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LIGHT MATTERS

COMITÉ CIENTÍFICO DE LA EDITORIAL TIRANT HUMANIDADES Manuel Asensi Pérez

Catedrático de Teoría de la Literatura y de la Literatura Comparada Universitat de València

Ramón Cotarelo

Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración de la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

M.ª Teresa Echenique Elizondo Catedrática de Lengua Española Universitat de València

Juan Manuel Fernández Soria

Catedrático de Teoría e Historia de la Educación Universitat de València

Pablo Oñate Rubalcaba

Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración Universitat de València

Joan Romero

Catedrático de Geografía Humana Universitat de València

Juan José Tamayo

Director de la Cátedra de Teología y Ciencias de las Religiones Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Procedimiento de selección de originales, ver página web: www.tirant.net/index.php/editorial/procedimiento-de-seleccion-de-originales

LIGHT MATTERS

MIRIAM FERNÁNDEZ SANTIAGO

tirant humanidades Valencia, 2022

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Contents

INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................

I. LAUGHING I.1. I.2.

Humor. The Ambiguous Truth of Laughter.......................................... Bergson’s Mechanicism. The Joy of Compulsive Shopping.................

15 36

II. THINKING II.1. II.2.

The Postmodern Context. Because Schizophrenia is Also Funny..... Derrida’s Nominalism. Of Why you Need(n’t) Understand It............

47 56

III. LAUGHING AND THINKING WITH T. PYNCHON III.1. III.2. III.3 III.4. III.5.

Postmodernism and Humor in T. Pynchon. The Man and His Text. Parasitical Discourses.............................................................................. Reflexive Textuality.................................................................................. Metafiction. Or “About Fiction”............................................................. The Joke Sublime......................................................................................

71 81 92 104 118

CONCLUSION..................................................................................................... REFERENCES.......................................................................................................

137 141

INTRODUCTION

Adjectives: To determine which are the adjectives that could qualify one’s son is a difficult task for a mother, which grows even more complicated if–in order not to miss objectivity–one tries to avoid abusing praises. The present study is partial in its examples, but that makes it more precise in its assertions. It is limited by time and space, which excuses it from all that it does not include. If it could be found ambiguous by some, at least nobody could term it an absolutist metanarrative. Sometimes, it might get a little playful, but who is not influenced by trends nowadays? It is true in all its deductions if its premises are believed to be true. It is ambitious, which is a necessity for progress in knowledge. Of course, it is incomplete, but that is a prerequisite for criticism. And, oh my son! yes: you are also nice. Adverbs: We built its chapters with a spiral structure which is only completed at the beginning of the next chapter. The circular movement of the spiral accounts for the recurrent theoretical generalisations that appear at the beginning of each chapter, and for their conclussion with very specific examples. Its linear movement marks progression in the argument. This spiral construction always closes around its end in the shape of a vortex (for obvious reasons). The various elements presented in an apparent random order all move towards the same (in)conclusion by the end of the last chapter. The circular structure of the whole work is broken by a parallel move: each chapter parallels the main spiral as they progress from the general to the particular. However, all this Euclidean symmetry is continuously shattered by odd recurrences; unexpected and unsuspected connections between disparate ideas which move the text backward and forward.

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Subject: The subject of this study is the explanation of a coincidence. We could see it both as a presence of humorous elements in postmodern texts, or as a certain “postmodern” practice inherent to humor. This does not imply either that all postmodern texts are essentially humorous, or that postmodernity started with the first hilarious manifestation. It just points at the coincidence of many characteristics, which are not just marginally present both in Postmodernism and humor, but essential to both of them. To make it simpler, we shall say that the jocosity so often found in postmodern texts, and which is partly responsible for the accusations of Postmodernism’s historical/political unawareness that have been made by its many detractors has a raison d’être. The reason is that both Postmodern and humorous textual practices are built around the same premises, and therefore share so many characteristics that it is quite difficult to distinguish between them both. However, textual characteristics such as parasitism, reflexivity, and metafiction are not the only coincidences between Postmodernism and humor. As all cultural manifestations, they are also a social practice. Both Postmodernism and humor share not only their populism, critical perspective and conception of the individual, but also a philosophy of life, when not a whole cosmology. Not to make the subject of this study a compendium of abstract generalisations, I chose the latest work of Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, as an example of postmodern humorous practice to be contrasted with theoretical aspects. I focus on a single author for several reasons. The first one is that it helps to restrict the large corpus of postmodern fiction. Because of the spatial limits of this essay, the inclusion of many writers would make my analysis too superficial, and generalisation could not be escaped. From my perspective, Pynchon makes the perfect paradigm of postmodern writer. This is not only because of his genius and ex-centricities, (Hutcheon, 57-74) and because of his excellent sense of humor, but also because he is not mediated by any of the postmodern variants

Introduction

such as writings by the many minorities, or postcolonial discourse. The latter argument is not intended to show discrimination for any of such cultural manifestations–which deserve all my respect–but to avoid thematic considerations, which would distract us from our main purpose. Finally, I chose Mason & Dixon as the main source for textual samples–although some fragments from his other work are also included–both for its perfection in complexity, and for its hilariousness. Many have been those who see in Mason & Dixon the culmination of Pynchon’s career so far. I am one of them. Verb: I have divided the present study into three main parts, although the boundary line between them is a rather ambiguous one. Such ambiguity allows for smooth transitions to unfold and helps to establish connections between otherwise apparently disconnected fields. The first part is mainly concerned with humor, the second deals with Postmodernism, and the third one establishes the connections between the two exemplified with the work of Thomas Pynchon. However, these three parts interpenetrate each other, and such tripartite division can also be found in each chapter. The first chapter of this study makes a revision of 20th-century criticism on laughter. It is essential that it should be 20th-century criticism because, otherwise, its comparison with Postmodernism would seem anachronistic. This revision aims to find similarities, links between the three main discourses that structure a contemporary critical conception of laughter. However, it will be in the particularities that make them different from each other where the most interesting connections with postmodernism can be found. Bergson’s mechanicism connects with the technological era and compulsive consumerism. Bakhtin’s idea of carnival is close to the “regenerative ends” (Baudrillard 30) we find in simulacra, and Freud’s conception of disguise accounts for the intertextual intricacies of the Postmodern text. By the end of the chapter, we provide close textual analysis of an example from Pynchon’s work. This move towards the postmodern serves as transition to the next chapter, where more

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overt connections between the scope of humor and the postmodern are provided. The second chapter develops the idea of Bergson’s mechanicism in the light of Jameson’s idea of postmodern society. Jameson’s Marxist approach to Postmodernism, and his subsequent argument that Postmodernity is the result of a technological development connects with Bergson’s perception of laughter as the result of a mechanical movement. From Jameson’s historicist approach to Postmodernity, our study moves towards a review of the several critical trends that frame the period in the third chapter. Their condensation in a single chapter responds to the need to establish a theoretical field where to come back for reference in later ones. Its dismemberment and scattering through the whole study would interrupt the flow of its main argument. Therefore, it works like a large footnote within the text. The theoretical presentation of Postmodernism is closed by a fourth chapter which turns back to humor with a close analysis of a text by Jacques Derrida. With the analysis of Pynchon’s texts in chapter one, we looked at the humorous aspect of postmodern fiction from a theoretical perspective. In this chapter, we analyse a critical text from the perspective of fiction with no little hilarious effects. This chapter also serves as a transition from the theoretical frame to the literary one. We chose Derrida among the many critics presented in the previous chapter because of the style of his writing. Such style displays a set of linguistic techniques which allow for a very particular and neat condensation of meaning. To put it in terms of Einstein’s imagery, we could say it condenses matter and releases laughter. The fifth chapter of this study focuses on the person and work of Thomas Pynchon. It closes the circle drawn round humor and Postmodernism in the work of a single writer. After a brief presentation of his whole literary production and personality, I comment on the combination of both his postmodernist characteristics, and the use he makes of humor within this frame.

Introduction

The following three chapters present a reflection on the construction of postmodern texts to show how the techniques traditionally used by postmodern fiction (exemplified by Pynchon’s work) also respond to the characteristics and purpose of humorous writings. These three chapters are organized following a movement of infection which is typical both of postmodernity and humor. The chapter dedicated to textual parasitation analyses postmodern fiction as a compound of parasites around a central structure which is de-centered under the effects of parasitation. The textual analysis of concrete texts which follows a first theoretical reflection shows the humorous effects of parasitation as the result of a coincidence in textual construction. Such is the coincidence existing in the ways both humorous and postmodern texts are built. The idea of reflexivity, developed in the seventh chapter, responds to the obsessively reproductive essence of the parasite. Its occupation becomes so invasive that, in order to think of its own identity or centrality, the text must think of itself as an Other, an alien presence. Self-detachment is one of the main characteristics of humor. Therefore, this idea of reflexivity is mainly concerned with a general sense of non-belonging, of the rejection of the parasite from the center, and of the center from the parasite. As each of them claim for the possession of the whole text, they render each other a pretension of reality. This raises in the text a selfconsciousness of fiction, of self-generated simulacra which is the sinequanon pre-condition of any joke. There is only one little step from this textual self-awareness to the idea of metafiction. The text becomes both fiction and its criticism, without ever being able to determine which came first. This situation gives way to a series of internal paradoxes and contradictions, which not only cannot fail to be funny, but do intentionally aim at such result. Such is also the logic of the joke: self-explanatory, contradictory, and paradoxical. Apart from the specific examples of how this can be seen in Pynchon’s texts that we have included in this chapter, we found pleasure in including a last chapter which combines both criticism on Postmodernism, and postmodern writing. We took one of the (many) possible organizing principles

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of Pynchon’s latest novel, Mason & Dixon, and contrasted it with the viewpoint on postmodernism of one of its most powerful detractors, Fredric Jameson. It should be noticed that this chapter follows the same pattern as the second chapter, where we compared Bergson’s theories on laughter with Jameson’s analysis of Postmodernism, with Pynchon taking Bergson’s place. It is also some kind of gloss to the fourth chapter, in which I analyzed Derrida’s criticism and its connection with humor in the scope of performative utterances. This last chapter works both as summary and example of our whole study. It collects many of the ideas presented before, joins and exemplifies postmodern literary and critical practice, and is itself a joke on the Sublime. This study can only be understood in progress. Its action is in the present continuous; already started, yet never completed. It is only a project, an enunciation waiting for revision. It must be read retrospectively, and with a large dose of tolerance for fragmentation. It humbly aims to push knowledge a bit forward by proposing new ways of thinking about theory and literature–if such distinction may still be made. Its main purpose is to be enjoyed.

I. LAUGHING

I.1. HUMOR. THE AMBIGUOUS TRUTH OF LAUGHTER here you will find a novel savour, a most obscure doctrine; here you will learn the deepest mysteries, the most agonizing problems of our religion, our body politic, our economic life. Rabelais, Gargantua “Ours tries to be a comic age” Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor

There has been much controversy about the various manifestations of humorous writings. Such writings have been cursed and praised, admired or despised by literary criticism for centuries, although they have certainly never ceased to be practiced. It would be of great interest to make a historical review of all the opinions, criticisms, and analyses that the many forms of humorous representations have been subject to since the original loss that we date from Aristotle to our present times. However, such a task exceeds our purpose here, and must therefore be left for more daring spirits to accomplish. We will restrict the content of this chapter to those analyses of the humorous phenomena that, in our view, form the three pillars of the 20thcentury research on humor: namely, the works of Freud, Bergson and Bakhtin on the subject1. Despite the many differences that can be found between their perspectives, it is necessary to mention that of these three authors, Bergson and Freud analyze laughter 1

Although we have used Freud’s theories on laughter from Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, we find Koppe and Olsen’s study quite useful as a tool for its interpretation, since it provides a general perspective of such theories, and reviews them at the light of Freud’s whole work.

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as a general phenomenon and propose rules of an approximately universal character to determine the causes and effects of hilarity. Bakhtin, however, makes special remarks on the importance of the historical element in determining such characteristics and puts a strong emphasis on the particularities that each historical period confers to humorous representations.2 Unfortunately, nothing they can say could ever fill the original void of comedy’s origin, on which Aristotle would but briefly comment: The successive improvements of tragedy, and the respective authors of them, have not escaped our knowledge; but those of comedy, from the little attention that was paid to it in its origin, remain in obscurity […] (F)rom the time, indeed, when it began to acquire some degree of form, its poets have been recorded; but who first introduced masks, or prologues, or augmented the number of actors–these, and other particulars of the same kind, are unknown (12).

It is this obscurity that Bergson tries to illuminate with the light of his work Laughter. Bergson’s theory on laughter can easily be reduced to the simple premise that it is caused by the presentation of some clumsiness that he attributes to lack of elasticity in movement or action, and to which he refers as mechanical. He distributes his analysis into three main parts that are categorized depending on the object to which the attribute “comic” can apply: namely, forms and movements, situations and words, and character. In all of them he perceives mechanicism to be the “same essence from which so many products borrow either their obtrusive odor or their delicate perfume” (1). To this aspect of mechanisation in Bergson, we will dedicate the next chapter of this study. We shall focus now on the corrective function that Bergson attributes to laughter from the social perspective. He perceives laughter as a restrictive weapon that a particular social group holds against all those who want to escape the norms that rule 2

Both Bergson and Freud analyse laughter as a physical or psychological phenomenon, though they also include some references to humorous representations, which is Bakhtin’s main concern.

Laughing

the community. Laughter thus conceived keeps the group uniform and strengthens social boundaries among individuals: Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity (my emphasis) of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common center round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. (19)

When the target of laughter is an individual, s/he is completely unconscious of making a mistake or separating him/herself from society’s rules at all. The laughter of the group makes her/him conscious of her/his mistake and therefore allows her/him to correct it. “This rigidity,” Bergson affirms, “is the comic, and laughter is its corrective” (20). It is in this sense that Bergson would conceive of laughter as an appeal to intelligence, completely devoid of feeling or, in other words, as some kind of unrecorded popular justice. Many are the examples that Bergson could bring to illustrate his theory of the corrective social function of laughter, the most remarkable of which is the whole satiric production. However, it is no less true that he is completely ignoring the simple difference existing between laughing at or with someone–this someone being at the same time target and participant in the act of laughing. For Bergson, laughter remains some sort of intellectual instinct, which serves to keep the community together around certain rules which they consciously identify with. Each particular act of laughter belongs to and is understood exclusively by that social group and is therefore, untranslatable. However, Bergson reconciles this untranslatability of laughter with the universalistic idea that all human beings, as long as they belong to or identify with any social group, laugh at the same thing and for the same causes. Any deformity is therefore laughable insofar as it can be corrected. Against this, we could argue that any natural or artificial element is always the possible subject of laughter since it can never attain perfection. Thus, we would be left with the deity as the only object against which laughter might not possibly be directed. Bergson is presupposing the

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possibility for the existence of an advantaged position from which imperfection can be not only detected, but also corrected. The many limitations of human consciousness render such a position utterly impossible for humanity. Whether this advantaged position belongs to the unconscious, preconscious, or supernatural, laughter thus conceived is a conscious movement towards a moral truth, virtue and goodness. Indeed, Bergson perceives laughter to originate in the spiritual perfection inherent to every human being, thus “this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as though through a glass” (49). To illustrate this moral essential aspect of laughter, Bergson would later analyze repetition as one of the techniques that are used to produce laughter with the example of the Jack-in-the-box. Bergson’s Jack-in-the-box is a game which closely resembles the famous one Freud names as for/da, but it reaches a different conclusion. The Jackin-the-box elicits laughter by virtue of the mechanical repetition that makes the game remind us of mechanical uncontrollable movement in a person. The instinct of intellectual repression in the child makes him push the toy down once and again. However, we might also be wondering whether the real cause of laughter might be the resistance of this mechanical movement (whatever leads it) to repression. In that case it would mean that it is this mechanicism, this movement that Bergson has located in the body as opposed to the soul, the happiness of liberation from those very moral rules that were supposed to cause laughter, what actually allows for it. This explanation of laughter would be closer to Bakhtin’s bodily lower stratum principle, to which we will return below. Though morally centered, Bergson is still quite close to what we consider to be one of the essential truths about laughter in his idea of repression. This truth is the idea that the possibility to confine laughter within certain limits produces its effect, that its repression makes this effect possible, that it is nothing but “a game, a game that imitates life” (68-9), the truth hiding behind laughter, as Lucian

Laughing

believes it, being “not pleasant to the ear […] blurts out downright remarks, and offends people” (Chapman 93). This idea of repression as an essential element of laughter is also present in Freud’s analysis of laughter entitled Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, first published in 1905. The same as in dreams, Freud sees jokes as a release of repressed energy, but contrary to Bergson, he locates pleasure in the act of circumventing censorship, not in the repressive movement itself. As Freud himself explains: “Reason, critical judgment, suppressionthese are the forces against which it fights in succession, it holds fast to the original sources of verbal pleasure and, from the stage of the jest onwards, opens new sources of pleasure for itself by lifting inhibitions” (169). The day’s residues and repressed wish fantasies fall into the space of the unconscious and accumulate, creating a source of energy and tension whose release is pleasurable. Laughter is, for Freud, the direct consequence or outer manifestation of that pleasure. These residues, lying outside the scope of consciousness, would spring out in random order, in some chaotic way that must be disguised in conscious forms to pass censorship. To illustrate this, Freud would give the example of a true or repressed subconscious idea that finds its way out to consciousness by means of similitude in its verbal expression with another form that the conscious would let go unrepressed. Such is the case of someone who would want to express an idea about Schweinerei ‘filthiness’ but attempted to express it more tactfully by using the expression zum Vorschein ‘appear’ and would finally say zum Vorschwein. The main difference between this example, which Freud considers as a slip of the tongue and a proper joke, is that the joke is meant to release the repressed energy, while the slip of the tongue is not, which does not make the latter any less amusing. These disguises used by jokes to pass censorship are not restricted merely to word similarity but might also extend to any logical organization or behavior. This can be seen in the example of the man who —after being accused of having borrowed a kettle and returned it with a hole— would answer with the triple excuse that he had

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returned the kettle undamaged, that it was already broken when he borrowed it, and finally, that he did not borrow it at all. Each argument is perfectly valid on its own, while invalidated by being posed next to the others. In this case, the apparent nonsense that comes out of the repressed shows the intention of avoiding responsibility. Therefore, we can see how obvious nonsense might lead to the disclosure of some truth. These examples reveal nothing less than the existence of a certain “method in its madness,”3 (Bakhtin 2) which leads us directly to question whether it is either in the release of repressed residual energy or in its disguising that pleasure resides. Following Freud’s theories, we should believe that pleasure is intensified only by partial satisfaction of desire, since a complete satisfaction would lead to a state of calmness that seems to be completely devoid of pleasure. The disguises4 used by the forces of the unconscious represent a certain form of repression, since they do not allow for these repressed residues to come out overtly or completely, but only under the assumption that they belong to the conscious. It is in this sense that the disguise acts as a regulating repressive force that allows for maintaining a high level of pleasure. That for Freud laughter is the momentary submission to the pleasure principle might not only be understood in the sense that the surprise factor is essential to the joke upon the risk of the intention being recognized before passing censorship. 3

The idea of method in the madness is, of course, not Bakhtin’s. There are references to such concept all along the history of literature and philosophy. Like Polonious would aside of his lord Hamlet: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” (II, 2, 211-2) This particularity of jokes remarked by Freud can be confronted with Chapman’s assertion that it is pretension of philosophical discourses what induces scoffers to mock them. In a certain way, it is philosophical discourse–we should read “dogmatic” in the Bakhtinian sense–and its assumption of truthfulness what would be revealed as mere pretension by exaggerating the forms of pretension that jokes use as a disguise of the unconscious to pass censorship. The result should not be considered a nihilistic approach of truth, but only the realization that this truth depends on subjective conditions.