Doubtful Fictions

List of abbreviations

Introduction: “What do you find so amusing Democritus?”: Comedy, The English Dunamis, and The Poetics of Sceptical Humour

I. (Un)Taming of the Shrew: Humour, Comedy, and the Tragic Discourse

The study of humour is a paradoxical pursuit since the history of humour theory/criticism does not perfectly chime in with the individual history of humour. Better put, the development of humour theory and the development of humour itself serve two discursive ends which paradoxically do not necessarily embrace each other. For, humour theory is frequently promoted as an early modernist invention with a fin de siècle complexion¹ and this particular attitude implicitly declares the instrumentalisation of humour as a gorgonically shrewd form of literary expression. In agreement with this particularly modernist emotion, the rhetoric surrounding humour theory largely emanates from the precepts of the institution of criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth century academia which required the intellectual “to perform according to the rigorous rules of scholarship.”² Emerging as part of a metaphysical agenda which would now open new, mysterious vistas for the willing initiates,”³ it is barely deniable that the tradition of modern humour theory mostly considers humour as an ideological extension of its intuitive politics and in this sense it is no wonder that the early academic critics of the early nineteenth century appear too eager to define humour as an instinctual social corrective, a critical attaché that antagonises the “liberal elites” who “elevated positivism to an unofficial credo.”⁴ In accordance, humour theory creates its own interpretative repertoire that looks forward to re-negotiating the bio-political status of humour rather than looking into the ontological basis of an eons-old human ability. It in this respect that the fin de siècle intellectual’s prominent sense of ennui, disappointment, and “ineffable élan vital which is accessible only to intuition”⁵ had planted the seeds of a theoretically programmed attempt to understand the raison d’être of the phenomenon of humour in its philosophical, biological, and literary contexts. With slight or major differences, these theoretical contexts were expanded during the twentieth century by the hand of the semantic turn in linguistics,⁶ the advances in psychology and anthropology,⁷ and the cognitive neuroscience of humour which proclaimed the connection between the activities of the cerebral cortex and the human capacity for humour which “involves higher-order thinking, especially seeing things from multiple perspectives.”⁸ Philosophers of art and language writing in the analytical tradition considered the truth-conditions and the logical asymmetry of humour as well as the overlap between the aesthetic sphere of experience and the cognitive sphere of experience which granted humour “even more cognitive engagement than Kant allows.”⁹ Recent theoretical studies on humour with a more continental tone and approach tend to re-evaluate it under neo-Kantian terms where humour is “not noumenal but phenomenal, not theological but anthropological, not numinous but simply luminous.”¹⁰ However, most of these contemporary contexts appear to reserve the political need for explaining humour as a species of counter-metaphysicality that is apropos of their intellectual predecessors.

It would be utterly unfair to assume that the variety of these early modernist and post-modernist contexts have made little contribution to our understanding of humour. For, although it was not until the early nineteenth century that humour theory has managed to establish itself as a distinct category of interpretation and evaluation in literary aesthetics, the variety of these contexts have had a tremendous impact on our understanding of the socio-political functions of humour. On the other hand, though, these critical approaches mostly miss the vital point that despite its fairly late entrance into the critical imagination, humour emerges as an already autonomous human capacity in recorded human history which cannot be simply predicated of its functions or ideological attributes. For, humour theory as a turn-of-the-century enterprise (and by extension contemporary humour theory, in general) wishes to popularise humour as a favourable form of clairvoyant amusement. Even contemporary humour studies which promote humour as a concept that plays along the lines of irrationality and instinctiveness mostly take this late-nineteenth century attitude for granted without noticing that they mostly leave humour theory ‘humourless’ in the sense that they treat it as an apparatus rather than as a distinct human capability. To a certain extent, even a quick glance at older humour traditions reveal a prejudicial position that is analogous to the modern and contemporary reception of humour. For instance, Socrates’s lack of self-knowledge in Plato’s Philebus offers a study in the laughability of not knowing thyself but humorously propels a violent sense of superiority over the ignorant individual. Horace’s painter who paints a coal-black fish with a human head in Satires attends to the humorous merge of logically irreconcilable physical and mental assets while Immanuel Kant’s notion of logical irreconcilability holds responsible the “strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing”¹¹ for the production of humour. Aristotle’s man, on the other hand, rushes for a moment of relaxation in the Nichomachean Ethics,¹² while Quintilian’s jokes in Institutes act in the capacity of a relief-bringer which humorously dispel melancholy in the audience, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury accentuates in his Sensus Communis the sense of freedom which entails humour since “the natural free spirits” of human beings will seek for psychological release “if imprisoned and controlled.”¹³ The entirety of these examples display the fact that the recurring philosophical interest in humour documents our persisting interest in it which has later led to the categorisation of humour’s separate functions as (a) a violent form of expressing superiority, (b) an onto-epistemic expression of the dissonance between object and reality, and (c) as a means of neuro-psychological catharsis. But also, they point at the disparity between the legislative power of the institution of criticism and humour’s humanity.

Without resorting to the comfort of extremist interpretations it should be acknowledged that, to a certain extent, the act of theorising about humour leads to the conceptual confinement of its own subject of study. For, common practices in theory either situate humour as an antidote to positivism or define it as part of human functionality which are altogether meant to define the humour-ness, the essence of humour although humour tends to persistently outshine the doctrinal creed. In connection with that point, it can be construed that this particular conceptual confinement is met by the hierarchical organisational structure of literary genres. For, humour is frequently viewed as a comedic device and the humour critic, whether ancient or modern, does not particularly deliberate a distinction between comedy and humour term-wise. Since it is not necessarily specified as an individual ability, it is only ironical to discover that despite our long-lasting engagement with it, humour still appears to suffer from a theoretical invisibility since theory barely ever asks questions about the separate meaning(s) of humour. It is simply known of its relational relevance to comedy and in some specific cases, to laughter. Theory functionalises humour but also standardises it as a symbiote. By doing so, the canon of literary criticism establishes an unavoidable reciprocity and interdependence between humour and comedy without taking into consideration that a reciprocity of this sort risks creating a conceptual void. As a result, humour’s ontological status remains a mystery at large as it does not seem to be particularly known from its near-synonymy with comedy.

Ideally speaking, since we are faced with the conundrum of trying to find a way out of this oddity, it could have been a better starting point where we would have paid specific attention to humour as a concept that has a literary and culture life of its own as distinct from comedy. By way of doing so, we would avoid the trap of conceptual isonomy and could also respond to the possible meaning(s) of humour rather than its functions and fend off the modernist and postmodernist pressure on humour theory. Ironically enough, however, since the humoristic vision of the comic theorist instinctively assumes an innate parallel between comedy and humour, we would have to address first the taxonomically enigmatic situation of comedy as the lower form of literary genres so as to understand and conceptualise humour as a non-essentially comedic endeavour. Otherwise stated, to free humour of the ideological connotations of this ostensible exchangeability we would still have to counter comedy’s banalisation and trivialisation at the hands of cultural and critical reception. To locate the philosophical coordinates of humour, then, I would like to make an argument in favour of the anti-banality of comedy and, in order to do so, would like to refer to a specific moment in the mid-eighteenth-century which will require us to spend some time on the archaic binary opposition between laughing comedy and mournful tragedy.

On New Year’s Eve, 1769, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend, who happened to be on a diplomatic mission in Italy—reporting on the Stuarts in exile—of the “ominous eggs”¹⁴ which the last year has laid. Walpole, a proponent and admirer of William Pitt, 1^st Earl of Chatham’s adept oratorical skills which to his thinking echoed “a self-consciously classical manner,”¹⁵ expressed a personal resentment of John Wilkes’s egregious libertarianism which temporarily prevailed over Chatham’s nationalistic interests whose political undertones, ironically enough, were considered to be in collision with the excessively coarse manners of the reigning monarch, George II.¹⁶ He acknowledges the vigour of the constitution which has been recently put to test by the anonymous Junius’s epistolary attacks and finds comfort in the non-uniqueness of the situation as he illustrates the minutest details of the Távora affair;¹⁷ a technique in which he particularly took delight.¹⁸ The parallelism between the tumultuous Portuguese court scandal which was not only curiously preceded by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake but also possibly included Sebastião de Melo’s hatred towards the power wielding aristocratic families, and the tempestuous political climate of Hanoverian England which appeared to be under constant literary and political attack, leads him to the following conclusion:

Walpole’s observation, at large, is a political pay-off in regard to his socio-cultural milieu since the formal onset of the text suggests a familiar Augustan sentiment in its epistolary realism.²⁰ It could also be considered that the reverberation of the aplomb and panache of Walpole’s wit which often had made himself detested²¹ presents a largely political case in itself that is devoid of literary interests. In either case, however, the conclusion he reaches seems to have more literary consequences than political ones despite his purely political statement. For, contrary to expectation, it is telling of a literary disposition which takes sides with cerebral gaiety that furloughs the conventional attribute of low ridicule attached to comedy and allocates superfluous emotional distress to tragedy whose nature has been frequently located in the mimetic representation of technically complete and philosophically serious series of action(s). In addition, it adds to this set of literary binaries a philosophical duplexity which hideously insinuates the futility of Heraclitusean tragedy in the face of an ever-developing world, leaving little space for grief and a plenty of space for comedy. In accordance, although Walpole’s observatory remarks do not necessarily aspire to the status of literary theory and there is not any clear evidence that he favours comedy/Democritus over tragedy/Heraclitus, it is interesting to note that even seven years later in another letter addressed to Horace Mann he wrote:

Still, it can be maintained that Walpole’s intellectual capriciousness does not necessarily assign him a missionary role with regards to his employment of a philosophically emblematic dichotomy as analogous to a literary binary. For despite his political tendencies and sagacious formulations, other poets with neoclassical tendencies were not oblivious to the competition between tragedy and comedy nor were they unappreciative of the emblematic relation between these two ancient philosophers. A specific moment in Dryden’s Tenth Satire of Juvenal escalates the force of a preceding argument when the poet refers to the “pair of sages”²³ who, to his thinking, pursue the same end by different methods. This particular reference can be taken as a palpable allusion to Dryden’s previous remarks on the rather peculiar points of dissimilitude between tragedy and comedy²⁴ but also it could be considered as an implied comment on Democritus’s belittling laughter in the face of human folly and Heraclitus’s tears in the face of unspeakable crime. Furthermore, the “examiner” poet Matthew Prior summons the mirthful spirits of Democritus and the grief-stricken spirit of Heraclitus to mourn humanity’s “greater crimes”²⁵ while towards the dawn of the nineteenth-century, Henry Kirke White addresses his own unpredictable and indeterminate nature by referring to his daily veering “to all points of the compass” and the “laughing and pleas’d child” inside who could be effortlessly “vex’d to the soul with impertinent tattle.”²⁶ Henry Fielding, on the other hand, in the prologue to his The Author’s Farce considers the possibility of flying from Heraclitus’s “sad rules” as he prefers to think of himself as one “bred in Democritus’s schools.”²⁷ In all four of these historically and textually unique instances, these poets and littérateurs appear to suggest a strict contrast between profane light-heartedness and literary mirth in opposition to philosophical moralism and universal tragicality in an identically Walpolean manner. Practicing ‘poesy’ within their own contemporary frameworks with the intention of referring to an ancient opposition, they emulate and re-popularise an “eternal cleavage” since

In this respect, the non-uniqueness of Walpole’s disposition seems to account for the late neoclassical (or early Romantic) cognisance of two different ancient metaphysical takes on being and its perception.²⁹ For his literary-philosophical blueprint that reproduces the established rivalry between tragedy and comedy vividly describes why the traditional confrontation between the laughing and the weeping philosopher appears to be a prevalent intellectual tactic among eighteenth-century poets who seem to be in favour of taxonomical solidarity over inter-categorical vitality by eventually seeking for a cantankerous division between tragedy and comedy. Correspondingly, it appears that Walpole puts so much effort into remaining neutral throughout the rest of the letter and yet eventually he seems to be enraptured by the allure of Democritean joy since the textual evidence becomes growingly suggestive of his literary and intellectual preferences. It is against this backdrop that looking back on his former correspondence, our suspicions appear to gain more ground since in a much earlier letter to George Montagu, 4^th Duke of Manchester in 1761 he does not shy away from signing his letter as Democritus when he writes: