11
Interlude
The Eternal Return of Folly
It is time to take another look at Lady Folly, whose demise has often been announced. Anton Zijderveld, one of the very few sociologists to pay sustained attention to the phenomenon of the comic, quotes a French poem dating from around 1513, which denies the demise. Freely translated: “You tell me that Lady Folly is dead? By my faith, you lie. Never has she been as great, and as powerful, as she is now!”1 But Zijderveld too thought that she had died, only a couple of centuries later. One can state with some confidence that he was mistaken as well. He could, of course, show how particular social roles, like that of the court jester, came to disappear. But folly itself returns again and again, in evernew incarnations. If there is any merit to the present argument, this could not be otherwise, for the perceptions that lead to the upside-down view of reality that folly represents spring from the human condition as such. Put differently, folly is anthropologically necessary.
A powerful example of this recurrence of folly is the so-called theater of the absurd, which exploded (the word applies) in Paris in the years following World War II with the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and others. But Martin Esslin, who wrote the definitive work on this episode, also speaks of “the tradition of the absurd.”2 More of this in a moment. But just what does the term absurd refer to?
Etymology is not always useful in clarifying a concept. In this case it is. The Latin, absurdum, literally means out of deafness. A possible explanation is that the absurd is what people say who are deaf to reason. The term would in that case be more or less synonymous with the irrational. But a more interesting interpretation suggests itself: The absurd is a view of reality that comes out of deafness itself—that is, an observation of actions that are no longer accompanied by language. Such actions are, precisely, meaningless. Individuals with normal hearing can easily replicate this experience by turning off the sound on television: The actors on the screen now go on busily as before, but much of the time it is impossible to say what their actions mean. The effect usually is comic. By the same token, actions that had self-evident meaning when accompanied by language suddenly appear to be problematic. Deafness problematizes. Some psychologists have suggested that deaf people tend to he suspicious. They learn willy-nilly what Nietzsche recommended as a philosophical discipline: the “art of mistrust.” If Nietzsche was right, one might conclude that deafness, because of its problematization of ordinary reality, carries with it a certain cognitive gain (which, of course, would not make the condition any less unfortunate).
The absurd is an outlandish, a grotesque representation of reality. It posits a counterworld—just what Zijderveld intended when he desscribed folly as “reality in a looking-glass.” Not so incidentally, the etymology of the word grotesque is of some interest too. The word comes from the Italian, grottesca, and refers to strange paintings that appeared on the walls of grottoes. This etymology suggests a picture: One leaves the ordinary world of sun-lit reality and enters a dark grotto, and then, suddenly, one is confronted with startlingly strange visions. If this experience is of sufficient intensity, one is enveloped in this other reality and, at least temporarily, the ordinary world outside loses its accent of reality. The picture of a grotto graphically conveys what Alfred Schutz called a finite province of meaning.
Most of the links mentioned by Esslin as part of the tradition have been encountered earlier in this book. There is the, as it were, apostolic succession going from the Dionysian orgy through the medieval celebrations of folly to the court jesters and clowns of more recent times, and that is just within Western civilization. If the tradition is taken more narrowly as referring to the stage, there is a chain going back to classical Greek comedy through the commedia dell´arte and vaudeville to such heroic clowns of motion pictures as Charlie Chaplin (whose absurdity, true to the aforementioned etymology, comes through more clearly in silent films that is, under the aspect of deafness).
There is one important feature that recurs in the long history of the absurd: an assault on language. The experience of the absurd beats against the limits of taken-for-granted language, which is simply not made for expressing it. In this, once again, the absurd as a manifestation of the comic resembles both religion and magic. Ordinary language cannot convey the reality of religious experience and, again and again in the history of religion, special languages (such as theglossolalia of Pentecostalism are invented to overcome this difficulty. These special languages, like the language of magic, typically strike the uninitiated as plain nonsense. Thus Esslin includes in the tradition of the absurd such phenomena as the distorted Latin of the goliards, the peculiar language of Rabelais and Villon, but also such modern creations as the looking-glass logic of Lewis Carroll´s Alice in Wonderland, the nonsense verse of Edward Lear in English and Christian Morgenstern in German, and some parts of Franz Kafka´s novels. As immediate precursors of the theater of the absurd in France one must count the literary and artistic products of surrealism (the term was coined by Guillaurne Apollinaire) and dadaism. Over and beyond the movement that gave itself that name, all expressions of the absurd are surreal—that is, they literally transcend what is taken for granted as real in normal, everyday life.
An important precursor of the theater of the absurd in France was Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an eccentric bohemian, whose varied works attracted a good deal of attention during his short and unhappy life, hut who also underwent a posthumous renascence in the immediate post-World War II period. He was notorious for his penchant for elaborate practical jokes; his entire opus could well he described as a gigantic practical joke, buttressed by an impressive erudition. Jarrv is best known for a cycle of plays featuring the character of Uhu, former king of Poland, a grotesque figure surrounded by equally grotesque companions. Arguably, though, Jarry´s later work is more interesting, notably the presentation of the supposedly revolutionary new science of “pataphysics.”
It is almost impossible to convey the effect of Jarry's plays through their written texts. Everything depends on the actual dramatic performance. As in the later theater of the absurd, the effect lies in the deadly serious enactment of perfectly preposterous actions and dialogues (not so incidentally, the same effect as is achieved by successful clowns and stand-up comedians). This is the case, for example, in the perfectly absurd dialogues between Ubu and his conscience, a tall thin fellow, who is dressed in nothing but a shirt and lives in a suitcase. It is significant that the figure of Ubu was based on a play composed as a parody of a teacher at the lycée attended by Jarry; he was fifteen years old at the time. An American commentary on Jarry's work refers to his “freewheeling and adolescent nihilism.”4 His nondramatic writings, many of them published in newspapers as what he called “speculative journalism,” contain such pieces as an application by Ubu for patents on his alleged invention of the umbrella, the carpet slipper, and the glove (each carefully and accurately described), detailed instructions for building a time machine, and the proposal by a priest to transform all statues of the Virgin and Child into machines, designed to imitate the famous Brussels depiction of Manneken-Pis, whereby the infant Jesus would urinate holy water. But Jarry's magnum opus was what he called a “neo-scientific novel,” Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician. The work is best described as a sort of encyclopedia of nonsense, much of it extremely difficult to understand. After Jarry's death a College of Pataphysics was founded, in whose publication some of France´s most illustrious writers continued to interpret the new science, only half tongue-in-cheek.
This is how the protagonist of the neoscientific novel is introduced:
Doctor Faustroll was sixty-three years old when he was born in Circassia in 1898 (the 20th century was (-2) years old). At this age, which he retained all his life, Doctor Faustroll was a man at medium height with a golden-yellow skin, his face clean-shaven, apart from a sea-green mustachio, as worn by King Saleh; the hairs of his head alternately platinum blonde and jet black, an auburn ambiguity changing according to the sun´s position; his eyes, two capsules of ordinary writing-ink flecked with golden spermatozoa like Danzig schnapps.5
And this is how Doctor Faustroll's new science is defined:
An epiphenomenon is that which is superinduced upon a phenomenon. Pataphysics . . . is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter´s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex. an epiphenomenon being often accidental, pataphysics will he, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be —and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, hut in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality.
DEFINITION: Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolicaly attributes the properties of objects, described by their Virtuality to their Lineaments.6
Is this purely a spoof? Perhaps. Yet it is understandable that some very intelligent commentators tried to find interesting insights in the midst of what at first seems to be an accumulation of witty nonsense. After all, Doctor Faustroll is not the first great thinker to go out in search of a “universe supplementary to this one”! In any case, the possibilities of pataphysical thought are endless. Thus Dr. Faustroll is accompanied on his journeys (in a boat which is a sieve) by a baboon named Bosse-de-Nage, whose only linguistic expression is the exclamation “ha ha.” There is a detailed analysis of this phrase, trying to reconstruct from it the baboon´s view of the world:
Pronounced quickly enough, until the letters become confounded, (ha ha] is the idea of unity. Pronounced slowly,is the idea of duality, of echo, of distance, of symmetry, of greatness and duration, of the two principles of good and evil. But this duality proves also that the perception of Bosse-de-Nage was notoriously discontinuous, not to say discontinuous and analytical, unsuited to all syntheses and to all adequations. One may confidently assume that he could only perceive space in two dimensions, and was refractory to the idea of progress, implying, as it does, a spiral figure.
It would be a complicated problem to study, in addition, whether the first A was the efficient cause of the second. Let us content ourselves with noting that since Bosse-de-Nage usually uttered only AA and nothing more (AAA would be the medical formula Amalgamate),he had evidently no notion of the Holy Trinity, nor of all things triple, nor of the indeterminate, nor of the Universe, which may be defined as the Several.7
There is even a pataphysical theology. A passage entitled “Concerning the Surface of God” begins as follows:
God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however, for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselveswith two dimensions so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper.
Based on the vision of a mystic, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, of the cross in the shape of a Y, it is then postulated that God has the shape of three equal straight lines of length A, emanating from the same point and having between them angles of 120 degrees. There follows an impenetrable sequence of algebraic formulas, culminating in the definition that “God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity,” or alternatively “the tangential point between zero and infinity.”8
Put simply, Jarry's pataphysics is the construction of a counterworld by means of a counterlanguage and a counterlogic. In this, it is a faithful replication of the key features of classic folly. And this, precisely, is what the theater of the absurd sought to accomplish a half-century later.
Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994) not only produced some of the best-known plays in this genre, but also explained repeatedly how he came to do this and how his intentions are to be understood. The world of folly, or the world of the absurd, is entered as the ordinary world is relativized by means of some sort of shock (one may recall here once more what Alfred Schutz had to say about the entry into finite provinces of meaning). A sudden loss of confidence in the reliability of language is one such shock. In 1948, Ionesco set out to learn English. At the hand of the textbook he was learning from, he “discovered” such startling insights as that there are seven days in a week, or that the floor is down and the ceiling up. He experienced, by his own account, a sudden shift in the sense of reality: What previously was taken for granted is now, through the medium of a foreign language, made problematic. He then wrote his first play about the “tragedy of language,” The Bald Soprano (a title that has nothing to do with the contents of the play´). The entire play consists of a number of absurd conversations between two couples, the Smiths and the Martins, their maid Mary, and a visiting fire chief. After a long conversation between the Smiths (a middle-class English couple, sitting on English chairs on an English evening) they are visited by the Martins, who are left alone while the Smiths go to change. For a while they sit quietly, smiling timidly at each other. Then their dialogue begins:
They then discover that they traveled in the same compartment, that they are residing at the same address in London, in the same flat, and that they both have a little daughter named Alice, who is two years old and has one white eye and one red eye. At the end of this long conversation, after a period of reflection, Mr Martin gets up slowly and announces (“in the same flat, monotonous voice”):
Mr. Martin:
Then, dear lady, I believe that there can be no doubt about it, we have seen each other before and you are my own wife . . . Elizabeth, I have found you again!9
What is at work here is a kind of demented Cartesian logic, elaborately demonstrating what was obvious to begin with. This, of course, is comic. Yet at the same time a doubt is introduced as to whether the obvious is all that obvious after all. Indeed, as the Martins happily embrace after this rediscovery of their being married to each other, Mary the maid declares that they are quite mistaken, that they are really different people, and that her own real name is Sherlock Holmes. One is reminded of the exercises assigned to his students by Harold Garfinkel, the founder of the ethnomethodology school in American sociology. For example, a student would be instructed to go home and ask his parents or his wife for directions to the bathroom, for instructions on how to use the refrigerator, or the like. This would naturally upset the student´s interlocutors, but that was not the purpose of the exercise. Rather, it was to disclose the web of taken-for-granted assumptions underlying normal social interaction. Be it in ethnomethodology or in the theater of the absurd, the basic proposition here is quite simple: the obvious becomes less obvious as it is repeatedly asserted (especially if that is done in a “flat, monotonous voice”).
Ionesco has eloquently expressed this experience:
All my plays have their origin in two fundamental states of consciousness: now the one, now the other is predominant, and sometimes they are combined. These basic states of consciousness are an awareness of evanescence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the unreal transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and of thick darkness. Each of us has surely felt at moments that the substance of the world is dream-like, that the walls are no longer solid, that we seem to be able to see through everything into a spaceless universe made up of pure light and color; at such a moment the whole of life, the whole history of the world, becomes useless, senseless and impossible. When you fail to go beyond this first stage of depaysement—.for you really do have the impression you are waking to a world unknown—the sensation of evanescence gives you a feeling of anguish, a form of giddiness. But all this may equally well lead to euphoria: the anguish suddenly turns into release; nothing counts now except the wonder of being, that new and amazing consciousness of life in the glow of a fresh dawn, when we have found our freedom again.10
He goes on to say that, in this new freedom, it is possible to laugh at the world. And in another passage Ionesco formulates the relation of the comic to this experience of emigration (depaysement) from ordinary reality:
To feel the absurdity of the commonplace, and of language —its falseness— is already to have gone beyond it. To go beyond it we must first of all bury ourselves in it. What is comical is the unusual in its pure state; nothing seems more surprising to me than that which is banal; the surreal is here, within grasp of our hands, in our everyday conversation.11
The experiences of the absurd and of the comic are not coterminous. Rather, they overlap. But where they do overlap they reveal the most profound aspect of the comic—namely, a magical transformation of reality. In order to achieve this, ordinary reality must first be problematized— if one prefers, deconstructed. Just as language constructs the order of reality, so it can be used to tear down this construction, or minimally to breach it. Non-sense actions and non-sense language are thus vehicles to induce a different perception of the world. This is a methodology very familiar to anyone who has studied mysticism. Perhaps the closest religious analogy to the theater of the absurd is the way in which Zen techniques of meditation break down the ordinary, “normal” mode of attending to the world.
Absurd comedy releases a curious dialectic. It puts before one a reality that is both strange and familiar, and that evokes the response that it is impossible. But as one exclaims, “That is absurd!”—that being the magical counterworld one has just entered—another exclamation immediately suggests itself, “This is absurd!”—and this, of course, is the world of ordinary, everyday experience. It is this dialectic that is implied in Anton Zijderveld´s characterization of folly as reality in a looking-glass. The Vedanta used the phrase neti, neti (not this, not that) to indicate the impossibility of describing the ultimate reality. One could say that absurd comedy applies the same phrase to ordinary reality— not this, not that—and thereby, however tentatively, adumbrates the possibility that there may be a reality beyond the ordinary. This does not as yet make it a religious phenomenon. But it comes dangerously close (and the adverb here is quite appropriate). Martin Esslin, in the concluding chapter of his hook on the theater of the absurd, makes an argument about its relation to religion that at first seems self-contradictory.12 On the one hand, he puts the experience it sought to convey in the context of the decline of religion: A world bereft of any divine presence must appear absurd, meaningless. But on the other hand, Esslin suggests, the experience of the absurd also opens up the possibility of transcendence that is, of a reality beyond the absurd realities of this life.
The Latin church father Tertullian is famous for his statement, “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd). Much has been made of this both by advocates and by critics of Christianity, to show the power of faith or, alternatively, its irrationality. The correct interpretation of Tertullian must be left to experts in patristics. But a most nonexpert— perhaps a pataphysical—exegesis may be ventured here: Perhaps Terillian said more than he intended. For it is not so much that one should believe because something is absurd, but rather that one is led toward faith by the perception of absurdity. Needless to say, there is nothing inevitable about this progression. It remains as an intriguing possibility. In other words (and never mind what Tertullian actually meant): it is not the object of faith that is absurd. The world is absurd. And, therefore, faith is possible.
Notes
1. Anton Zijderveld, Reality, 70:
Me di toi que dame Folie
Est mort? Ma foy, tu as menty;
Jamais si grande ne la vy,
Ny si puissante comme elle est.
2. Martin Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 61), 229ff.
3. Cf. Roger Shattuck and Simon Taylor, eds., Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove, 1965); Keith Beaumont, Alfred Jarry (New York: St. Martin´s, 1984)
4. Shattuck and Taylor, Alfred Jarry, 13.
5. Ibid., 182f.
6. Ibid., 192f.
7. Ibid., 228f.
8. Ibid., 254ff.
9. Eugène Ionesco, Four Plays (New York: Grove, 1958), 15ff.
10. Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes (London: Calder, 1964), 169.
11. Cited by Esslin, Theater of the Absurd, 93.
12. Ibid., 291ff.
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Last updated on March 09, 2000