox of the Centipede
However, an additional factor enters into the comic effect of some disorders of behaviour such as stuttering, mispronunciation, misspelling: one might call it the bisociation of structure and function, or of part and whole. The stammering barbarian was a comic figure to the Greeks for reasons just mentioned; but the comedian's stage-stutter is funny in a different way. When he struggles with a consonant, trying to take the same hurdle again and again, eyes bulging and face convulsed, we become suddenly aware of the complicated motions of lips and tongue required to produce the sound M; our attention becomes focussed on these physiological details torn from their functional context and placed under a magnifying glass, as it were. Much the same happens when the gramophone needle gets stuck in a groove, and the soprano's voice keeps repeating the same word on the same quaver. The part has become detachcd from the whole and monopolizes attention as if it existed in its own right, as an independent structural entity, regardless of its function in the larger context from which alone its meaning is derived. In one of Silone's novels an innocent peasant boy from the Abruzzi drifts into a crowd in front of Mussolini's new forum, and cannot understand why everybody keeps chanting in a chorus: 'Ce-du, ce-du, ce-du, ce-du . . .' The isolated quaver or consonant which has made a declaration of independence, the syllables 'du' and 'ce' torn from their context, are examples of the conflict which can arise between part and whole, structure and function, when -- to put it in a different way -- the dependent part pretends to be an independent whole and forces our attention to regard it as such.
When we exercise a well-practised skill the parts must function smoothly and automatically -- they must never occupy the focus of attention. This is true whether the skill in question is riding a bicycle, playing the violin, enunciating the letter M, or forming sentences according to the rules of grammar and syntax. The code which controls the performance functions, as we repeatedly saw, on a lower level of consciousness than the performance itself -- on the fringes of awareness or, in completely automatized skills, even beyond the fringe. The moment attention is focussed on a normally automatized part-function such as enunciating consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralysed -- like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.
The paradox of the centipede is a consequence of the hierarchic organization of the nervous system which demands that the highest centres should be occupied with the task in hand conceived as a whole, and leave the execution of the component sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks to the sub-centres, etc., on lower levels of the nervous system. A brigadier does not give orders to, and concentrate his attentio
n on, individual soldiers during action; if he does the action goes haywire. The paradox of the centipede will be seen to play an important part in discovery and the theory of thinking in general; in humour, apart from the examples mentioned, it accounts for the comic effect of the 'self-conscious' (in fact, detail-conscious) behaviour of the person who does not know what to do with his hands; and also explains why the comedian's clothes, and some foreign or bygone fashions, are funny. Conventional articles of apparel are perceived as parts of a person's appearance as a whole, whereas the comedian's checked trousers and the Victorian lady's bustle disrupt the unity and force attention on textiles and starched draperies leading an independent life. Except when we are in a romantic mood: then a historical costume on the stage is no longer seen detached from its wearer but attaches him to the period.
Since I mentioned mispronunciation, I must add the obvious remark that if the maltreated word assumes a different meaning, we get the involuntary pun; and even if it does not, mispronunciation can be funny if it follows its own logic which exposes the absurdities of conventional spelling. Try on an innocent foreigner the sequence: a coughing plough and a soughing trough; then see what happens.