Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (8 page)
The artist reverses this technique by conferring on trivial experiences
a new dignity and wonder: Rembrandt painting the carcass of a flayed ox,
Manor his skinny, insipid Olympia; Hemingway drawing tragedy out of the
repetitive, inarticulate stammer of his characters; Chekhov focussing
the reader's attention on a fly crawling on a lump of sugar while Natasha
is contemplating suicide.
When 'consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small'
-- which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter -- the result
will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether
the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the
transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks
on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the
trivial planes meet; he
sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero
perish or a sparrow fall
. The scientist's attitude is basically similar
in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal
event and a general law of nature -- Newton's apple or the boiling kettle
of James Watt.
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:
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 reveals 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
a new dignity and wonder: Rembrandt painting the carcass of a flayed ox,
Manor his skinny, insipid Olympia; Hemingway drawing tragedy out of the
repetitive, inarticulate stammer of his characters; Chekhov focussing
the reader's attention on a fly crawling on a lump of sugar while Natasha
is contemplating suicide.
When 'consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small'
-- which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter -- the result
will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether
the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the
transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks
on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the
trivial planes meet; he
sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero
perish or a sparrow fall
. The scientist's attitude is basically similar
in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal
event and a general law of nature -- Newton's apple or the boiling kettle
of James Watt.
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 reveals 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
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