Fabled by the Daughters of Memory — Part Three
‘Call halton eatwords! Mumm me moe mummers! What, no Ithalians? How, not one Moll Pamelas? Accordingly!! Play actors by us ever have crash to their gate. Mr Messop and Mr Borry will produce of themselves, as they’re two genitalmen of Veruno, Senior Nowno and Senior Brolano (finaly! finaly!), all for love of a fair penitent that, a she be broughton, rhoda’s a rosy she. Their two big skins! How they strave to gat her! Such a boyplay! Their bouchicaulture! What tyronte power! Buy our fays! My name is novel and on the Granby in hills. Bravose!! Thou traitor slave!’
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 1939.
It is very late into the night at the household of Mr. and Mrs Porter (or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle), when husband and wife are aroused from their sleep by a cry from their son Jerry (or Shem) and so upstairs they go to give him comfort after which they return to their bed where they endeavour to engage in sexual intercourse before falling asleep again, having been interrupted in the act by the crow of a cock.
‘O yes! O yes! Withdraw your member! Closure. This chamber stands abjourned. Such precedent is largely a cause to lack of collective continencies among Donnelly’s orchard as lifelong the shadyside to Fairbrother’s field. Humbo, lock your kekkle up! Anny, blow your wickle out! Tuck away the tablesheet! You never wet the tea! And you may go rightoway back to your Aunty Dilluvia, Humprey, after that!’
Lock your keckle up, kettle is slang for the vagina, blow your wickle out, wick is slang for the penis. The tea is wet, the tea is ready, a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and having never wet the tea we may assume this means H.C.E. never reached the desired climax. The chamber stands abjourned, adjourned that is, referring to the fact that during all of this time a kind of dramatic mime is taking place while four judges present four views of the parents and their bedroom antics, among other things, for in a work that has guilt, the Fall of Man, rebirth etc as themes there is much judging going on, much as there is in life sadly. Each of the four bedposts are variants of the four judges or four old men or four evangelists that keep on putting in an appearance in the text, Mamalujo, or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The passage above is from Mark’s ‘second position of discordance’ which covers among other things the Phoenix Park episode wherein H.C.E. disgraced himself in some unspecified manner involving two teenage girls and three soldiers. Mark is especially adjudicating, as in a trial, upon the present activities of the parents. However:
‘She, she, she! But on what do you again leer? I am not leering, I pink you pardons. I am highly sheshe sherious’.
A very humorous and delightful chapter in a very humorous book, (a comic masterpiece), whilst also of the utmost seriousness, as Mark himself insists he is not leering but is rather highly sheshe sherious. D. H. Lawrence, (1885–1930), who also wrote bedroom scenes, though they are hard to take seriously given his predilection for solemnly theorising about sex as one should never do, did not at all appreciate Joyce’s joyful levity in matters so sherious, and upon looking into the Wake he discerned naught but ‘deliberate journalistic dirtymindedness’, whereas upon looking into Lady Chatterley’s Lover Joyce saw nothing but ‘the usual sloppy English’. But for Joyce the compatibility of incompatibilities was most assuredly compatible, the spirit of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, (1548–1600), infuses the text, he whose motto was ‘in tristitia hilads hilaritate tristis’, cheerful in gloom, gloomy in cheer.
How fitting then that in the above passage the questions arise: how, not one Moll Pamelas? Melpomenê, muse of tragedy, and: what, no Ithalians? Thalia, muse of comedy. H.C.E. is burdened by guilt for what he has done while taking upon his shoulders the collective guilt of all humanity, protesting his innocence, while feeling guilt; borne down by the hump of guilt while also hump-free. And as memory generates its imaginative constructs, (which is how memory operates and is why it is so unreliable as I have discussed in previous articles) so then his humiliating encounter with the two teenage girls and the three soldiers alters with every recounting of the event, the same event that is continually referred to throughout the text, for within the dream it involves exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation, homosexuality, murder and the like, for the dreamer’s sense of guilt becomes exaggerated through his memory of this one incident. Comic and serious most certainly, as guilt and conscience can be.
As Anthony Burgess, (1917–1993), has pointed out, the Wake is not ‘a humourless monster crammed with learning and merely seasoned with a few puns. It is always funny where it is not touching and inspiring, and it is provocative of loud laughter, just as is Ulysses (Nora Joyce heard that laughter constantly coming out of her near-blind hard-working husband’s work-in-progress-room)’.
I had a dream recently in which there was a tall building, the details of which were not very clear, but I knew in my dream it was the Mullingar House, Chapelizod, Dublin, setting of the Wake, such is how dreams work. And there were two other men with me, vague figures merely on the periphery who I knew were there though they were not visible but I sensed their presence. I do not know who they were. We discovered something like a crawlspace under the building and so we decided to investigate, into a space so very narrow I could feel the weight of the building pressing down upon me and was in fear that it might collapse, or that I would get stuck and unable to get out. And so we decided to crawl our way back to the open air, I could feel my panic in the dream, and indeed upon getting half way out of the crawlspace I did get stuck whereupon one of my invisible companions, who had already made it into the open, pulled me out though I was stuck so tight I lost my trousers as he did so. Very comical.
And what does such a dream mean? Well, it certainly put me in mind of the force of gravity, feeling the weight of the building pressing down upon me, and by association the spirit of gravity together with all of its connotations that is so central in the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900). Zarathustra, (died 538 BC), his mouthpiece, proclaims that the spirit of gravity is his devil and the only way to triumph over it is through laughter:
‘You say to me: ‘Life is hard to bear’. But why would you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?
Life is hard to bear: but then do not carry on so tenderly! We are all of us handsome, load bearing jack- and jillasses.
What have we in common with the rosebud that trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body?
It is true: we love life not because we are accustomed to life but because we are accustomed to love.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
And even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness.
To see these light, foolish, delicate, sensitive little souls fluttering — that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs.
I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, sombre: it was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.
Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity!’
Interestingly the Stoics would not have approved, for they placed a great deal of stress upon self-control, which laughter diminishes. Epictetus (c 55 AD — 136 AD), who reportedly laughed not at all, wrote in his Enchiridion: ‘Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or unrestrained’.
For Nietzsche/Zarathustra gravity equates with solemnity and seriousness, (of a kind displayed by D. H. Lawrence in fact), descending into the depths, an attitude of seeing life as tortuous and difficult to cope with, and through the spirit of gravity everything falls. The very antithesis of this spirit is therefore a feeling of levity, ascending to the heights, a softer more airy texture as it were, joy and laughter. Not by anger nor by resentment is the spirit of gravity, the spirit of seriousness, overcome in life, but only through laughter. Spitting in the face of the spirit of gravity, assuming an air of defiance towards it, grants one the facility to place oneself above all of the world’s seriousness, thereby also granting one the facility to laugh at everything in life that is either tragic and sorrowful. The spirit of gravity endows human life with a heaviness and burdensomeness. Indeed, such a feeling of burden is a consequence of the love for one’s neighbour, (a reference to ‘Matthew’ 22:39), and ‘for this reason one lets the little children come to one, in order to restrain them early on from loving themselves: this is the spirit of gravity’s doing’, (a reference to ‘Mark’ 10:13–10:16, particularly apposite with regard to the Wake passage). Clearly Nietzsche is concerned, with such textual cross referencing as this, to establish a direct connection between the spirit of gravity and the Christian comprehension of being and existence, for both see life as burdensome because of the suffering and tragedy that one experiences in it. The Christian answer to suffering on earth is an afterlife in heaven, where one’s worldly agony is redeemed and an adherence to Christian virtues in this life, such as love of one’s neighbour, if such could be said to be an exclusively Christian virtue which it is not, is duly recompensed in a life to come through eternal happiness.
Zarathustra on the other hand instructs us to love ourselves (and without wishing to sound purposefully incredulous as one does to avoid addressing an issue I really and truly have no idea what loving oneself means); and furthermore, ‘only the human being is a heavy burden to himself! This is because he lugs too much that is foreign to him. Like a camel he kneels down and allows himself to be well burdened’. For Zarathustra, the virtues that encourage a love of one’s neighbour (which in fairness to Zarathustra again I have to say I really have no idea what loving one’s neighbour is supposed to mean) implicate a devaluing of one’s life upon Earth for with it comes suffering. To love oneself is therefore to grasp a hold of one’s life in a devoted one might almost say indulgent embrace, irrespective of the pain and of the suffering, and therefore it is that laughter is invoked to eradicate this debilitating spirit of gravity and to place oneself above the tragic dramas played out in the world, and the tragic matters of fact that otherwise hit us so hard.
But what of Nietzsche’s own concept of eternal recurrence? That is to say, the notion that the universe and all of its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum. Is that not a heavy thought with which to weigh us down? My particular dream I could say was a dream about the heaviness of being, which puts me in mind of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera, (1929 — ), in which is posited the thought that each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again, hence being is light and not heavy (somewhat like the Nietzschean self help thinking also espoused in self help books though at a slightly higher level, but I present it here prior to presenting the German Idealist response more rooted in realism if that doesn’t sound paradoxical). Furthermore, such lightness in addition signifies freedom; unlike me in my dream feeling weighed down and trapped by the burden of being represented by the Mullingar House.
On an alternative point of view, the concept of eternal recurrence imposes a heaviness upon one’s life and the decisions that one makes, it apparently gives them weight, and this heaviness could either be a dreadful burden or a wonderful blessing depending upon the individual’s sole perspective. And yet, there’s the rub, what a tremendous burden to put upon one’s own shoulders. Recurrence, even if it amounts from a practical point of view to no difference at all, nonetheless imposes upon us a terrible weight whatever does or does not happen in any case.
Kundera writes:
‘Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature, This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine’.
But what if the doctrine of eternal recurrence were meant as a joke? A parody of all those doctrines that assert the existence of another world the relationship of which to this dismal vale of tears is one of a higher and purer mode of being, one of higher and purer values. Instead of Heaven and Hell, or the world of unchanging forms that Plato, (427–347 BC), envisaged, such a postulation suggests this world that we experience is constructed eternally through meaningless repetition. A very fine joke indeed, given that doctrines of other worlds happily suggest that an eternal recurrence somewhat temptingly for us presents this world of ours as deprived of values by analogy to one hearing a word or a sentence repeated over and over again until it becomes nothing more than a mere sound or a sequence of sounds.
Weight is attached to occurrences by the thought that they happen more than once, in the world of Nietzsche/Kundera anyway. Einmal ist keinmal, as the Germans say, once is nothing, or try anything twice, though I am really not quite sure of the force of that expression. Weight is one thing, value is another, and Kundera follows Nietzsche’s direction in what I suppose in his own mind is an adroit dialectic between lightness and heaviness, meaning, or value, and futility, but do not be misled by such lightweight thinking! In Kundera’s novel Tomáš, surgeon, intellectual, philanderer, at the beginning is of the view that: ‘If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all’, and in particular, with respect to committing to Tereza, his wife who is very tolerant of his womanizing: ‘There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison’. But why value anything merely because of its uniqueness?
Perhaps a person’s imagination may be seduced by the idea precisely through his or her facility for assuming a perspective exterior to any one particular cycle, thereby enabling his or her visualizing its occurrence over and over again. Perhaps a shift from observing oneself as trapped within a cycle and assuming a vantage point akin to a God’s-eye point of view upon things engenders some kind of buzz and a sense of a weight really not to be borne, or for the positive minded an elation with the return analogous to the Christian rapture: ‘Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord’. (1 ‘Thessalonians’ 4:17). And of course the unbearable lightness includes the lightness of love and sex which Kundera presents as ephemeral, careless, arbitrary and aimless, grounded upon interminable chains of coincidences, and yet we endow such matters with so much significance:
‘The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? …When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina [Tomáš’s mistress] — what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being’.
I’ll opt for the eternal recurrence postulate as being a joke. After all: ‘A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling’, as Nietzsche said.
O Thalia muse of comedy, comforter in our griefs. ‘The more one suffers’, said Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), ‘the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature’. And is not Nietzsche just espousing that common feeling among us that humour gets us through the difficult business of living? And is not humour in a man especially attractive to women? Then why has it in general been scarcely discussed among philosophers? We are after all supposed to be concerned with what is important (yes, seriously).
So are there any reasonable theories upon this topic? Nietzsche provided us with that enigmatic aphorism concerning jokes which is not particularly helpful, and extolling the benefits of laughter is one thing, but laughter at what? And whatever it is why is it so funny? Nietzsche may have had Plato, among others, in view as a target with his thoughts upon laughter given that it is made clear in the Platonic ideal state that it is better not to try and be a comedian, for laughter, as the Stoics later were to agree, is an emotion that overrides rational self-control. As for the Guardians of the Republic: ‘they must not be prone to laughter. For ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction…Then if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods… Then we must not accept from Homer such sayings as these either about the gods: ‘Quenchless then was the laughter that rose from the blessed immortals / When they beheld Hephaestus officiously puffing and panting’…. we must not accept it’.
And here we have a good illustration of the importance of knowing what the real object of laughter is, it is often mistook, sometimes one may suspect deliberately especially in these times of ‘protected groups’ that are legally protected against ‘harassment’ or being made fun of. It was frequently supposed that the Homeric gods who displayed a somewhat primitive sense of humour liked to laugh at the personal deformity of Hephaestus, divine craftsman, aka Amphigýeis, the lame one, crippled as a result of being thrown out of Heaven towards Earth as a consequence of protecting his mother from Zeus’s advances (according to one account, though according to Homer he was lame from birth). But what the Gods are really laughing at is not his deformity over which he has no control, especially were he born that way and that would certainly be an unsuitable target for jesting. Rather they laugh at his meddlesomeness, his officiousness, we know the type too well, who like to offer their services without them being asked for or wanted. And also a suitable subject for a jest by the Gods was the contrast he presented with regard to Hebe, his mother, goddess of youth and of the prime of life, sometimes known as the gladdening princess.
As it happens the God of the Bible is also known to laugh, but only ever with antipathy and mockingly towards the rulers of the Earth as they stand prepared to collude against Him and His anointed king, He laughs them all to scorn:
‘Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.
Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.
- Psalm 2. 1–5.
Plato apparently had some difficulty in distinguishing wit from scorn, for laughter he regarded as generally mean and antipathetical. Enjoyment of comedy, he informs us in the Philebus, is a type of scorn:
Socrates
Surely ignorance is an evil, as is also what we call stupidity.
Protarchus
Surely.
Socrates
Next, then, consider the nature of the ridiculous.
Protarchus
Please proceed.
Socrates
The ridiculous is in its main aspect a kind of vice which gives its name to a condition; and it is that part of vice in general which involves the opposite of the condition mentioned in the inscription at Delphi.
Protarchus
You mean ‘Know thyself’, Socrates?
The issue seems to be that self-ignorance is a vice, the people we laugh at have this vice, taking themselves to be richer, more fair, smarter, more honest and honourable, than they are in fact, therefore, in laughing at them, we are taking amusement and entertainment in something evil, their self-ignorance, that is to say, we are being malicious, and that is morally reprehensible. Plato has certainly touched upon something very important here with regard to the meaning of the comic but proceeds to present us with a rather odd diagnosis concerning it. The chasm between our pretensions about what we ourselves believe we are doing and what is really going on, together with that chasm in itself serving to put on display that which is genuine and true, that is what is really at stake in the reality of a comedy drama. This can be seen in great comic characters such as hotel keeper Basil Fawlty who really should not be a hotel keeper. And in these modern times as we aspire to be fully rounded self-sufficient characters, trying to be authentic as the existentialists like to put it, this turns out to be not possible, thereby we become comic figures, or rather tragi-comic figures, like the two genitalmen of Veruno, constantly striving for what we implicitly know that we cannot have.
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1831), pointed out that: ‘Each such modern tragedy is also well fitted for parody’. Whatever meaning or significance we may detect in human suffering and death will have to be derived from our own collective efforts at endowing them with meaning, and all such endeavours are, being self-legislated, as much open to being challenged as any other. A difficult load to bear in the modern world, as Hegel realised, a heaviness of being as he might have said were he prone to such a mode of discourse which happily he was not. And furthermore, it is apparent that he was of the opinion that but a few could actually find in philosophy the kind of reconciliation with human suffering and death that we search for, and that for the majority of people religion would be the favoured practice.
In Plato’s ideal state comedy is to be tightly controlled… much like it is becoming so in our own day, the humourless Republic is being realised upon the Earth: ‘We shall enjoin that such representations be left to slaves or hired aliens, and that they receive no serious consideration whatsoever. No free person, whether woman or man, shall be found taking lessons in them’. And furthermore, as he lays down in the Laws: ‘No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise’
Aristotle followed Plato in this, in the Nicomachean Ethics warning that: ‘Most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they should … a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery — perhaps they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting’. Like Plato Aristotle believed that laughter expressed scorn, and though he recognised wit as something else he was quite damning of that too in the Rhetoric:
‘Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people’s attacks of hunger and thirst… They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything. If they do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm. They are ready to pity others, because they think every one an honest man, or anyhow better than he is: they judge their neighbour by their own harmless natures, and so cannot think he deserves to be treated in that way. They are fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence’.
A rejection of humour and laughter continued with Christianity through the Middle Ages. When the Puritans came to rule England in the mid-17th century, they outlawed comedies. They wrote tracts against laughter and comedy. One by William Prynne (1600–1669) was over 1100 pages long and purported to show that comedies ‘are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men’. It encouraged Christians to live sober, serious lives, and not to be ‘immoderately tickled with mere lascivious vanities, or … lash out in excessive cachinnations in the public view of dissolute graceless persons’. Thomas Hobbes, (1588–1679), at this time strengthened the case against laughter in his Leviathan which describes human beings as naturally individualistic and competitive. That makes us alert to signs that we are winning or losing. The former make us feel good and the latter bad. If our perception of some sign that we are superior comes over us quickly, our good feelings are likely to issue in laughter. He wrote that:
‘Sudden Glory Laughter — Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others is a signe of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves onely with the most able’.
A similar explanation of laughter from the same time is found in René Descartes’ Passions of the Soul. He says that laughter accompanies three of the six basic emotions, wonder, love, (mild) hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Although admitting that there are other causes of laughter than hatred, he considers laughter only as an expression of scorn and ridicule:
‘Derision or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred, which proceeds from our perceiving some small evil in a person whom we consider to be deserving of it; we have hatred for this evil, we have joy in seeing it in him who is deserving of it; and when that comes upon us unexpectedly, the surprise of wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter… And we notice that people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind of an eye, hunched-backed, [note what I said about Hephaestus above] or who have received some public insult, are specially given to mockery; for, desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced at the evils that befall them, and they hold them deserving of these’.
A happier account of comedy and humour is to be found in Hegel, who said that through Art: ‘ …the man contemplates his impulses and inclinations, and while previously they carried him reflectionless away, he now sees them outside-himself and already begins to be free from them because they confront him as something objective…’. And this of course includes comedy. I do not know if he had read the two genitalmen of Veruno but Hegel refers to Shakespeare as a modern example of ‘comedy which is truly comical and truly poetic’, manifesting a ‘deeper wealth and inwardness of humour’, his comedies resisting any moralizing (always a sensible thing to do in comedy) in favour of merrily bringing into the light the intricate negotiations involved in politics or in modern love. The central characters in comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘Miss Somer’s nice dream’ as it is in the Wake) raise questions through their comedic carrying on concerning standards and values with little grounding in rationality and are then drawn into cooperating with others to establish some kind of reform. And all of this is achieved through language that exploits an elaborate use of metaphor and simile, with carefully crafted soliloquies, and with neatly unified plotting.
Hegel, in his description of the transition from Art to Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, makes clear that, just as natural religion (in which human self-consciousness recognises its own divinity in material forms, that is, inorganic and organic nature and human nature ) is in need of artistic interpretations, (statues etc,) so the religion that Hegel designates as manifest (revelatory) could only have emerged in the form through which we know it by first passing through a moment of artistic self-awareness in which an individual is set over against his or her world. How ironic then (Hegel has much of interest to say about irony too but I won’t go into that here) that Socrates condemns comedy because it encourages us to laugh at evil, self-ignorance, whereas in fact it serves to bring us to a recognition of such evil, or rather such human failings, in ourselves, and thus we can set about amending it, one hopes. How ironic that Christianity should have set its face against comedy, given that it developed out of both tragedy and comedy in the Arts.
Furthermore, the overall transition to philosophy from religion involves a demythologizing, casting the gods out of Heaven so to speak, not as a result of either philosophical or religious critique but rather was instigated by an artistic interpreting activity that has both a tragic and a comic aspect. Within ancient Greek tragedy (tragedy will be the subject of Part Four) because of the central role played by Fate there was a transition to a new form of religion, and more directly a transition to philosophy itself. For it is Fate herself that depopulates Heaven, this latter being ‘that unthinking mingling of individuality and essence’, that is to say, ‘the expulsion of such shadowy, insubstantial picture thoughts (Vorstellungen) which was demanded by the philosophers of antiquity’ was instigated by tragedy, and yet the tragic dissolution of the pantheon of the conventional Greek religious imagination had its comic correlate which added a further dimension to the whole process, one which Hegel saw as captured in the plot of a comedy by Aristophanes, (c. 450 — c. 385 BC), The Clouds. This drama lampooned the intellectual trends, or fads, in Athens at that time. Socrates, head of the Thinkery, appears overhead at one point conveyed in a basket at the end of a rope, the better so that he can observe the Sun and other meteorological phenomena (not much like the philosopher that appears in the Platonic dialogues then). He descends and rapidly embarks upon an induction ceremony for a new somewhat elderly student, culminating in a parade of Clouds, patron goddesses of thinkers and other idle wastrels. The clouds arrive with singing both elated and elevated of the regions from whence they arose and of the land to which they have come. Hegel writes:
‘Rational thinking frees the divine Being from its contingent shape and, in antithesis to the unthinking wisdom of the Chorus which produces all sorts of ethical maxims and gives currency to a host of laws and specific concepts of duty and right, lifts these into the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the Good. The movement of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic contained in these maxims and laws themselves and, consequently, the consciousness of the vanishing of the absolute validity previously attaching to them. With the vanishing of the contingent character and superficial individuality which imagination lent to the divine Beings, all that is left to them as regards their natural aspect is the bareness of their immediate existence; they are clouds, an evanescent mist, like those imaginative representations’.
In comedy the actor doffs his or her mask, the individual self-consciousness reduces everything to mockery, including the solemn proceedings of the gods, a fitting subject for ridicule. In comedy the common man and woman asserts himself or herself in his or her revolutionary disrespect for everything while also making a mockery of his or her own self-assertion. Socratic dialectic is a continuation of the dissolving irony of comedy. For conventional opinions and prescriptions it substitutes cloudy notions of goodness and beauty. The pure thoughts of the Beautiful and the Good thereby ‘display a comic spectacle’. If the annulment of divine forces (because of Fate) in Greek tragedy initiates a dialectical movement that culminates in the demands of Socratic philosophy, the corresponding movement within comedy brings Socratic philosophical concepts directly on stage, as it were. Philosophy thus makes its first appearance as a phenomenon within religion as art. The consequence of these tragic and comic moves toward philosophy is to bring together divine essence and individual human self-consciousness. At the level of the dramatic artform, this development means the convergence of individual actor and the persona he or she plays, as well as the collapse of the spectator-spectacle divide, since the comic spectator happily recognizes himself in the comic actor/persona. The comic self-awareness of this convergence can be expressed in philosophical terms as the claim that ‘the self is absolute essence’ or, in a phrase that helps underscore the peculiar role of art in the development of the revelatory religion, what Hegel calls ‘the becoming-human of the divine essence (die Menschwerdung des göttlichen Wesens, incarnation of the divine Being).
Menschwerdung, so central for the transition from Art to Religion, for the development from the ultimate or absolute form of religion to absolute or speculative knowing. Who knew just how crucial the comic consciousness is on the way to absolute knowing? Well, religious and philosophical for some unknown reason have been blind to it, not just dismissing it but condemning it, but perhaps the reasons for that are a more fitting subject for psychology than philosophy. Laughter is most certainly productive and of great benefit for human advancement, but not for the reasons, such as they are, that Nietzsche adduces. It clears the way towards a manifest or revelatory religion, one whose very ‘being manifest consists in this, that what it is, is known’. Knowledge of such a form of religion is speculative knowledge certainly that needs to be further overcome in the transition to absolute knowing itself. But as Hegel states in the Aesthetics: ‘.. in comedy, what is inherently null …manifests itself in its hollowness, but equally everything inherently excellent and solid’, and: ‘In comedy there comes before our contemplation, in the laughter in which the characters dissolve everything, including themselves, the victory of their own subjective personality which nevertheless persists self-assured’.
Hegel writes:
‘Through the religion of Art, Spirit has advanced from the form of Substance to assume that of Subject, for it produces its [outer] shape, thus ,making explicit in it the act, or the self-consciousness, that merely vanishes in the awful Substance, and does not apprehend its own self in its trust. This incarnation of the divine Being starts from the statue which wears only the outer shape of the Self, the inwardness, the Self’s activity, falling outside of it. But in the Cult the two sides have become one; and in the outcome of the religion of Art this unity, in its consummation, has even gone right over at the same time to the extreme of the Self. In Spirit that is completely certain of itself in the individuality of consciousness, all essentiality is submerged. The proposition that expresses this levity runs: ‘The Self is absolute Being.’ The essence, the Substance, for which the Self was [only] an accident, has sunk to the level of a predicate; and in this self-consciousness over against which there is nothing in the form of essence, Spirit has lost its consciousness’.
Note the word ‘levity’, we are now back with the themes of lightness and heaviness; Nietzsche and Kundera mistook, or rather fabricated, this phenomena in their different ways. It is rather a lightness of thinking that is in play here, for the heaviness of which they speak is not so much a heaviness of being but a comic consciousness having reached such a pitch that all things, itself included, become subject to the control of and defenceless against an individual self-consciousness. ‘The Self is absolute Being’ indeed. And the truth of comedy is that all the grand essential components standing over against self-consciousness are in truth products of, and defenceless against, self-consciousness, and while an individual knows himself in his individuality as the absolute essence it is the religion of art out of tragedy and comedy that has made the huge stride forward toward making its absolute essence a subject instead of merely substantial being as it expressed itself in forms of statues and so on, simply emblematic of self-consciousness. To give an Hegelian slant to my dream, perhaps I was not so much at the mercy of an heaviness of being but at that of my own comic self-consciousness. The view of the self becomes inverted by self-consciousness into a mere necessary adjunct to the absolute essence as the comic consciousness makes the latter a mere necessary adjunct of the former and now inverts that inversion but without a returning to the original priority of mere substance set over against self-consciousness. Since it consciously gives priority to the absolute essence this carries on as itself in self-consciousness with the consequence that there are now two sides of self-consciousness of equal standing rather than situations in which one of these sides takes precedence over the other.
The comic consciousness is the spirit of an age in which the ethical spirit is being ground down, and pure individualism becomes unrestrained, and religion loses its meaning, and a man and a woman lives unto himself or herself alone. But one yearns for the Absolute, and the Stoic, and Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard fall victim to the unhappy consciousness, (consciousness that is internally divided, regarding itself as variable and inessential while projecting its universal, essential and invariable aspect onto a transcendent being with whom it seeks reunion .. I include Nietzsche because whether existentialism is Christian or atheistic it is always theology reconstructed in secular form. See my article ‘A World of Gods and Monsters — Part Three’). What is to the unhappy consciousness colossal misery is to the comic consciousness a colossal joke, and behind Nietzschean laughter and the cry that God is dead is an abstract self-consciousness that has become but a miserable refuge that has lost all reason for respecting itself as a rational thinking being (exemplified in Nietzsche’s exhortations to laughter seemingly just for its own sake). All the religious and artistic expressions of a culture, statues, rites, etc, become profoundly meaningless, akin to modern scholarship scrutinising them in a merely external, lifeless way to construct pictorial views of their background. But Thalia is a daughter of memory, how we reinterpret the ancient past is more important than the ancient past itself would we but remember it and interiorize it and understand from whence the comic consciousness derives and to where it can take us.
‘Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits’.
- two genitalmen of Veruno, Act 1, Scene 1
Coming up in Part Four:
Melpomenê, muse of tragedy.
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’:
1. Hilton, Edwards = as Mr Wilder points out, 20th-century Dublin actor.
2. Give; and Mumm Champagne.
3. moll = minor; prostitute; and Daniel Defoe, ‘Moll Flanders’; and Melpomenê, muse of tragedy.
4. accordingly = in accordance with the sequence of ideas; agreeably or conformably to what might be expected; in natural sequence, in due course.
5. play actor = an actor of plays, a dramatic performer.
6. Gate Theatre, Dublin; and crash the gate, to enter without paying or without permission.
7. Mossop, Henry (1729–74), Dublin-born actor who long played with Barry; and the command performance relates additionally to one at the Smock Alley Theatre, which was famous in connection with Dublin’s two great eighteenth-century rival actor/managers, the imperious Mossop and the emotional Barry. In 1784 the Viceroy, the Duke of Rutland, commanded there the production of John Home’s ’Douglas’ (‘My name is Norval, on the Grampian hills . . .’). But having recently made himself unpopular he was hissed and groaned on the command night.
8. Verona = the name of a city in northern Italy, scene of Shakespeare’s ’Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and veruno (Italian), anyone, no-one.
9. penitent = one who repents; a person performing (ecclesiastical) penance; and Nicholas Rowe: ‘The Fair Penitent’ (1703 play, performed in Dublin).
10. Broughton, Rhoda (1840–1920), English novelist, author of ’Red as a Rose is She’; and brought on (to stage).
11. rhodon (Greek), rose; and rhoda (plural) (Greek) — roses.
12. scenes.
13. strave = obsolete past tense of strive (verb); and strava (Serbian), fright, panic, terror.
14. gat = past tense of get (verb); and gatten (German Slang), fuck.
15. bouche (French), mouth; and Dion Boucicault.
16. Tir Eoghain (tirowin) (Gaelic), Eoghan’s (‘wellborn’) Land; tribal land of N. Ui Neill; co., anglic. Tyrone; and William Grattan Tyrone Power (1797–1841), best stage-Irishman of his generation.
17. fay = religious belief; credit, authority; promise, assurance; In quasi-oath: par ma fay (by my fay); and W. and F. Fay, actors of early Abbey Theatre.
18. ‘My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills / My father feeds his flocks…’ — John Home, Douglas, 11.1 (Joyce’s favourite example of a bad writer).
19. Granby = Dublin actor; and Grampian Hills, Mountain system of Scotland, boundary between Highlands and Lowlands.
20. bravo = capital! excellent! well done!
