Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (7 page)
Beneath the human level there is neither the possibility nor the need
for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species with
redundant emotions and intellectual autonomy.* The sudden realization
that one's own excitement is 'unreasonable' heralds the emergence
of self-criticism, of the ability to see one's very own self
from
outside
; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an
objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo
sapiens.
Thus laughter rings the bell of man's departure from the rails of
instinct; it signals his rebellion against the singlemindedness of his
biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit, governed
by a single set of 'rules of the game'. Animals are fanatics; but
O /
How the dear little children laugh / When the drums roll and the lovely /
Lady is sawn in half . . . .
[13]
NOTES
To
p. 56
. Criticizing a paper read by a neurologist
to a learned society, he remarked: 'The author spoke of emotions in very
general terms. . . . There are features which he mentioned which I could
recognize as characteristic of major emotions, as anger and rage; but
after all, love is an emotion. . . . I think that when we discuss emotion
we ought to specify the sorts of emotion we have in mind' (Cannon, 1929).
To
p. 61
. The article in which this list appeared is
characteristic of the behaviourist approach; it ennumerated three 'basic
principles' of laughter: (a) 'as an expression of joy', (b) 'laughter
makes for group cohesion through homogeneity of feeling within the group',
(c) 'laughing an be used as a weapon in competitive situations'. The word
'humour' was not mentioned in the article; laughing at 'jokes, antics,
etc.', was mentioned only in passing, as obviously not a phenomenon
worthy of the psychologists' attention.
To
p. 63
. Some domesticated animals -- dogs,
chimpanzees -- seem to be capable of a humorous expression and to engage
in teasing activities. These may be regarded as evolutionary forerunners
of laughter.
III
VARIETIES OF HUMOUR
The tools have now been assembled which should enable the reader
to dissect any specimen of humour. The procedure to be followed
is: first, determine the nature of M1 and M2 in the diagrams on
pages 35 and 37
by discovering the type of logic,
the rules of the game, which govern each matrix. Often these rules
are implied, as hidden axioms, and taken for granted -- the code must
be de-coded. The rest is easy: find the 'link' -- the focal concept,
word, or situation which is bisociated with both mental planes; lastly,
define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding
the unconscious elements that it may contain. In the sections which
follow I shall apply this technique to various types of humour.
Pun and Witticism
Our spacemen, Mrs. Lamport fears, are 'heading for the "lunar bin".'
The ageing libertine, she tells us, 'feels his old Krafft Ebbing'.
The Reverend Spooner had a great affection, or so he said, for 'our queer
old dean'.
One swallow, the proverb says, does not make a summer -- nor quench the
thirst. Elijah's ravens, according to Milton, were 'though ravenous
taught to abstain from what they brought'. Not so Napoleon, who,
shortly after his coronation, confiscated the estates of the house
of Orléans, which caused a contemporary to remark:
C'est le
premier vol de l'aigle
. Equally to the point was Mr. Paul Jenkin's
discovery regarding the pros and cons of Britain's entry into the Common
Market: 'The Cons were pro, while Lab has turned con.'
The pun is the bisociation of a single phonetic form with two meanings --
two strings of thought tied together by an accoustic knot. Its immense
popularity with children, its prevalence in certain forms of mental
disorder ('punning mania'), and its frequent occurrence in the dream,
indicate the profound unconscions appeal of association based on pure
sound. Its opposite number is the rhyme. In between these two, on the
central panel, the bisociation of sound and sense assumes a playful
form in word games like Lexicon, anagram, and crossword puzzle; and a
serious form in comparative philology and paleography, the deciphering
of ancient inscriptions (pp. 186-7).
Whether the two meanings associated with the pun are derived from the
same root as in 'lunar bin'; or are homonyms as
vol
= flight and
vol
= theft, is irrelevant provided the two derivations have
drifted apart far enough to become incompatible. In fact, there is a
continuous series stretching from the pun through the play of words
(
jeu de mots
) to the play of ideas (
jeu d'esprit
). Let me
quote a few more examples of the latter.
The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in
alcohol
. The concept 'soluble' is bisociated (a) with the context
of the chemical laboratory and (b) with the (metaphorical) dissolution
of one's high principles in one's cups. The first few words of the
sentence arouse perhaps a mild irritation with the Freudian jargon --
or apprehension, as the case may be; which is then tittered away through
the now familiar mechanism.
Here is another sample from this game of definitions:
What is
a sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.
The link-concept is 'kindness', bisociated with two diametrically
opposed meanings; moreover the whole definition is open to two different
interpretations:
(a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him;
(b) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him.
In both cases the sadist must go against his own nature, and the
definition turns out to be in fact a variant of the logical paradox about
the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans are liars. But we can get around
it by deciding that in either interpretation 'kind' should be understood
both literally and metaphorically at the same time; in other words, by
playing simultaneously two games governed by opposite rules. We shall
see that such
reversals of logic
play a considerable part in
scientific discovery (pp. 191-9). They are also a recurrent motif in
poetry and literature. One of my favourite Donne quotations is a line
from the
Holy Sonnets
:
logic, of metaphorical with literal meaning, of contexts linked by sound
affinities, of trains of reasoning travelling, happily joined together,
in opposite directions. The list could be extended beyond the limits of
patience. In fact any two matrices can be made to yield a comic effect of
sorts, by finding an appropriate link between them and infusing a drop of
adrenalin. Take as a random example two associative contexts centred on
the unpromising key-words 'alliteration' and 'hydrotherapy'. (The example
actually originated in a challenge following a discussion; I am merely
quoting it, with apologies, to show that in principle it can be done):
incompatible codes. One can obtain comic effects by simply confronting
quantitatively different scales of operation, provided that they differ
sufficiently in order of magnitude for one scale to become negligible
compared with the other. The result is the type of joke made according
to the formula: the mountains laboured, the birth was a mouse.
With an added twist you get this kind of dotty dialogue -- between a
nervous bus-passenger and the conductor:
successively involved, each with a different scale of measurement. M1
has a grid of hours and minutes; M2 of days of the week. The two differ
in fact only in quantity but provide qualitatively different frames of
reference; the third matrix has spatial instead of temporal co-ordinates
-- where to get off, not when. It would be impossible to orientate one's
behaviour with reference to these three different grids at the same time;
yet that is precisely what the tri-sociated passenger is trying to do.
Let me repeat: any two universes of discourse can be used to fabricate
a joke. Lewis Carroll sent the following contribution to a philosophical
symposium:
sound-affinity -- with rhyme but without reason. When T. E. Lawrence
joined the ranks as Private Shaw, Noel Coward wrote to him that famous
letter beginning 'Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)'.
Man and Animal
In the previous chapter I discussed the bisociation of man and machine;
related to it is the hybrid man-animal. Disney's creatures behave as
if they were human without losing their animal appearance, they live
on the line of intersection of the two planes; so do the cartoonist's
piggy or mousy humans. This double-existence is comic, but only so long
as the confrontation has the effect of a slightly degrading exposure of
one or the other. If sympathy prevails over malice, even poor Donald
Duck's misfortunes cease to be laughable; and as you move over to the
right-hand panel of the triptych, the man-animal undergoes a series
of transformations: from the cloying lyricism of Bambi to the tragedy
of Orwell's Boxer; from the archetypal menace of the werewolf to the
Metamorphosis of Kafka's hero into a filth-devouring cockroach. As for
science, the importance of learning about man by the experimental study
of animal physiology need not be stressed; in psychology it has been
rather overstressed to the point where the salivary reflexes of dogs
came to be regarded as paradigmatic for human behaviour.
Impersonation
The various categories of the comic shade into each other: Disney's
animals acting like humans could as well be classified under the heading
'imitation, impersonation, and disguise'. The impersonator is two
different people at one time. If the result is degrading, the spectator
will laugh. If he is led to sympathize or identify himself with the
impersonated hero, he will experience that state of split-mindedness
known as dramatic illusion or the magic of the stage. Which of the two
possibilities will occur depends of course partly on the actor, but
ultimately
a jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it,
never in the tongue / Of him that makes it
.[1] The same 'narrative', a
Victorian melodrama or a Chinese opera, acted in both cases in precisely
the same way, will make some spectators giggle, others weep. The same
dramatic devices may serve either a comic or a tragic purpose: Romeo
and Juliet are the victims of absurd coincidences, Oedipus's marriage
to his mother is due to mistaken identity; Rosamund in
As You Like
It
and Leonora in
Fidelio
are both disguised as men, yet
in one case the result is drama, in another comedy. The technique of
creating character-types is also shared by both: in the classical form
of tragedy, whether Greek, Indian, or Japanese, characterization is often
achieved by standardized masks; in the comedy, down to Molière,
by the creation of types: the miser, the glutton, the hypocrite, the
cuckold. In the centre panel (where impersonation appears in the form
of empathy, the act of self-projection which enables one to understand
others, see below,
pp. 187-8
) the classification
of character-types has been the aim of incessant efforts -- from the 'four
temperaments' of the Greeks, to Kretschmer, Jung, Sheldon, and so on.
The Child-Adult
Why are puppies droll? Firstly, their helplessness, trustingness,
attachment, and puzzled expression make them more 'human' than grown-up
dogs; in the second place the ferocious growl of the puppy strikes
us as an impersonation of adult behaviour (like the little boy with
stuck-on beard and bowler-hat, pretending to be the family doctor);
thirdly, the puppy's waddling and tumbling makes it a choice victim
of nature's practical jokes; furthermore, its bodily disproportions,
the huge padded paws, wrinkled brow, and Falstaffian belly, give it the
appearance of a caricature; and so on. The delighted laughter which greets
the puppy's antics seems so simple to explain; but when we try to analyse
it we find several interlocking causes; and while the word 'delighted'
indicates a pure emotion, free from the ugly taint of aggressiveness,
the grain of self-satisfied condescension, the conviction of our own
superiority is nevertheless present, even if we are not aware of it.
A simple shift of emphasis will move the bisociation of child and adult
into the centre panel where it becomes a concern of pedagogues and
psychiatrists. A further shift to the right, and the relation will be
reversed, the child will be seen as an adult in disguise, immersed in the
hidden tragedies of the nursery and boarding school -- an inexhaustible
subject of the autobiographical novel.
The Trivial and the Exalted
Parody
is the most aggressive form of impersonation, designed not
only to deflate hollow pretence but also to destroy illusion in all its
forms; and to undermine pathos by harping on the trivial, all-too-human
aspects of the victim. Stage props collapsing, wigs falling off, public
speakers forgetting their lines, dramatic gestures remaining suspended in
the air -- the parodist's favourite points of attack are all situated on
the line of intersection between two planes: the Exalted and the Trivial.
for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species with
redundant emotions and intellectual autonomy.* The sudden realization
that one's own excitement is 'unreasonable' heralds the emergence
of self-criticism, of the ability to see one's very own self
from
outside
; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an
objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo
sapiens.
Thus laughter rings the bell of man's departure from the rails of
instinct; it signals his rebellion against the singlemindedness of his
biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit, governed
by a single set of 'rules of the game'. Animals are fanatics; but
O /
How the dear little children laugh / When the drums roll and the lovely /
Lady is sawn in half . . . .
[13]
NOTES
To
p. 56
. Criticizing a paper read by a neurologist
to a learned society, he remarked: 'The author spoke of emotions in very
general terms. . . . There are features which he mentioned which I could
recognize as characteristic of major emotions, as anger and rage; but
after all, love is an emotion. . . . I think that when we discuss emotion
we ought to specify the sorts of emotion we have in mind' (Cannon, 1929).
To
p. 61
. The article in which this list appeared is
characteristic of the behaviourist approach; it ennumerated three 'basic
principles' of laughter: (a) 'as an expression of joy', (b) 'laughter
makes for group cohesion through homogeneity of feeling within the group',
(c) 'laughing an be used as a weapon in competitive situations'. The word
'humour' was not mentioned in the article; laughing at 'jokes, antics,
etc.', was mentioned only in passing, as obviously not a phenomenon
worthy of the psychologists' attention.
To
p. 63
. Some domesticated animals -- dogs,
chimpanzees -- seem to be capable of a humorous expression and to engage
in teasing activities. These may be regarded as evolutionary forerunners
of laughter.
III
VARIETIES OF HUMOUR
The tools have now been assembled which should enable the reader
to dissect any specimen of humour. The procedure to be followed
is: first, determine the nature of M1 and M2 in the diagrams on
pages 35 and 37
by discovering the type of logic,
the rules of the game, which govern each matrix. Often these rules
are implied, as hidden axioms, and taken for granted -- the code must
be de-coded. The rest is easy: find the 'link' -- the focal concept,
word, or situation which is bisociated with both mental planes; lastly,
define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding
the unconscious elements that it may contain. In the sections which
follow I shall apply this technique to various types of humour.
Pun and Witticism
Our spacemen, Mrs. Lamport fears, are 'heading for the "lunar bin".'
The ageing libertine, she tells us, 'feels his old Krafft Ebbing'.
The Reverend Spooner had a great affection, or so he said, for 'our queer
old dean'.
One swallow, the proverb says, does not make a summer -- nor quench the
thirst. Elijah's ravens, according to Milton, were 'though ravenous
taught to abstain from what they brought'. Not so Napoleon, who,
shortly after his coronation, confiscated the estates of the house
of Orléans, which caused a contemporary to remark:
C'est le
premier vol de l'aigle
. Equally to the point was Mr. Paul Jenkin's
discovery regarding the pros and cons of Britain's entry into the Common
Market: 'The Cons were pro, while Lab has turned con.'
The pun is the bisociation of a single phonetic form with two meanings --
two strings of thought tied together by an accoustic knot. Its immense
popularity with children, its prevalence in certain forms of mental
disorder ('punning mania'), and its frequent occurrence in the dream,
indicate the profound unconscions appeal of association based on pure
sound. Its opposite number is the rhyme. In between these two, on the
central panel, the bisociation of sound and sense assumes a playful
form in word games like Lexicon, anagram, and crossword puzzle; and a
serious form in comparative philology and paleography, the deciphering
of ancient inscriptions (pp. 186-7).
Whether the two meanings associated with the pun are derived from the
same root as in 'lunar bin'; or are homonyms as
vol
= flight and
vol
= theft, is irrelevant provided the two derivations have
drifted apart far enough to become incompatible. In fact, there is a
continuous series stretching from the pun through the play of words
(
jeu de mots
) to the play of ideas (
jeu d'esprit
). Let me
quote a few more examples of the latter.
The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in
alcohol
. The concept 'soluble' is bisociated (a) with the context
of the chemical laboratory and (b) with the (metaphorical) dissolution
of one's high principles in one's cups. The first few words of the
sentence arouse perhaps a mild irritation with the Freudian jargon --
or apprehension, as the case may be; which is then tittered away through
the now familiar mechanism.
Here is another sample from this game of definitions:
What is
a sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.
The link-concept is 'kindness', bisociated with two diametrically
opposed meanings; moreover the whole definition is open to two different
interpretations:
(a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him;
(b) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him.
In both cases the sadist must go against his own nature, and the
definition turns out to be in fact a variant of the logical paradox about
the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans are liars. But we can get around
it by deciding that in either interpretation 'kind' should be understood
both literally and metaphorically at the same time; in other words, by
playing simultaneously two games governed by opposite rules. We shall
see that such
reversals of logic
play a considerable part in
scientific discovery (pp. 191-9). They are also a recurrent motif in
poetry and literature. One of my favourite Donne quotations is a line
from the
Holy Sonnets
:
'For O, for some, not to be martyrs is a martyrdom.'I have given examples of the bisociation of professional with commonsense
logic, of metaphorical with literal meaning, of contexts linked by sound
affinities, of trains of reasoning travelling, happily joined together,
in opposite directions. The list could be extended beyond the limits of
patience. In fact any two matrices can be made to yield a comic effect of
sorts, by finding an appropriate link between them and infusing a drop of
adrenalin. Take as a random example two associative contexts centred on
the unpromising key-words 'alliteration' and 'hydrotherapy'. (The example
actually originated in a challenge following a discussion; I am merely
quoting it, with apologies, to show that in principle it can be done):
Gossip Column Item: Lady Smith-Everett, receiving me in her sumptuousIt is not even necessary that the two matrices should be governed by
boudoir, explained that she had always suffered from 'the most maddening
rashes' until she met her present physician, a former professor
ofpsycho-hydrotherapy at the University of Bucharest. By employing a
new test which he invented, the Professor discovered that she had 'a
grade 4 allergy' against sojourning in spas and holiday resorts with the
initial letter C. No more visits to Capri and Carlsbad for Lady S-E.!
incompatible codes. One can obtain comic effects by simply confronting
quantitatively different scales of operation, provided that they differ
sufficiently in order of magnitude for one scale to become negligible
compared with the other. The result is the type of joke made according
to the formula: the mountains laboured, the birth was a mouse.
With an added twist you get this kind of dotty dialogue -- between a
nervous bus-passenger and the conductor:
What's the time?This is a serial affair in which not two but three matrices are
Thursday.
Good Lord! I must get off.
successively involved, each with a different scale of measurement. M1
has a grid of hours and minutes; M2 of days of the week. The two differ
in fact only in quantity but provide qualitatively different frames of
reference; the third matrix has spatial instead of temporal co-ordinates
-- where to get off, not when. It would be impossible to orientate one's
behaviour with reference to these three different grids at the same time;
yet that is precisely what the tri-sociated passenger is trying to do.
Let me repeat: any two universes of discourse can be used to fabricate
a joke. Lewis Carroll sent the following contribution to a philosophical
symposium:
Yet what mean all such gaieties to meThe universes of verbal and mathematical symbols are linked by pure
Whose life is full of indices and surds?
x² + 7x + 53
= xx/3'
sound-affinity -- with rhyme but without reason. When T. E. Lawrence
joined the ranks as Private Shaw, Noel Coward wrote to him that famous
letter beginning 'Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)'.
Man and Animal
In the previous chapter I discussed the bisociation of man and machine;
related to it is the hybrid man-animal. Disney's creatures behave as
if they were human without losing their animal appearance, they live
on the line of intersection of the two planes; so do the cartoonist's
piggy or mousy humans. This double-existence is comic, but only so long
as the confrontation has the effect of a slightly degrading exposure of
one or the other. If sympathy prevails over malice, even poor Donald
Duck's misfortunes cease to be laughable; and as you move over to the
right-hand panel of the triptych, the man-animal undergoes a series
of transformations: from the cloying lyricism of Bambi to the tragedy
of Orwell's Boxer; from the archetypal menace of the werewolf to the
Metamorphosis of Kafka's hero into a filth-devouring cockroach. As for
science, the importance of learning about man by the experimental study
of animal physiology need not be stressed; in psychology it has been
rather overstressed to the point where the salivary reflexes of dogs
came to be regarded as paradigmatic for human behaviour.
Impersonation
The various categories of the comic shade into each other: Disney's
animals acting like humans could as well be classified under the heading
'imitation, impersonation, and disguise'. The impersonator is two
different people at one time. If the result is degrading, the spectator
will laugh. If he is led to sympathize or identify himself with the
impersonated hero, he will experience that state of split-mindedness
known as dramatic illusion or the magic of the stage. Which of the two
possibilities will occur depends of course partly on the actor, but
ultimately
a jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it,
never in the tongue / Of him that makes it
.[1] The same 'narrative', a
Victorian melodrama or a Chinese opera, acted in both cases in precisely
the same way, will make some spectators giggle, others weep. The same
dramatic devices may serve either a comic or a tragic purpose: Romeo
and Juliet are the victims of absurd coincidences, Oedipus's marriage
to his mother is due to mistaken identity; Rosamund in
As You Like
It
and Leonora in
Fidelio
are both disguised as men, yet
in one case the result is drama, in another comedy. The technique of
creating character-types is also shared by both: in the classical form
of tragedy, whether Greek, Indian, or Japanese, characterization is often
achieved by standardized masks; in the comedy, down to Molière,
by the creation of types: the miser, the glutton, the hypocrite, the
cuckold. In the centre panel (where impersonation appears in the form
of empathy, the act of self-projection which enables one to understand
others, see below,
pp. 187-8
) the classification
of character-types has been the aim of incessant efforts -- from the 'four
temperaments' of the Greeks, to Kretschmer, Jung, Sheldon, and so on.
The Child-Adult
Why are puppies droll? Firstly, their helplessness, trustingness,
attachment, and puzzled expression make them more 'human' than grown-up
dogs; in the second place the ferocious growl of the puppy strikes
us as an impersonation of adult behaviour (like the little boy with
stuck-on beard and bowler-hat, pretending to be the family doctor);
thirdly, the puppy's waddling and tumbling makes it a choice victim
of nature's practical jokes; furthermore, its bodily disproportions,
the huge padded paws, wrinkled brow, and Falstaffian belly, give it the
appearance of a caricature; and so on. The delighted laughter which greets
the puppy's antics seems so simple to explain; but when we try to analyse
it we find several interlocking causes; and while the word 'delighted'
indicates a pure emotion, free from the ugly taint of aggressiveness,
the grain of self-satisfied condescension, the conviction of our own
superiority is nevertheless present, even if we are not aware of it.
A simple shift of emphasis will move the bisociation of child and adult
into the centre panel where it becomes a concern of pedagogues and
psychiatrists. A further shift to the right, and the relation will be
reversed, the child will be seen as an adult in disguise, immersed in the
hidden tragedies of the nursery and boarding school -- an inexhaustible
subject of the autobiographical novel.
The Trivial and the Exalted
Parody
is the most aggressive form of impersonation, designed not
only to deflate hollow pretence but also to destroy illusion in all its
forms; and to undermine pathos by harping on the trivial, all-too-human
aspects of the victim. Stage props collapsing, wigs falling off, public
speakers forgetting their lines, dramatic gestures remaining suspended in
the air -- the parodist's favourite points of attack are all situated on
the line of intersection between two planes: the Exalted and the Trivial.
Other books
Selby Sorcerer by Duncan Ball
The Crucifix Killer by Chris Carter
Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett
False Allegations by Andrew Vachss
The Mirage: A Novel by Matt Ruff
Sweet Evangeline (Moon Magic Book 2) by Sable Hunter
Chasing Silver by Jamie Craig
Ivy in the Shadows by Chris Woodworth
The Hollow Kingdom by Dunkle, Clare B.
Los cuatro grandes by Agatha Christie