Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media. (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur Neueren Germanistik)

Gender and Laughter Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media

Herausgegeben von

Norbert Otto Eke Martha B. Helfer Gerhard P. Knapp Gerd Labroisse

70

2009

Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik

Gender and Laughter Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media

Edited by Gaby Pailer, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Die 1972 gegründete Reihe erscheint seit 1977 in zwangloser Folge in der Form von Thema-Bänden mit jeweils verantwortlichem Herausgeber. Reihen-Herausgeber: Prof. Dr. Norbert Otto Eke Universität Paderborn Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Warburger Str. 100, D - 33098 Paderborn, Deutschland, E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Martha B. Helfer Rutgers University 172 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Tel.: (732) 932-7201, Fax: (732) 932-1111, E-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Gerhard P. Knapp University of Utah Dept. of Languages & Literature, 255 S. Central Campus Dr. Rm. 1400 Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Gerd Labroisse Sylter Str. 13A, 14199 Berlin, Deutschland Tel./Fax: (49)30 89724235 E-Mail: [email protected]

Cover Image: watercolour by Charlotte Litzenburger All titles in the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik (from 1999 onwards) are available online: See www.rodopi.nl Electronic access is included in print subscriptions. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2672-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2673-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents Gaby Pailer: Introduction I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings Stefan Horlacher: A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter Andreas Böhn: Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic? II. Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration Jessica Hamann: “Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”: Laughter, Blush, and Gender Roles in Gottfried Keller’s Novella Cycle A Formula for Love. The Epigram (1881) Beth Pentney: “A comic turn, turned serious”: Humour, Body Modification, and the Natural in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil Raluca Cernahoschi: “From now on, I am Carmen”: Imagining Cross-Dressing as Comic Protest in the Life and Work of Romanian-German Author Franz Hodjak Ulrich Scheck: Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Humour and Gender Crossing in Star Trek’s Voyager and Enterprise Markus Hallensleben: “To be educated is to become a Harlequin”: Cross-Skinning as Carnivalesque Hybridity in Michel Serres, Hannah Höch’s Dada, and Orlan’s Body Art III. Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender, and the Comic Gaby Pailer: Multi-Layered Conflicts with the Norm: Gender and Cultural Diversity in Two Comedies of the German Enlightenment Sabine Wilke: Indigenous Laughter: The Voice of the Other in Tales from the “South Seas” Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza: Subverting the Pantragic Heroine: Nestroy against Hebbel Jakub Kazecki: Black and White in Color or Black Victory? The Comic Effect of Displacement in the Film Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976) by Jean-Jacques Annaud

7 15 17 49 65

67

81

93 103

119 139

141 155 169

187

6 Karin Lornsen: The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn IV. Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio, Television, and Cinema Andreas Seidler: Moral Ideal and Physical Desire: Gender Roles, Sex, and Comic Elements in the Rococo Tales of Christoph Martin Wieland Birte Giesler: Social Satire, Literary Parody, and Gender Critique in French and German Fairy Tales of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger Ellie Kennedy: “But I’m a Lady!” Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy Peter Stear: Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy Christine Mielke: Couples and Friends: Comic Strategies and Social Structures in German and American Comedy Series Frank Degler: Affirmative Humour in Bully Herbig’s Parody of Star Wars/Star Trek: (T)Raumschiff Surprise V. Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art Susanne Bach: May I Laugh about Women’s Lib? or: The Difficult Relationship of Humour and Feminism in Margaret Atwood, Caryl Churchill, and Helen Fielding Stefan Börnchen: Aletheia as Striptease: Gendered Allegories of Truth in Heidegger, Gorgias, and Barthes Volker Helbig: Judith Butler and the Problem of Adequacy, or: The Epistemological Dimension of Laughter Caroline L. Rieger: Comparing Same-Gender and Opposite-Gender Conversations: a Laughing Matter? Oliver C. Speck: The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada List of Contributors

201 219

221

233 251 269 285 297 313

315 329 347 355 371 383

Gaby Pailer

Introduction “Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic in Literature, Theatre, and Modern Media: Chances and Limits” was the rather stern heading of what was to become a pleasurable three-year collaborative research programme. Dealing with the crossroads of gender, laughter, and media from a multitude of theoretical and practical perspectives, researchers involved would soon label it more succinctly the “Gender – Laughter – Media” project. This volume documents the refined results of the respective series of workshops and final conference held in Germany and Canada from the spring of 2004 to the fall of 2006. The point of departure was the observation of a remarkable intersection between gender theories and theories of laughter, the comic, and comedy: in both areas the question of physicality for shaping or expressing identity is a major issue, and in both fields critics claim the subversive potential of bodily acts towards a cultural norm. Yet the results presented in both fields are very different, and the overlap has only rarely been considered in groundbreaking research. Therefore the research programme aimed to address both the overlapping issues and differing results by focusing on a wide range of traditional and modern media in western societies of the last 250 years. Among other issues literature deals with the shaping of gender identity through ‘intertextuality’, or ‘citational’ acts; visual media transform this procedure into scenic presentations, or ‘performative’ acts. If we look at the intersections with theories of gender and laughter, crucial questions arise, for example: How can gender identities, their performance and perception, be influenced and shaped by comic genres and strategies? What impact does the communicative function of laughter have on the traditional binary view of gender roles in textual and visual media? Which possibilities and limitations in changing heterosexual norms does one encounter in various comic paradigms? A brief glance at the theoretical backgrounds concerned – gender, laughter, and media – will help to understand their interrelatedness as conceived in this volume. As to the first aspect, the most widely addressed theorist is Judith Butler, who considers gender identities to be primarily performative, that is, constituted by the recognition, creation, and performance of differing interpretations of the body and physicality. She seeks to expose the heterosexual norm that governs everyday perceptions of gender, and to open new possibilities for imagining gender beyond the dominant paradigms. Referencing Jacques Lacan, she claims that the construction of identity is driven by the imitation or

8 citation of the symbolic order; conversely, as the symbolic originates from individual citational acts, a subversion of the heterosexual norm is possible by citing the law differently “in order to reiterate and co-opt its power” (Butler, Bodies 14) employing satirical, parodistic, and ironic practices. Another theorist, who questions the concept of ‘nature’ and the primordial binary sexual categories as naturally given, is Donna Haraway. With her works about contemporary constructions of bodies and genders in the context of bio-medicine she also refers to the aspect of construction in research itself and claims that the same as scholars in the humanities and arts, scientists should be aware that they are producing ‘narratives’ rather than finding the truth about human ‘nature’ (Haraway, Primate Visions). Yet, in general, gender theorists do not tend to see the claims of comedy and laughter as a major opportunity of subversion. Of course, studies on several genres in different national cultures have analysed various comic models (for example the following monographs and essay collections: Little; Lowe; Sochen; Finney; Rowe; Hengen; Walker; Chirico; Uecker), but most of the existing studies tend to set aside the positive impact of laughter for understanding physicality and social relations. When it comes to gender issues, the basic claim of “subversive laughter” through comedy (cf. Jenkins) is often already questioned in titles such as A very serious thing, women’s humor (Jochum), or That’s not funny, that’s sick (Hurst). As for the second cornerstone of our approach, the interrelatedness of laughter, the comic, and comedy deserves consideration. Laughter is one of the most fascinating human functions, a non-verbal, bodily response to a conflict of perception as well as a discharge or relief that acts as a satisfactory solution for the subject who experiences such a perceptual conflict. The anthropological, physiological, psychological, and social experiences of laughter and the comic play significant roles in the relation between the ‘nature’ and the ‘culture’ of human beings. The comic appears in the everyday world as the failure or breakdown of an event that is met with laughter (Stierle). It can also be used deliberately, either to smooth over differences or to exacerbate them, in order, for example, to reassert hierarchical distinctions within groups, to exclude others, or to undermine hierarchical relations and their presumptions. It can be an instrument of discrimination, or of ridicule and humiliation, or of celebration, appreciation, and recognition (Greiner). To be sure, theories of laughter and the comic have a long tradition. The causes and forms of laughter have been studied extensively from different points of view. Prominent theories (for example: Freud; Bergson; Bakhtin; Plessner) have influenced more than a century of research. By contrast, the functions of laughter and the comic in constructing or undermining gender identities have only recently been considered (for example: Jochum; O’Neal; Gilbert; Furman). And there have been team approaches such as an interdisciplinary research programme at the University of Konstanz (Germany) which included anthropological, psychological, and sociological perspectives (cf. Kotthof).

9 The performance aspect is what links gender and laughter to the third field of our approach, media in their various traditional and modern forms. In literature, theatre, radio, and film, types of comedy derive from performative acts and the intention to provoke the kind of surprise that ends in laughter. These kinds of laughter – laughing or sympathizing with people in contrast to ridiculing or laughing at them – depends on the manners and kinds of comic figures presented (Jauß). Similarly, there are at least two kinds of comedy that involve the subjugation of the body under a cultural or societal norm, implying either the subversion or the affirmation of existing socio-cultural structures (Greiner). In addition to the theatre as the classical medium for comedy, we encouraged the scholars in our programme to consider other genres of literary writing, such as, for example, the picaresque novel or verse narratives. Above all, newer media such as film, and television were analysed for their comic functions. It is noteworthy that media in this context are not just ‘vehicles’ to transport funny contents, but provide a specific frame for the production of the comic itself. Physicality as a comic-producing dimension appears in literature completely different than in a scenic presentation. Modern visual media offer a variety of possibilities to visualize and transform different aspects of the body such as, for example, movement or voice. For the purposes of our project, we asked all participants to focus on the performance aspects of gender and their potential power of subversion specifically from the perspective of the comic import; conversely, laughter, or the production and reception of comedy, satire, and irony, was intended to be analysed primarily from a gender perspective. In regard to the intersection among gender theories and theories of laughter and the comic, a leading question was how the heterosexual norm gender theorists seek to subvert is comparable to the societal norm that is subverted or affirmed in different forms of comedy. Another aspect concerns the gendered organization of social, political, and familial groups and the question of how gender is marked by different forms of laughter. In social interaction, laughter often works as an instrument of power: superiors only rarely make fun of themselves, whereas employees tend to make themselves a target of laughter (Laub Coser). Gender plays a significant role in such processes, since women and men seem to joke and laugh in very different ways (Kotthof). Hence, the research would also ask: How do the respective participants of different groups respond to given norms, and how can these norms be influenced by humour? Or, on another level: What implied gender bias or acceptance of the heterosexual norm is there in theories that claim to be objective in their concept of human ‘nature’? How are these normative discourses of ‘culture’ versus ‘nature’ employed for the fictional display of laughter? This leads finally to the aspect of cultural diversity, with acts of joking and laughing as means of ethnic group solidarity or rejection. One part of the research thus reflected on the different roles of cultural history and intercultural relations.

10 The research programme included investigations on traditional and modern media from western cultures (Germany, England, France, Spain, USA, Canada) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Important aspects to focus on were, for example, the transformation of comic materials from the stage into film, or the study of certain motifs – such as cross-dressing and gender bending – in their historical and cross-cultural transformation in different media. More synchronic studies would investigate the differences between modern media in their treatment of relations between gender aspects and the comic. With this bundle of questions we opened up a series of meetings, in which several teams of scholars reflected on aspects such as the multiple forms of gender transformation in different media, the relation of gender and laughter in the context of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and the subversive power of laughter and the comic in regard to comic genres and strategies. Three workshops were held at German and Canadian venues in 2004 and 2005, concluded by a conference in 2006. The opening workshop in Bronnbach, Germany (May 2004) focused on the multiple forms of cross-dressing and gender transformation. The contributions concerned textual and medial forms of gender bending and the change of sexual orientation, including the cultural and historical complexes of clothing, fashion, and transvestism. The symbolic constructions of identity were discussed, as well as the emergence of ‘artificial’ human beings and their – possibly ‘new’ – gender concepts. The second workshop in Vancouver, held in August the same year, concentrated on gender identities, cultural diversity, and intercultural relations. The group of researchers reflected on the traditional view of two ‘genders’ as two ‘cultures’ within a heteronormative framework of thinking and connected this question with post-colonial approaches to ethnicity, hybridity, and national stereotypes. The third workshop in Kingston, Ontario (August 2005) dealt with comic genres and strategies and the apparently more dominant resistance to innovative gender concepts within various genres and media. The participants presented diachronic and synchronic studies of traditional and modern genres and media, as well as comparative studies of related genres and media in North America and Europe, for example film comedies and TV series. The programme was concluded by an international conference at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C., in August 2006. The format of these meetings was intended to allow for team research and peer-mentoring, with groups of approximately 20 participants, senior and junior scholars from North America and Europe. All participants of the individual workshops were asked to submit their contribution in writing two months prior to the meetings in order to circulate them to the entire group. This turned out to be a successful strategy in order to enhance discussions and to create a forum for communicating the ongoing research and developing results. The original workshop contributions with abstracts and minutes of deliberations are posted on the website of the research programme, whereas the 23 articles selected for

11 this research anthology are all revised or extended versions of former contributions. Since the collaborative approach enhanced the opportunity to include various initially unexpected subject matters and arguments, the editors of this volume did not wish to narrow down the thematic scope by focusing too closely on the original workshop topics. The articles were therefore arranged in a slightly different form in five thematic sections. The opening section, Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings, presents two survey chapters, based on keynote lectures at previous meetings. Stefan Horlacher presents a philosophical-historical survey establishing a nexus between gender, laughter, and media, and demonstrating the complexity of the question to what extent laughter can be considered a liberating social and bodily means. Andreas Böhn contributes a systematical approach. Based on examples of modern film productions, he investigates the possibility of subversion in gender roles as related to changing modes of cultural norms in modern societies. The second section, Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration, explores the multiple forms of irritating stereotypical gender perceptions and their comic impact. The first two contributions investigate works of literature in German and English. While Jessica Hamann focuses on the role of body language in narratives of Swiss Realism, Beth Pentney investigates beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm in a contemporary novel by Fay Weldon. Two further papers explore acts of gender bending as acts of cross-dressing and beyond in different contexts: Raluca Cernahoschi reflects on a unique act of transvestism as a famous opera figure, Bizet’s Carmen, by Romanian-German author Franz Hodjak, an episode, which he later transformed into the medium of the novel. Ulrich Scheck investigates the potentially subversive gender role changes in the imaginary spatial environment of Star Trek; Markus Hallensleben examines processes of ‘cross-skinning’ as statements on race, class, and gender in modern bio-art by performers such as Orlan. The essays in the third section, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender and the Comic, explore aspects of (post-)colonialism and multiculturalism as related to gender and laughter. The first chapter establishes a nexus between gender, the comic, and postcolonial discourse and investigates German 18th century comedies that deal with cross-national and cross-religious encounters (Gaby Pailer), followed by Sabine Wilke’s analysis and discussion of early contact narratives between Polynesians and Europeans in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century and their depictions of ‘native laughter’. The tragedy of the ancient Jewish heroine Judith and its parody – as a struggle between 19th century dramatists Hebbel and Nestroy – comes into view in Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza’s paper; Jakub Kazecki treats encounters between French and German colonists in Africa during WWI as parodied in the medium of film.

12 Karin Lornsen explores the city as a stage of Turkish-German encounters in contemporary German narrative prose. The fourth section, Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio, Television, and Cinema, focuses on literary and media genres and the question of affirmation or subversion of the comic with respect to different national cultures. The first two papers focus on German and French 18th century literature. Andreas Seidler treats conflicts between intellect and sensibility as a source of comic situations in texts by German Enlightenment author Christoph Martin Wieland; Birte Giesler compares the ridiculing of gender identity formation in French and German fairytales by Friederike Helene Unger and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Two further chapters explore contemporary British radio comedies (Ellie Kennedy) and television series (Peter Stear), followed by a comparative study of German and US-American sitcoms (Christine Mielke). The final chapter deals with the Star Trek/Star Wars parodies by the German film director Bully Herbig (Frank Degler). Section five, Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art, approaches the gender-laughter interrelationship by looking at the different comic strategies in fictional, philosophical, artistic or real life communication: It starts with Susanne Bach’s considerations of the affirmative or subversive impact of English literary texts that poke fun at feminism. Stefan Börnchen investigates the comic impact of gendered allegories of truth in western philosophy, and Volker Helbig re-examines the notions of subversive laughter as claimed in Judith Butler’s gender theory. Caroline L. Rieger contributes an approach from applied linguistics on gender aspects of laughter in everyday conversations. The section concludes with a discussion of the event art form of Dadaism and its humorous strategies (Oliver C. Speck). It was a pleasure to develop and conduct this programme over the period of three years in cooperation with Andreas Böhn (University of Karlsruhe), Stefan Horlacher (University of Dresden), and Ulrich Scheck (Thompson Rivers University). I would especially like to acknowledge the work of all research assistants involved on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Frank Degler (University of Mannheim) co-organized the workshops in Bronnbach, Germany, and Kingston, Ontario; Raluca Cernahoschi (UBC Vancouver) co-organized the one in Vancouver, and Peter Stear (University of Dresden) helped with the editing and proofreading of some of the contributions. I would also like to thank the administrative staff of Ulrich Scheck at both Queen’s University and Thompson Rivers University. Following the first workshop we posted a project website created by Jakub Kazecki with the assistance of Sonja Bichsel and, later-on, Jamie Lee. As for the preparation of this research anthology for print, I cannot be thankful enough to my research assistant Melissa Kerr (UBC Vancouver) for her work of proofreading and editing the whole manuscript. Our special thanks go to Charlotte Litzenburger who provided us with her art

13 work for workshop and conference posters, our website, as well as for the cover of this volume. Research programmes of this format are not possible without the financial assistance of major research funding institutions. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, who provided a three-year Standard Research Grant, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), who was gracious in granting substantial travel support as a matching fund from the German side. Finally, all major collaborators of this research programme would like to thank their institutions for the support received in order to conduct and successfully complete this research programme. Vancouver, August 2008

Works Consulted Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich: Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur. Trans. by Alexander Kaempfe. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1990. Bergson, Henri: Das Lachen. Ein Essay über die Bedeutung des Komischen. Zürich: Arche 1972. Butler, Judith: Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York – London: Routledge 1993. —: Gender Trouble. New York, London: Routledge 1990. Chirico, Miriam M.: Female Laughter and Comic Possibilities. Uncommon Women and Others. In: Modern Dramatists. A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. Ed. King Kimball. New York: Routledge 2001. Pp. 339–359. Finney, Gail (Ed.): Look Who’s Laughing. Gender and Comedy. Langhorne: Gordon and Breach 1994. Freud, Sigmund: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1992. Furman, Suzanne Nay: Exploration of gender, attitudes toward women, and anger in perceptions of gender-typed humor. Ph.D. Thesis. University of South Florida 1995. Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic in Literature, Theatre, and Modern Media. Project webpage by Jakub Kazecki. ⬍http://www.cenes.ubc.ca ⬎. Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992. Haraway/Donna: Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge 1989. —. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge 1991. Hengen, Shannon (Ed.): Performing Gender and Comedy. Theories, Texts and Contexts. Williston (VT): Gordon and Breach 1998.

14 Hurst, Raymond: That’s not Funny, that’s Sick. Humor, Leadership and Gender. La Verne: University of La Verne Press 2000. Jauß, Hans Robert: Über den Grund des Vergnügens am komischen Helden. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 103–132. Jenkins, Ronald Scott: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: Free Press et. al. 1994. Jochum, Petra-Angelika: A Very Serious Thing, Women’s Humor. Gender Differences in the Production and Appreciation of Humor. Ph.D. Thesis. West Virginia University 1990. Kotthoff, Helga (Ed.): Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz 1996. Laub Coser, Rose: Lachen in der Fakultät. In: Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern. Ed. by Helga Kotthoff. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag 1996. Pp. 97–120. Little, Judy: Comedy and the Woman Writer. Woolf, Spark, and Feminism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1983. —. Humoring the Sentence. Women’s Dialogic Comedy. In: Women’s Comic Visions. Ed. by June Sochen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991. Pp. 19–32. Lowe, Mary Leah: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Wedding. Gender Ideology and Narrative Structure in Romantic Comedy. Ph.D. Thesis. Florida State University 2001. O’Neal, Beverly S.: Gender and Humor Elicitation. How Males and Females Elaborate Offensive Humor. Jefferson City: Carson-Newman College 1993. Plessner, Helmut: Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens. Arnheim: Leo Lehnen 1941. Rowe, Kathleen: The Unruly Women. Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press 1995. Sochen, June (Ed.): Women’s Comic Visions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991. Stierle, Karlheinz: Komik der Handlung, Komik der Sprachhandlung, Komik der Komödie. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 237–268. Uecker, Karin: Hat das Lachen ein Geschlecht? Zur Charakteristik von komischen weiblichen Figuren in Theaterstücken zeitgenössischer Autorinnen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2002. Walker, Nancy A.: What’s so Funny? Humor in American Culture. Wilmington (DW): Scholarly Resources Inc. 1998.

I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings

Stefan Horlacher

A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter Establishing a decisive nexus between gender, laughter, and media, this article not only critically discusses the often contradictorily defined concepts of humour, the comic, and laughter but also introduces to the most important theories in these fields with reference to Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Helmuth Plessner, Anton C. Zijderveld, Judith Butler, Bernhard Greiner, Hans Robert Jauß, Peter L. Berger, and others. Basic concepts such as the “significantly comic” versus the “absolutely comic” or the “comedy of denigration and exclusion” versus the “comedy of valorization and inclusion” are interrogated and the link between comedy, citationality, performativity as well as parody is established. Moreover, this article explores the sociological, psychoanalytical, bodily and theological dimensions to laughter and questions notions such as the carnivalesque and the grotesque. It is argued that the liberating potential of “full laughter” can be understood as the return of the body, of the repressed, and of the Other, and that if it is precisely this ‘other realm’ which ultimately makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is humankind’s best means of dealing with it. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; [. . .] laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians. [. . .] Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil [. . .]. Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God.1

Gender – Laughter – Media For more than three years, the Canadian-German research project and conference series “Gender – Laughter – Media” has concentrated on how humour, the comic, and laughter question, subvert, criticize, ‘correct’ but also strengthen and affirm gender identities and gender norms. By doing so, “Gender – Laughter – Media” has related the vast territory of laughter – which oscillates between valorisation and denigration, inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and subversion, and extends to the grotesque, the ludicrous, nonsense2, and the plainly silly – to gender identities and their representation and construction across various media. That there is indeed a decisive nexus between gender, 1

Jorge of Burgos (Eco 474f.). For a more detailed discussion of nonsense and of linguistic manifestations of humour such as spoonerisms and puns cf. Stemmler and Horlacher; Horlacher, Nonsense; Zijdeveld, Trend Report 10–12. For a discussion of laughter and comedy in Anglophone postcolonial literatures and cultures cf. Reichl and Stein. 2

18 laughter, and media has, at least partly, been observed by Manfred Pfister in his History of English Laughter, where he argues that one “of the main incentives or targets of laughter has, indeed, been the sexual sphere, and, in particular, female sexuality”, and that “gender roles, relations and hierarchies – and, in particular, their transgressions! – have proved the common laughing stock of cultures otherwise far apart from each other” (Pfister vi). Analysing the possible subversion or affirmation of gender identities through humour, the comic, and laughter becomes even more relevant if we consider Sigmund Freud’s line of argument that we “are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke”, so that we “are no longer inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure” (162). From this it follows that to “perceive a situation as humorous causes it to appear less discriminatory, and more acceptable” (Bill and Naus 659). But if sexism “disguised by and delivered through humor” is potentially interpreted “as being harmless and innocent” (646), and thus tends to escape criticism altogether, if “[p]erceiving and labeling an incident as humorous appears to diminish its sexist content” (660), this only increases the necessity for a critical analysis of the “comic mode” (Lodge 170) with special attention to its ability to hide patriarchal, sexist, and even misogynist tendencies in literature, plays, films, and other media. As a matter of fact, a study of the medial creation and representation of laughter should enable us to “reveal the fault lines of the anxieties and the social pressures at work at any given historical moment” (Pfister vii) and in any culture or society we choose to analyse. For such a study, the literary, auditory, theatrical, and televisual, or cinematic representations of laughter have the advantage of revealing these points of contention and debate even more clearly than actual laughter does since they allow us to analyse “the symbolic systems of representations” – that is “culture as first, second and higher order systems of signs”3 – rather than the social reality they represent and to include the diachronic, historical dimension as well as the anticipatory power of art conceived of as a savoir littéraire in the broadest sense (Horlacher, Literatur). Art is thereby considered as a special sign system which, notwithstanding its historical imprint, transcends any narrow notion of mimesis that would reduce it to a mirror or a simple image of reality. Whatever the medium of artistic expression, be it literary texts, radio plays, theatre, film, body art, or other performances, all of these art-forms are a central part of that “larger symbolic 3 Pfister vii. Any ‘history of laughter’ – just as any ‘history of sexuality’ – “can only be the history of social discourses, representations, performances and practices through which cultural processing of laughter is effectuated”. A history of laughter is then the history of the – often conflicting – norms giving social shape to and circumscribing “the anthropological impulse of laughter in a particular society” (Pfister v).

19 order by which a culture imagines its relation to the conditions of its existence” (Matus 5). Notwithstanding their medial form, imaginative ‘texts’ “are able to ‘mobilize fantasies without legislating action,’ and can constitute a space in which shared anxieties and tensions are articulated and symbolically addressed” (ibid. 7). They not only represent the laughter of a particular society but simultaneously give shape to it, analyse and frequently problematize it (cf. Pfister). Moreover, these texts, or works of art, are especially rewarding objects of analysis since they have the ability to articulate impressions, intuitions, mentalities, and pre-scientific forms of knowledge long before – if ever – they reach the status of the collective consciousness (Horlacher, Daniel Martin); they are forms of knowledge which cannot be articulated or even conceived of outside the realm of art because this is exactly the space where – analogous to dreams – the borders of (self-)censorship are potentially lowered and the unthinkable, the liminal, the forbidden, and the experimental, in the sense of Raymond Ruyer’s utopian mode (mode utopique), can be articulated. The different forms of art analysed in this volume all have the potential to create a simultaneity of the unsimultaneous, of the clearly possible and the barely conceivable, of the officially sanctioned and the expressly forbidden. Their unique potential rests in their capacity to render the possible worlds or realities they create ‘real’ in the sense of liveable (that is able to be experienced, tested and criticized), so that they can be understood as a privileged space where the important work on a cultural imaginary takes place (cf. Fluck 7–29).

The Quixotic Interrelatedness of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter While Mikhail Bakhtin argues that “[l]aughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth” that “cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils” (94), Georges Minois contends that “[l]e rire est une affaire trop sérieuse pour être laissée aux comiques” (9) (“[l]aughter is far too serious to be left to comedians”). These contradictory statements raise the question of how far it is possible, or even desirable, to write seriously (not to say dry-as-dust à la Sir Walter Scott) about laughter (cf. Kuschel 11), and how far it is reasonable to expect that “after having thoroughly examined the structure of comic experience” one can with a serious demeanour “declare to the world what it is” (Berger xv). Laughter is evanescent, negates differences, and harbours paradoxical traits. The problems for analysis arising from this are well documented in scholarly literature: “How many jokes”, Peter L. Berger asks, “could survive treatment by philosophers?” (xiv). And if the comic experience is fragile and inherently fleeting, if laughter is volatile, “an ephemeral performance, not a lasting text or monument”, if laughter “vanishes with the situation that occasioned it” (Pfister vii), how can it be taken apart or held up for scrutiny? That there is no simple

20 answer becomes obvious if one takes a look at Minois’s impressive Histoire du rire et de la dérision and his reference to Edmund Bergler’s Laughter and the Sense of Humour, where already in 1956 Bergler listed more than 80 theories of laughter. Although philosophical theories of laughter may explain different and complimentary aspects of laughter, and despite this list having become much longer by now, none of these theories really manages to comprehensively explain the phenomenon of laughter. One of the reasons for this may well reside in the fact that the term “laughter” comprises many different and contradictory realities, that in analogy to Jacques Lacan’s famous “THE woman does not exist” (Il n’y a pas La femme), THE laughter does not exist either: “Le rire n’existe pas” (Minois 484; cf. Pfister v). THE laughter is an illusion since there are always only endlessly proliferating forms of laughter, their only point in common being their physical manifestation; however, a physical manifestation that can stand for a whole variety of feelings, ideas, and intentions (Minois 484), that has a historically and culturally variable and instable significance, and therefore needs interpretation. Moreover, [f]ür das Lachen ist [. . .] keine Wissenschaft zuständig; es entzieht sich jedem bestimmenden Zugriff. Die Vorstellung eines objektiv erkannten Lachens wäre lächerlich; sie verfehlt das Lachen, indem sie es zu einem Gegenstand der Erkenntnis macht. Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Lachen, Philosophie und Wissenschaft scheint unaufhebbar (Kamper and Wulf 9). [there is n]o single academic discipline [. . .] expressly devoted to the study of laughter; it exceeds any attempt at precise definition. The idea of an objectively definable notion of laughter is risible; it misses the point of laughter by making laughter an object of knowledge. The relationship of tension between laughter, philosophy and science appears to be irresolvable.4

More recently, Renate Brosch has also argued that until “today no transhistorical cause for laughter, no transhistorical definition for a joke has been found” (158). If one of the main problems seems to be the ‘nature’ of the object of analysis itself, another problem is that in scholarly literature about humour, the comic, and laughter these terms are either used without clear definitions or the definitions given are contradictory. It seems that what one scholar calls humour, another defines as belonging to the comic. The problems arising from this for the “Gender – Laughter – Media” project as well as for this introduction are obvious: On the one hand, no serious survey of theories of humour, the comic, and laughter can work without defining these concepts or phenomena; on the other hand, it makes no sense to simply impose new definitions and – by 4

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. All emphases in citations are according to the original. I would like to thank Dr. Sigrun Meinig, Claudia Lainka MA, and Peter Stear MA for their editorial help and for the stimulating and rewarding discussions.

21 doing so – to create, in all likelihood, yet more artificial categories that cut across the multiplicity of notions and concepts already available to literary theorists, social scientists, and philosophers. For this reason I shall not endeavour to (re-)structure or (re-)categorize the relevant theories of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Anton C. Zijderveld only to then ascertain that there is a mutual incompatibility between these theories since each of them works with slightly different internal differentiations between the terms in question so that sometimes the terms humour, the comic, and laughter even appear interchangeable (cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 2; Titze et al. 201). I shall instead adhere to a primarily but not exclusively descriptive approach, in other words, a tour d’horizon of a selection of the most relevant studies on humour, the comic, and laughter as well as of the multifarious definitions – and problems – they advance.5 Mahadev L. Apte ascribes in his book on Humor and Laughter the following three attributes to humour: “1) sources that act as potential stimuli; 2) the cognitive and intellectual activity responsible for the perception and evaluation of these sources leading to humor experience; and 3) behavioral responses that are expressed as smiling or laughter or both” (13f). Apte has to concede, however, that the term ‘humor’ and other expressions derived from it have been used to refer to all three phases or to any one of them. [. . .] Similarly, meanings of ‘humor’ include the behavioral responses of smiling or laughter. For many scholars the term ‘laughter’ is synonymous with the term ‘humor’ [. . .], and the phrase ‘theories of laughter’ often means theories of humor (14).

Bernhard Greiner argues along similar lines when he states that “[s]ystematischer Aufarbeitung hat sich die Komödie bisher verschlossen. Hierzu bedürfte es eines integrierenden Blickpunktes, an dem es offenbar gebricht” (Greiner 3) (“comedy has up to now evaded systematic research because no integrative perspective has yet been found”) and that the situation is even more problematic if one takes a look at theories of humour or of the comic: Auch aus der Komik-Theorie wurde ein übergreifender Blickpunkt nicht gewonnen. Das mag in dem eigenartigen Mißverständnis gründen zwischen hochkomplizierten, zugleich autistischen Entwürfen auf der einen Seite, die frühere oder gleichzeitige Theoriebildung nur marginal zur Kenntnis nehmen, und einem letztlich doch nur 5

This approach accords with Georges Minois (11) who argues that it is always too early or too late to try to elaborate a synthesis of the major theories of humour, the comic, and laughter. Therefore I can only ask the reader not to take this essay for more than it is, namely a selective and necessarily incomplete introduction and not a rigorous synthesis or re-conceptualization.

22 verbrämten Fortschreiben der schon immer herausgehobenen Dichotomie zweier Grundformen des Komischen, einer Komik der Herabsetzung, des Ver-Lachens, als intellektuelles Phänomen und einer Komik der Heraufsetzung, des Bejahens von Unterdrücktem und Verdrängtem und damit der Anerkennung des Lustprinzips (3). An overarching perspective could not be gleaned from comedy theory either. This may arise from the peculiar misunderstanding between, on the one hand, the highly complicated and at the same time autistic designs that refer to earlier or contemporary theory formations only marginally and, in the final analysis, a scarcely veiled continuation of an always already emphasized dichotomy of two basic forms of the comic: a comedy of denigration and exclusion, of laughing at, as an intellectual phenomenon, and a comedy of valorization and inclusion, of celebrating the oppressed and the repressed, and thereby of accepting the pleasure principle.

The pleasure principle takes us, of course, directly to Freud, who discusses the phenomena in question in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious as well as in a short article published in 1928 in Imago. Freud advances the following definition: We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity (Freud 293).6

Peter L. Berger, to continue our survey, defines humour as “the capacity to perceive something as being funny”. He calls humour universal and argues that “there has been no human culture without it” since humour is “a necessary constituent of humanity” (ibid. x; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 37f.; Titze et al. 201). What we have to be aware of, however, is the fact that “what strikes people as funny and what they do in order to provoke a humorous response differs enormously from age to age, and from society to society” (Berger x). Thus, humour is both an anthropological constant and historically relative. “Yet, beyond or behind all the relativities, there is [. . .] something that humor”, understood as an inherent human trait or ability, “is believed to perceive” (ibid.). This “something” is, if we follow Berger, the phenomenon of the comic. Thus the comic would be “the objective correlate of humor”, and humour would be regarded as a “subjective capacity”. What Berger suggests is a hierarchical structure which consists 1) of the comic which – as he argues – is 6 Cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 39 and 27 for a commentary typical of research on the comic. Among other things, Zijderveld calls Freud’s “distinction among what he called Witz, Humor and Komik [. . .] like most conceptual differentiations concerning humour, quite arbitrary and rather vague”.

23 beyond good and evil, 2) of humour, which can be used for good or evil purposes, and 3) of laughter as the expression of our finding something humorous. For the sociologist Anton C. Zijderveld humour is “something living in something (institutionally) mechanical” (Trend Report 21) and can be considered as “an interaction in which people play with institutionalized meanings within a situation that ought to be defined as being humorous and funny through laughter. In defining the situation as humorous or not, values play a decisive role” (9). Why values are important becomes obvious if we consider that for Zijderveld (Jokes; Trend Report) humour can be defined as playing with the institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated values and norms of a given society. A humorist or a comedian is a homo ludens who engages in cultural juggling: He or she playfully reshuffles the components of the surrounding nomos, turns the established order of opposites such as masculinity and femininity or good and evil around, and inverts traditional hierarchies. By doing so, special attention is paid to the ambiguities and incongruities of the human condition since they form the essence of most verbal and practical jokes. Although the humorist is sometimes a homo homini lupus, stressing the aggressive and derisive dimension of laughter, humorous words, acts, and events normally tend to constitute a mirthful interlude, not a rebellion or revolution that aims at the fundamental change or destruction of the traditional order.7 Another important characteristic of humour for Zijderveld, one that it shares with literature or art in general, is its potential to anticipate knowledge, to create alternative worlds, and to bypass censorship because of its feigned lack of seriousness, because we are not “inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure” (Freud 162). Humour carries an enigmatic quality: it is itself unrealistic and thereby able to demonstrate that reality as we know and live it could well be otherwise; that alternatives, as unreal and absurd as they may seem to be, are not unthinkable. Humour shares this with utopias, and it is up to the audience to decide, by a laughing response, whether a utopia is nothing but a joke (Zijderveld, Trend Report 58).

If humour “is viewed as an emergent property of human interaction”, emerging, as we have seen, “because of the defining work of laughter”, it follows that “[a] situation is defined as humorous by the laughing response that it elicits” (Coser 172). In accordance with this, Zijderveld argues that in a sociological sense laughter is the only appropriate language of humour and is a constitutive component of the humorous situation.8 This emphasis on the importance of laughter, however, leads to our next question, namely: How to define laughter? 7

As Zijderveld argues, destroying the cultural order would for the humorist or homo ludens be equivalent to a child destroying its toys. 8 “[L]aughter is more than a response: it is constitutive of the emerging symbolic interaction” which, if laughter arises, can “be called a humorous incident”. (Zijderveld, Trend Report 34).

24 Throughout history laughter has often been ‘forbidden’ and been regarded as dangerous; laughter is rather unpredictable and the intention to be humorous or funny is neither sufficient to make people laugh nor essential to humour or to the comic.9 Aristotle states in his De Partibus Animalium that man is the “only one of the animals that laughs” (69). In other words, humans are defined by their ability to laugh. Similar opinions are voiced by Rabelais – “Le rire est le propre de l’homme” (cf. Siguret 103) (“laughter is the property of man”) –, Baudelaire – “Laughter is satanic, and, therefore, profoundly human” (117)10 – and Nietzsche: “Das leidendste Tier auf Erden erfand sich – das Lachen” (Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlaß 467) (“The earthly creature that suffered most discovered for itself – laughter”). According to Nietzsche, human beings suffer so intensely that they needed to create laughter in order to survive: “the anxious, crouching creature springs up, greatly expands – man laughs”.11 From this one can conclude that laughter indeed appears to be an anthropological constant and “a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens or, at least, homo risus capax” (Pfister v; Zijderveld, Trend Report 6). Moreover, laughter is certainly more than “a gesture or psychic mechanism. It is [. . .] a human expression, comparable and congenial to crying”, with these two expressions having in common “that they lie on the borderline of the conscious and meaningful on the one hand, and the unconscious and psychical on the other” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 28). For Helmuth Plessner laughter as well as crying reveal “the essence of the conditio humana, which consists in the fact that human beings not only have a body, but at the very same time also are a body” (Plessner; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 28), that they are both physically and psychically determined. This fundamental ‘ambivalence’ is regarded by Plessner as being unique in the cosmos and corroborates his notion of “man’s eccentric position in nature”. In this line of argument, both crying and laughing “are caused by circumstances to which people cannot respond readily and adequately” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 29), such as a sudden event or an unexpected word: We lose our heads, we capitulate as persons, and the body-we-have takes the lead – through laughter, or tears. The body-we-have is now no longer an instrument of mind, language and behaviour. On the contrary, the crying or laughing body has 9

“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear/ Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/ Of him that makes it” (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii. 843–845). On the one hand, there are numerous acts, words and events that are not at all intended to be funny or humorous, and yet are experienced as being so by those who witness it; on the other hand, thinking of stand-up comedians, there are people who – often desperately – try to be funny, yet are perceived not to be so by others. 10 Cf. Siguret 103; Minois 489. 11 Nietzsche, Human, all too Human 89; cf. Minois 474–477; Greiner 106–108.

25 taken command of the mind and expresses what the body-we-are could not express. In this sense, crying and laughing are autonomous expressions, and thus not mere responses to stimuli (ibid.).

As both Bergson and Zijderveld among others have argued, “[l]aughter is always a fait social. This is as true of convivial laughter as of the lonely or even pathological laugh of an alienated individual. Each instance of laughter is inextricably tied up with social and power relations and framed within a social situation” (Pfister, vi) or constellation. Thus there is a triangular relationship between (1) “the ‘laughter-maker’” as the person “who incites laughter by making a joke or drawing attention to some absurdity, (2) the ‘butt of laughter’ as its target or victim, and (3) the ‘laugher(s),’ i.e. the laughing audience” (vi). This social triangle is “constructed along parameters of gender, class, race, age or other crucial differences operative in the respective culture” (Pfister vi; cf. Brosch, 158). Laughter, therefore, functions as an indicator of the tensions and contradictions existing in a given society and enables us to critically analyse social situations and mechanisms. As the bonding effects of laughter, to give but one example, tend to establish rhetorical or discursive communities (Hutcheon; Titze et al. 204), laughter can be seen as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, of valorisation on the one hand and of denigration on the other. Moreover, laughter is often caught up in the distinction between the centre and margin any given society employs to establish and stabilise its identity: in one society, the predominant form of laughter can be that which aims from the site of the ideological or power centre at what is to be marginalised or excluded altogether; in another, the most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins, challenging and subverting the established orthodoxies, authorities and hierarchies (Pfister vi).

However, if many theorists tend to view laughter as a rather one-dimensional phenomenon, namely as a social corrective linked to power, one should mention that there are also other conceptions of laughter such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “full laughter” which is universal, liberating, and revitalizing. For Bakhtin laughter abolishes frontiers, is immune to death, spreads everywhere and covers all aspects of life. It is seen as a dynamic link between our body in the sense of its animal and biological aspects, and our culture in the sense of intellect. Moreover, for Bakhtin laughter entails plurality and ignores interdictions. It is the enemy of censorship and allows mankind to temporarily enter the utopian realm of universality, liberty, equality, and abundance.

Mechanisms of the Comic: Comparison/Exclusion/Denigration – Identification/Inclusion/Valorization – Citationality/Performativity/Parody In attempting to define what makes us laugh, scholars usually refer to Aristotle’s Poetics, where the Greek philosopher states: “For the comic is constituted by a

26 fault and a mark of shame, but lacking in pain or destruction: to take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and misshapen, but does not express pain” (36). Thus, for Aristotle the phenomenon that something makes us laugh is characterized by flaws, distortion, and the absence of pain. This implies a transgression of norms which, however, is only experienced as funny if it does not cause real harm. “[J]e nachdem ob das Komische der Herabsetzung eines heroischen Ideals in eine Gegenbildlichkeit oder ob es der Heraufsetzung des materiell Leiblichen der menschlichen Natur entspringt” (Jauß 104) (“Depending on whether the comedy is intended to denigrate an heroic ideal thereby turning it into its opposite or to celebrate and valorize the bodily of human nature”), Hans Robert Jauß differentiates between two fundamental aspects inherent to the comic; firstly denigration or exclusion (Komik der Herabsetzung und des VerLachens), which works with the help of contrasts and incongruencies (Inkongruenz- und Kontrastkomik); and secondly, valorisation or inclusion (Komik der Heraufsetzung und des Mit-Lachens; cf. Andreas Böhn’s contribution in this volume), which is liberating and has recourse to the grotesque, thereby emphasizing the corporeal and the creaturely. In Greiner’s description: Die Komik der Herabsetzung stellt einen Helden in seiner erwarteten Vollkommenheit, eine Norm in ihrer behaupteten Gültigkeit in Frage. Der komische Held ist dabei nicht an sich selbst komisch, sondern vor einem Horizont bestimmter Erwartungen oder Normen. So ist Komik der Herabsetzung eine der Gegenbildlichkeit, was Vergleichen voraussetzt. [. . .] Die kognitive Funktion der Komik der Gegenbildlichkeit bzw. der Herabsetzung kann so darin erkannt werden, Normen zur Debatte zu stellen, zu verspotten bzw. zu problematisieren, was in destruktiver wie affirmativer Hinsicht geschehen kann. Die Herabsetzung schließt ein, daß der Betrachter, der den komischen Helden an Normen mißt und an diesen als scheiternd erkennt, sich überlegen fühlt. Die Versetzung des Helden in eine komische Situation löst den Bann der admirativen Identifikation und läßt den lachenden Betrachter (als lachenden Dritten gegenüber Subjekt und Objekt der Komik) ein Moment der Überlegenheit und Unbetroffenheit gegenüber dem ihm sonst überlegenen und ihn betroffen machenden Helden genießen (97). The comedy of exclusion or denigration questions the assumed perfection of a hero, the presumed validity of a norm. The comic hero is thus not funny in himself, rather he is so against a horizon of set expectations and norms. The comedy of exclusion or denigration is as such representation by contrast, which presupposes the act of comparison. [. . .] The cognitive function of comedy based on contrastive representation, i.e. denigration, can be ascertained in that it opens up norms to debate, mocks or problematizes them: an act that can be destructive or affirmative. Denigration includes the fact that the viewer, who judges the comic hero against norms and views him to have failed with regard to these, feels himself superior. By placing the hero in a comic situation, the spell of identification through admiration is broken and allows the laughing viewer (as the laughing third party in contrast to the subject and the object of comedy) to enjoy a moment of superiority and detachedness towards the otherwise superior and empathy-inducing hero.

27 As a matter of fact, most modern theories of laughter “revived the instrumental view of the Aristotle-, Hobbes-, Shaftesbury-tradition of laughing at” (Brosch 157). This tradition defines “laughter as an essentially malicious instinct” and justifies it “not only for its subjective and social functions but also through the ridiculous properties of the laughable object itself ” (ibid.). Thus the blame for laughter is laid on its object, while the laugher is conceived of as “a discerning individual who exposes the defects of someone to justified and corrective ridicule” (ibid.). What has to be noted, however, is that the ‘laughing-atposition’ implies a ‘laughing-with-position’ insofar as laughing at someone who transgresses a norm always requires the implicit acceptance of and identification with the norm. Thus either we laugh at someone and therefore with the norm or, if the norm is felt to be absurd or obsolete, we laugh at the norm and with the transgressor. From this it follows that either the transgressor or the transgressed norm is being denigrated and consequently – at least as long as the notion of the comic referred to is based on comparison (which presupposes a contrastive image or a kind of disorder that creates a cognitive and moral dissonance) – that the widespread but simplistic differentiation between a ‘laughing-at-position’ and a ‘laughing-with-position’ is not a particularly pertinent one but much more one of perspective and hierarchy. A slightly different notion of the comic is advanced by Emil Staiger in his Basic Concepts of Poetics, in which he argues that the comic “falls out of the framework of a world and exists naturally and unproblematically outside of this framework. [. . .] But the phallus and belly in Aristophanes, the huge red nose or ear that stands out like a spoon: these fall out of the framework, too. The framework is made up here of the network of relationships within an organic whole of the type we have in mind when we look at a human body” (170). The key elements that for Staiger define the comic situation are a transgression of or a deviation from norms, the absence of suffering (cf. Aristotle, Poetics), and what he calls Fraglosigkeit or unquestionability. By this term he means a happy ignorance of the system of norms held up by the social frame. Thus he implicitly reduces the importance of norms and of the faculty of comparison and comes close to Jauß’s notion of a Komik der Heraufsetzung und des Mit-Lachens. In accordance with this position, many critics have argued that in direct contrast to the position of ‘laughing-at’ and the thereby implied position of ‘laughing-with’ offered by the comedy of denigration, an inclusive comedy of valorisation that exalts life offers a ‘laughing-with-position’ (Mit-Lachen) of a quite different quality. It is open to debate whether, as Greiner and others have reasoned, this notion of the comic really works entirely without an intellectual moment of comparison and differentiation. Also questionable is whether phenomena such as the proliferating body or the grotesque are really beyond norms or whether the norms are still there but simply less relevant since this form of the comic privileges identification over comparison and differentiation. One

28 could even ask whether the grotesque, just as with the aesthetics of deviation, has not in itself become a norm. What we can say, however, is that [d]ie Komik der Heraufsetzung [. . .] den Abstand zwischen Rezipienten und Helden in einem lachenden Einvernehmen verschwinden [läßt], sei dies ein Einvernehmen über die Befreiung des Sinnlichen, über das Sich-Durchsetzen des Lustprinzips oder des Triumphes über die Gewalten der normativen Welt (Greiner 98). [t]his inclusive, valorising and elevating notion of the comic [. . .] allows the distance between recipient and hero to dissolve into harmonious laughter, whether this is a harmony about the liberation of the senses, the acceptance of the pleasure principle or a triumph over the authorities in the normative world.

Jauß has called this notion of the comic, which will be discussed in more detail below, grotesque comedy (groteske Komik), denn das Groteske kennzeichnet, was den Reiz dieser Art Komik ausmacht: das Aufheben aller Grenzen, das Mischen, Durcheinandergehen, unbekümmert um Gebote der ‘Sitte’ und Normen, damit auch eine verschmelzende, den einzelnen in seiner Besonderheit zum Verschwinden bringende Partizipation, das Entstehen und ordnungslose Sich-Ausbreiten von Lachgemeinden aus dem Einvernehmen im Freisetzen von Affekten. Daher hat die ‘groteske Komik’ einen elementar unbewußten Charakter, manifestiert sie sich wesentlich körperlich, an dem in Sitte nicht gebändigten Körper (Greiner 98). because the grotesque typifies what constitutes the appeal of this form of comedy: the transcendence of all boundaries, an intermingling and muddling up with scant regard to the demands of morality and norms, concomitantly a dissolving of the individual’s singularity through participation, the creation and unstructured spreading of communities of laughter due to the harmonious freeing up of emotions. That is why ‘grotesque comedy’ has such a fundamentally unconscious character, manifests itself essentially through the bodily, through a body that is not subject to the norms of morality.

Another form of the comic which depends on the body and escapes the dichotomy of denigration versus valorisation is epitomized by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity. For Butler, performativity effectively links sexual identity, and foremost gender, via citationality to parody, subversion, and the comic.12 In analogy to Susan Sontag’s concept of “camp” – “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre” (Sontag 280) – which allows for an interpretation of “camp” as a set of techniques of resignification in 12

Since this nexus has already been alluded to in the introductory essay by Gaby Pailer, I will restrict myself to some additional remarks pertaining to notions of performativity, to the role of the body and to parody. For a more extended discussion of parody and camp cf. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody; Meyer and Meyer.

29 which irony, the burlesque, pastiche, and parody all converge (cf. Preciado), Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal call Butler’s concept of gender “a kind of improvisional theatre” and stress “the possibilities opened up in Gender Trouble of being able to use transgressive performances such as drag to help decentre or destabilise gender categories”. However, it should be kept in mind that based on Foucault, Lacan, and on Derrida’s rewriting of Austin,13 Butler clearly transcends the notion of camp when she 1) argues that gender can be considered as “a corporeal style, an ‘act’ [. . .] which is both intentional and peformative” (Gender Trouble 139), 2) identifies a “desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body”, 3) locates the possibility for subversion of patriarchal power in subversive performances of gender, and 4) states that there “is no gender behind the expressions of gender”, i.e. that gender identity “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (ibid. 25). If performativity thus becomes “the vehicle through which ontological effects are established”, and if to perform gender means that “acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means”, it should be noted that this ultimately stresses the importance of the body. Bodies do matter since 1) cultural expressions such as discourse, speech, and language are determined by their embodiment (Butler, Excitable Speech 10f. and 141f.), 2) speech “is literally enacted because the body acts and is active when we speak” (Meinig 71), and 3) the relation between speech and the body can be regarded as scandalous (Butler, Excitable Speech 10) and ultimately takes the form of a chiasmus: “Speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions; and speech remains irreducible to the bodily means of its enunciation” (155f.).14 13

Cf. Butler, Excitable Speech 148–151; Lloyd 197: “Butler’s theory of gender performativity echoes both Austin and Derrida in proposing that the performative ‘enacts or produces that which it names’ [. . .]. She differs from Austin, however, in rejecting the idea that there is an autonomous agent that authors performative utterances. Instead, she takes from Derrida the idea that intentionality is always limited by the iterability of the sign. Repetition is central to performativity. This means that performative utterances are not singular events but, rather, the effects of ‘citational doubling’ [. . .]. Performativity [. . .] thus operates through the ‘reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ [. . .]. It is not in a single act of constitution or invention that the subject is brought into being, but through re-citation and repetition. This [. . .] has an important bearing on the capacity of parodic recitation to produce certain transgressive effects”. 14 “The body doubles what we say when we use expressions which are saturated with social and historical meaning and thus opens up a realm beyond those already established expressions. Thus, new meaning and also self-determination become possible. It is this inherent opportunity for enactment and even self-conscious theatricality which Butler refers to as performativity” (Meinig 71; cf. Krämer 253–255).

30 If, as Meinig argues, “the embodied view of performativity alerts us to the agency and the opportunity for subversive acts that result from our embodied speaking”, it is (especially in Butler’s earlier work) above all drag which by “disclosing that there is no original to imitate” fulfils a denaturalizing function, “divulging the culturally fabricated nature of gender”, and revealing “all gender as only ever parody” and therefore as inherently subversive. However, if the fact that “the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Butler, Gender Trouble 136), this entails in Butler’s reading a ‘radicalization’ of the notion of parody since gender parody can then of course not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original [. . .], so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect – that is, in its effect – postures as an imitation. This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself (138).

Referring to Fredric Jameson’s article Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Butler concedes that “the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is characteristic of pastiche rather than parody” (ibid.; cf. Lloyd), that whereas pastiche is a “neutral practice of mimicry”, parody is characterized by having an ulterior motive, a satirical impulse, is geared towards laughter and haunted by “that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic” (Jameson 114). Nevertheless, already the “loss of the sense of ‘the normal’ [. . .] can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler, Gender Trouble 138f.). Moreover, there is another point where the comic and laughter interpolate into Butler’s argument: Drawing on Lacan’s article The Signification of the Phallus and on the notion of masquerade, Butler argues that the supposedly original heterosexual – as well as any other – sexual position is intrinsically and fundamentally comic (46f.; Lacan 289) and becomes a constant parody of itself: It’s not just the norm of heterosexuality that is tenuous. It’s all sexual norms. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. If you say “I can only desire X” , what you’ve immediately done, in rendering desire exclusively, is created a whole set of positions which are unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I

31 take it that one of the essential aspects of comedy emerges when you end up actually occupying a position that you have just announced to be unthinkable. That is funny. There’s a terrible self-subversion in it (Butler qtd. in Osborne and Segal).

Sociological and Psychoanalytical Dimensions to Laughter: Henri Bergson, Anton C. Zijderveld, Sigmund Freud While humour can be regarded as the subjective capacity to experience something as being comic or funny, a sociological perspective allows us to define humour as a matter of social interaction and communication. Indeed, humour and laughter are social “by nature”, and laughter is always a group phenomenon.15 For Henri Bergson, whose notion of humour derives from his philosophical concept of vitalism, laughter creates a kind of complicity among people since it is linked to the popular imagination. Life is a continuous stream of consciousness, of time-awareness, of durée which is characterized by a souplesse intérieure, a certain plasticity and elasticity. Deficiencies in these qualities lead to a mechanization of the individual, to illness, stiffness, and inadequacy. Comedy, then, arises from a mechanical repetition across time – from la mécanisation de la vie – in something living and vibrant, and can be considered as a process whereby a human being is turned into a thing, an object, a machine, a robot. “Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity 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 centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity” (Bergson 73). If an individual as part of an organically conceived society lacks elasticity, which Bergson considers characteristic of any evolving community, and if he or she threatens to transgress social norms, society uses laughter to re-socialize and to reintegrate him or her. And since laughter arises because the mechanical is unexpected, because le mécanique plaqué sur du vivant takes us by surprise, Bergson’s theory is another example for a theory of the comic based on contrast and incongruency. In a positive sense laughter serves to revitalize and to de-mechanize the individual. It is less a sign of superiority on the part of those doing the laughing than it is a reaching out, an attempt to save the individual and to reconnect him or her to life. Pierre Siguret has called Bergson’s definition of laughter particulier en ce qu’il rend le mal pour le mal, mais en vue du bien. Il souligne l’insensibilité du spectateur indifférent, et il a pour fonction d’intimider en humiliant, car il possède un fond de malice et même de méchanceté. Par son biais, les excentricités sont réprimées, ce qui conduit à une amélioration, voire une perfection générale (Siguret 108; cf. Minois 481). 15

“Our laughter is always the laughter of a group” (Bergson 64).

32 special in so far as it fights evil with evil but with the intention towards good. It stresses the insensitivity of the indifferent onlooker, and its function is to intimidate by humiliating because it contains malice and even maliciousness. Thereby, eccentricities are censured, which leads to amelioration and even to general perfection.

The counter-position to Bergson is represented by Zijderveld. According to him, the systems of values, norms, and meanings which structure the lives of individuals in any given society possess three basic characteristics: They are institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated. Values and norms constitute a meaningful moral order or nomos intended to enable individuals to live meaningful, coherent lives and to interact accordingly. In order to participate in the moral order of one’s society, it is necessary to connect to the chain of tradition and to its synchronic dimension, i.e. to the values prevalent at a given point in time. Institutionalization is paired with enculturation, and since human life is subject to institutions, patterns and structures, it can – at least from a sociological point of view – be called mechanical. Not Bergson’s durée, not his vitalist individualism, but habitualization, routinization, and role-behaviour are the sociological characteristics of human life. Only because of this are, as many sociologists argue, our actions, thoughts and feelings predictable, understandable and accountable. Through humour, this sociological order is temporarily (until the laughter has ended) disrupted: Contingencies, surprises, and defamiliarizations occur during humorous interaction so that humour can be defined as a social game in which human beings play with the values, norms, and meanings of their society. From this it follows that, in contrast to Bergson’s view, for Zijderveld humour or comedy cannot be interpreted as a mechanization of life, but rather as a vitalization of what happens to be socioculturally mechanical. There is moreover an added dimension to Zijderveld’s argument when he points out that in most cultures this humorous play with institutionalized values, norms, and meanings is itself organized and institutionalized, so that even a putative de-mechanization of life is subjugated to mechanical control.16 In a brief analysis of Freud’s book on jokes, Tobias Döring argues that with the exception of Sarah Kofman’s Pourquoi rit-on? Freud et le mot d’esprit, “most other recent studies in the field of humour research [. . .] rarely refer to Freud, let alone engage with his laughter theory in any sustained or even critical manner” (123). If, for obvious reasons, this introduction does not intend to offer the critical analysis asked for by Döring, it can at least attempt to counteract the

16

Even if, as the “societies of fools”, court jesters, and feasts such as carnival prove, the play with traditional and sacred values seems to be an inherent human need, it is nevertheless viewed as threatening by those in power and is kept under control by means of institutionalization and organization.

33 neglect of Freudian thought in this area. In his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud states that in laughter the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge. And since laughter – not all laughter, it is true, but certainly laughter at a joke – is an indication of pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present. If we see that the hearer of a joke laughs but that its creator cannot laugh, this may amount to telling us that in the hearer a cathectic expenditure has been lifted and discharged, while in the construction of the joke there have been obstacles either to the lifting or to the possibility of discharge. The psychical process in the hearer, the joke’s third person, can scarcely be more aptly described than by stressing the fact that he has bought the pleasure of the joke with very small expenditure on his own part. He might be said to have been presented with it (181f.).

Döring correctly argues that if “a joke only works for those who hear it and who, like a present, receive it free, their laughter signifies the working of a rather ambiguous relation between the joke-creator and the joke-hearer” (127). As has already been shown, this connection needs three agents to function properly, so that Freud’s theory of laughter is based on a “triangular construction that cuts across the fundamental” and simplistic distinction of ‘laughing at‘ versus ‘laughing with’. For Freud these two versions coincide since they are socially linked and functionally dependent, thus bearing some semblance to what has been described above as a comedy of denigration in the sense that by laughing at someone or something one always, and be it only implicitly, also laughs with someone or something. Döring summarizes the functioning of a tendentious joke as follows: In his triangle of relations, Number One bribes Number Three into complicity to laugh with him at Number Two. In this way we can see how the social relationship established by joking emerges as an economy of exchanging substitutes, with laughter operating as the currency of payment. Number One tells the tendentious joke instead of satisfying his desire for Number Two directly; Number Three receives the satisfying joke for free instead of having to approach Number Two himself; so Number Three now has surplus pleasure which he pays off by laughing; his laughter, in turn, serves Number One, who is satisfied to receive at least this much pleasure instead of his own laughter (128).

From this we can conclude that laughter results from a process not monitored by conscious knowledge. The mechanisms of its pleasure in the discharge of psychical energy largely operate in the unconscious and must effectively remain there to operate below the level of control. This is why Freud concludes that the symptom of laughter always hides as much as it reveals: it shields the whole economy of secret pleasures from

34 the censoring power of our consciousness and, instead, reveals them only in the substitute form of compressions or omission – as they become manifest in the linguistic form of jokes (128).17

What remains to be explained, however, are the “mechanisms” which “operate in the unconscious” and which “must effectively remain there” on the level of psychological or psychoanalytical deep structures: in other words, how are we to fathom 1) what laughter hides and 2) why, when laughing, we re-enter “the mood of our childhood” (Freud)? Joachim Ritter has suggested that laughter is able to reconcile the ruling order with its excluded other. According to him, “[w]as das Komische ausmacht, ist dies, dass immer mittelbar und unmittelbar in den einen Bedeutungsbereich, der sich harmlos und einwandfrei zulässig gibt, der andere hineingespielt wird, der in jenem gerade ausgeschlossen und als nicht dazugehörig beiseite gebracht ist” (Ritter 73f.) (“[t]he comic can be defined by the fact that it indirectly as well as directly introduces into a seemingly harmless and acceptable semantic field a second semantic field that significantly was excluded from the first because it was viewed as being inappropriate”). Although the first semantic field excludes the second, evoking Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, it can never do without the other and is therefore linked to, interspersed or intertwined with it. Das Wesentliche ist immer die Bewegung, in der eine an sich nicht gemeinte und ferner in der anständigen Rede auch nicht zugelassene Sphäre in diese anständige Rede selbst derart eingewoben wird, dass sie selbst diese kundtun und aussprechen muss (Ritter 74). What is essential is the tendency whereby what was unintended and as a sphere not even permitted in respectable speech becomes itself so interwoven into the fabric of respectable speech that the latter must reveal and express the former.

Thus the comic compels the excluding power, i.e. the realm of the morally acceptable, the symbolic order etc., to verbalize what it intends to exclude: the chaotic, the unreasonable, the outrageous, the semiotic (cf. Kristeva). Another important feature of the comic as envisaged here is that it consists of a triple movement, namely 1) a transcendence of the existing symbolic order, 2) a reaching out for the realm of the excluded, and 3) a manifestation of what has 17

For Freud’s topic model and its relation to humour cf. Pietzcker; cf. also Titze et al. 216f.; Döring 128: “While humour [. . .] offers a way to avoid or alleviate suffering, Freud’s account of its psychical working does not abandon the triangular construction established in his analysis of jokes. In the case of humour, though, the triangle appears internalized and seems to correspond to his topic model of id, ego and super-ego. Thus, humour functions within the individual and lies entirely in internal psychical dynamics, whereas jokes operate in a social setting and typically involve three people”.

35 hitherto been excluded in and through the symbolic itself, or, in other words, the manifestation of the excluded area in and by means of the excluding area itself (cf. Greiner 117). Similarly to Ritter’s line of reasoning, namely that seriousness excludes wishes and desires which nevertheless are an integral part of life, the symbolic order excludes – or at least endeavours to exclude – drives and semiotic interferences. But since the fact that these interferences are excluded does not mean that they no longer exist, one can assume that that which is negated is the product of the very system which negates it and that instead of being destroyed it is implicitly validated. Thus, in analogy to Michel Foucault’s work on power, repression ‘produces’ the repressed and simultaneously verifies and attests to its belonging to the repressive system itself. Laughter, then, 1) demonstrates that the ostracized is and has always been a part of the very order that excludes it and 2) proves that there is an implicit and secret identity between the power of exclusion and that which is excluded. From this perspective laughter is simultaneously criticism and affirmation. It criticizes the ‘serious’ world and its order and is an expression of happiness and plenitude, accepting or even celebrating the right of the excluded. However, if the comic implies the presence of something excluded, i.e. the instinctual drives of the id, as part of the excluding power, that is the super-ego, this also recalls Freud’s work on dreams. During sleep a lowered censorship allows our dreams to manifest our desires, albeit coded and transformed, among other things by condensation and displacement, by metaphor and metonymy. A joke, Freud argues, works analogously and partially reverses the work of repression imposed on us by culture.18 For obvious reasons, cracking a joke can be read as a re-entry into the Oedipal constellation. Given that the early Oedipal relationship characterizes the human ego by a basic structural negation – “Thou shall not!” – and that old fears are reawakened whenever the ego is confronted with an analogous constellation, it is possible to say that the person who laughs represents the excluding and censoring order. He is a negating listener who – just for the duration of the joke – takes a bribe and allows forbidden desire and pleasure while the object desired becomes the target of aggression and derision. Instead of attacking Lacan’s “Name-of-the-Father”/”No-of-the-Father” (nom/non du père), i.e. the forbidding father and the castrating symbolic order he symbolizes, instead of attacking the super-ego and its representative(s), i.e. the listener(s), these ‘authorities’ are turned into allies against the original object of desire. Why this 18

Whereas we constantly have to invest psychic energy into inhibitions in order to keep up the barriers which a repressive culture erects in our minds, the “pleasure in jokes [. . .] arise[s] from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition” (Freud 293), so that we laugh because we have saved the energy needed to repress the repressed (cf. Minois 483f.; Brosch 158).

36 object is attacked becomes clear if one takes into consideration that what is desired in the Oedipal constellation is the mother, that this desire can never be granted and that this non-fulfilment entails aggression. A successful joke momentarily deprives the Oedipal structure of its power to intervene, and the listener, representing the symbolic order or the super-ego, conserves psychic energy and is free to laugh and to accept chaos. This only works, however, because even in a joke the incestuous desire to possess the mother is never fulfilled, because aggression takes the place of desire and because the person who laughs does not run the risk of being lost in a chaotic universe since they are always backed by the narrator of the joke, who does not laugh, and therefore remains solidly rooted in the symbolic order. While the audience is freed from its self-censorship and internalized structure of self-repression, it is never bereft of the support of the symbolic order so that although the power that excludes gives a voice to the excluded, it never loses control. In contrast, for example, to a ‘radical’ reading of Bakhtin (see below), Freud considers the culture of laughter as a part of the symbolic order which firmly stays in control (cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 9). From this it follows that his conception of the comic and of humour is rather conciliatory, integrating the repressed and thus disarming it (cf. Louis Ratisbonne qtd. in Minois 478).

Charles Baudelaire, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Liberating Potential of “Full Laughter” Not to lose control is, as Baudelaire writes in his essay “The Essence of Laughter”, a sign of the “Wise Man” who “does not laugh, does not abandon himself to laughter, without an accompanying tremor. The Wise Man trembles because he has laughed [. . .] [and he] pulls himself up on the brink of laughter as on the brink of temptation” (112). For Baudelaire mankind is torn between good and bad. Laughter is fuelled by these two elements and characterized by its double nature, showing our unconscious pride as well as our fear of damnation: “It seems certain, if we adopt the orthodox view, that human laughter is intimately connected with the accident of an original fall, of a degradation both of the body and the mind” (ibid.). The angelic and the diabolic work together and are both present in a laughter which is essentially as human as it is contradictory, being proof of “infinite grandeur and of infinite wretchedness: of infinite wretchedness by comparison with the absolute Being who exists as an idea in Man’s mind; of an infinite grandeur by comparison with the animals. It is from the perpetual shock produced by these two infinities that laughter proceeds” (117; cf. Siguret 104). Principally, Baudelaire distinguishes between (at least) two different kinds of laughter: The first form of laughter which he calls the “significantly comic” (comique significatif ) is a comedy of superiority since it is characterized by

37 satanic aspects – “laughter is man’s way of biting” (113) – and since those who laugh mainly enjoy the fact that they are superior to those they laugh about, Satanic laughter is inexhaustible and completely free of compassion or pity, the only exception possible being the laughter of children, which Baudelaire links to the concept of joy.19 But even the laughter of children “is not wholly devoid of ambition” given that children are but “Satans in the bud” (120). Thus, in the last consequence, laughter really becomes diabolic; it serves as proof of the human feeling of superiority, of the desire to make other people suffer, and it is linked to madness. Laughter, they say, comes of superiority. [. . .] A satanic idea if ever there was one! Pride and aberration! Now it is a notorious fact that patients in a madhouse are all of them suffering from the idea, developed beyond the normal, of their own superiority. [. . .] It should be noted that laughter is one of the most frequent symptoms of madness. [. . .] Indeed, what more obvious sign of debility can there be than the nervous convulsion, the involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze, provoked by somebody else’s misfortune? (115f.).

But Baudelaire’s theory is neither free of contradictions (cf. Greiner 105f.) nor limited to the “significantly comic”. As he argues, laughter out of superiority contains a moment of ridiculousness which can be regarded as a self-reflexive element: “It would not surprise me to find that [. . .] the physiologist himself bursts out laughing as he thinks of his own superiority” (cf. Baudelaire 115). Laughing-at, therefore, is always already undermined by its own ridiculousness. Moreover, Baudelaire introduces the notion of the “absolutely comic” as a kind of laughter in league with nature, as a laughter that casts a spell over people, causes frenzy or dizziness, and breaks down frontiers. The absolutely comic, “[l]aughter provoked by the grotesque”, is characterized by “something profound, axiomatic and primitive, which more closely relates it to innocence and to absolute joy than does the laughter occasioned by the comedy of manners” (121). Whereas the significantly comic “is an imitation, [. . .] the grotesque is a creation” (ibid.). It is “much closer to nature”, “has a unity which must be grasped by intuition” (122), and consists of “fabulous creations whose raison d’être, whose excuse, has nothing to do with common sense and arouses in us a wild and excessive hilarity translated into interminable fits of rending and uncontrollable mirth” (121). Nevertheless, “laughter caused by the grotesque still expresses the idea of superiority, not this time of man over man, but of man over nature” (ibid.). It is in this sense that Baudelaire gives due warning that when he uses “the words ‘absolutely comic’ [. . .] we must be very much upon our guard. From the point of view of the definitely absolute, there 19

“Joy is a unity, whereas laughter is the revelation of a double, not to say a selfcontradictory, sentiment” (Baudelaire 120).

38 is joy and nothing else. The comic can be treated as absolute only in relation to fallen humanity” (122). For Konrad Lorenz laughter is a mechanism preventing human beings from turning against their own species. It functions as a kind of sublimation of aggressive and/or sexual drives (cf. Minois 570f.). The fact that laughter is a good way to release pent-up aggression harbours the risk of it being conservative, as for example when laughter is sponsored and used by the ruling classes. In this case it functions as a kind of catharsis and as a prophylaxis for revolution, an often cited example being carnival: “Most politically thoughtful commentators wonder [. . .] whether the ‘licensed release’ of carnival is not simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes” (Stallybrass and White 13). Yet such a spatially and temporally delimited envisaging of carnival, which is less a subversion of the ruling order than part and parcel of the conservative framework it ultimately reaffirms,20 is indeed a very domesticated and pacified form of Bakhtin’s original notion of the carnivalesque. It is no surprise, therefore, that there is also another, more radical interpretation that links the carnivalesque to the positive elements attributed to the grotesque by Baudelaire and that views Bakhtin’s conception of laughter as part of the carnivalesque and of an aesthetics of the grotesque (also in the sense of “Renaissance realism”), which Wolfgang Kayser has interpreted as “a form expressing the id” (Kayser qtd. in Bakhtin 49). If one emphasizes the revolutionary potential of Bakhtin’s theory one can argue that for the Russian cultural theorist carnival possesses not only a regenerative and transfigurative impulse but is also linked to the principle of transformation and to the future (Bakhtin 24f.). The carnivalesque is characterized by a positive, life-embracing, and elevating concept of the comic, which does not laugh with someone at something but supposedly functions without comparison, exclusion, or denigration.21 Instead of being marked by distance or difference, Bakhtinian laughter is characterized by a close identification between the spectator/reader and the actor/protagonist, whereby both are in a full agreement about the setting free of sensuality, bodily needs, and the pleasure principle. Bakhtinian carnival, just like “full laughter”, unites contrasts and 20

Cf. Eagleton 148: “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art”. Cf. Björk 89–92; Hutcheon, Modern Parody and Bakhtin 99. 21 As argued above, the following issues need consideration: 1) whether the grotesque has not already long ago become an aesthetics and a norm in itself and 2) whether even within this exaltative and inclusive model of the comic, which puts a premium on identification instead of differentiation, norms are still there but simply less relevant and less visible than within a model of the comic based on denigration.

39 oppositions, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the insignificant (cf. Siguret 106). It calls for change and precipitates crises so that destruction and creation go hand in hand. Moreover, Bakhtinian laughter is ambivalent and linked to the body, especially to those functions which are officially tabooed and not allowed to manifest themselves: The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes. [. . .] To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body [. . .]. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one (Bakhtin 20f.).

From a carnivalesque perspective, the realm of the body is valorised and the body itself is conceived of as decentred, grotesque, uncontrollable, and as metonymically coinciding with the people. Bakhtin’s body is not a closed system subjugated and domesticated by culture, rather it is an open, living, proliferating, incorporating, and excorporating organism which interacts with other bodies and ignores fixed borders. Hence carnivalesque laughter is not intellectual or exterior to the body but springs from within: “Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning” (94). Refusing any fixed identity, super-ego or censor, Bakhtin characterizes the carnivalesque body by profanation, multiplication, and the denial of death. This constant mutability and non-identity of the body is not considered to be menacing but liberating and hilarious. It coincides with and causes laughter as a kind of fusion of death and resurrection, change and renewal. What Bakhtin is calling for is a full laughter, strong enough to attack official ideology and to valorise popular culture; what he insists on is the social and even chorus-like dimension of laughter; of a laughter that aspires to community and universality and is in strict opposition to everything official, serious, and monosemic (cf. Siguret 108f.). For the theological mainstream, this all-embracing, exaltative and life-affirming form of the comic, which works without comparison and negates hierarchies, has long been considered as the opposite of “God’s gift of grace to mankind” and as “a result of its fall from grace – together with labour, disease and death one of the evil consequences of the Original Sin and the Fall from innocence into knowledge” (Pfister 181). If, as has been shown, Baudelaire links laughter to Satan and to madness, it is indeed no surprise that “the history of laughter is first and foremost a history of the attempts at disciplining it and bringing it to heel” (ibid.). A reference to Umberto Eco’s blind Spaniard Jorge of Burgos for whom laughter

40 dehumanizes and even questions our humanity should suffice to make this point clear: “Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey” (Eco 131). In other words: He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating. [. . .] [T]ruth and good are not to be laughed at. This is why Christ did not laugh. Laughter foments doubt. [. . .] Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know [. . .]. With his laughter the fool says in his heart, ‘Deus non est.’ (131f.).

Although Berger (x) argues that the “experience of the comic is [. . .] a promise of redemption” and that “[r]eligious faith is the intuition (some lucky people would say the conviction) that the promise will be kept”, a brief consideration of the discourses on laughter from classical antiquity and the Fathers of the Church to the present demonstrates that its critics easily outnumber its advocates, that laughter has often been regarded as a symptom of stupidity and heresy,22 and furthermore, that during the Renaissance and the Middle Ages “theologians and clergymen were the most vociferous critics of laughter” (Pfister 181). What fuels this kind of vituperative ‘theory’ is the fear that the transformation of values, the changes in society, the deceptions and playful games ensuing from laughter could make it impossible to distinguish good from bad or true from false. In the final analysis, the prevailing fear is that in and through laughter God and the Devil will coincide, that religion will disintegrate, that human beings will gain their freedom – and ultimately take responsibility for themselves. If the art of laughing is the highest human fulfilment, if by and through laughing human beings gain control of their destiny, lose their fear and break all kinds of hierarchies, then death and damnation can no longer function as the final sanction and anchoring point (point de caption) from which religion erects the vast edifice of its power. Where laughter equals revolution, where there is no longer any need for redemption, and where psychological liberation goes hand in hand with political liberation, theologians are wont to consider these developments as leading to the abolition of any binding truth(s), thereby unleashing chaos and anarchy.23 In Bakhtin’s view it is no accident that the frontiers between what causes fear and what causes laughter are erased in popular culture, that fear can be vanquished by laughter, and that laughter leads to justice. The reason for this is that laughter comes from within and is equated 22

For an extended discussion, cf. Loewenstein. Cf. Kuschel; cf. Sarrazin 19, who argues that there exists a believing kind of laughter (“un rire croyant”) and two religious logics, one that pretends to impose (one) sense, truth, dogma and lacks humour and another which is open to the incredible, to paradoxa, to nonsense and which embraces laughter. 23

41 with ‘truth’. Not, however, a theological, logocentric or even phallogocentric truth but a kind of truth which is inherent in all laughter and which cannot be transformed into seriousness or into the symbolic without suffering loss. It is a kind of truth which is liberating with regard to internal as well as external censorship, such as the fear of the sacred and other deeply rooted human fears. But if laughter enables mankind to leave behind the world of everyday compromises and mediocrity without having to cling to ‘one’ truth or to a metaphysical signified, this is exactly the reason why, in the public sphere at least, it has effectively been circumscribed and even forbidden. The demise of carnival since the 17th century provides just one example for the fact that die Statthalter der Wahrheit auf Erden das Lachen nicht [lieben], denn es gefährdet ihre Ordnung, die früher die Ordnung Gottes war, über den zu lachen ein Sakrileg darstellte. Mit der Durchsetzung des Ideals einer nicht lachenden Öffentlichkeit in der Neuzeit wurde das Lachen ins Private vertrieben. [. . .] Dieser Ausschluss des Lachens aus der Öffentlichkeit ist Teil der neuzeitlichen Disziplinierung der körperlichen Expressivität, die durch zahllose kleine Verbote im Lebensalltag durchgesetzt worden ist (Kamper and Wulf 9). the earthly powers that be who administer truth are not at all well predisposed towards laughter, the reason being is that it endangers their order; an order that was previously divine and about which it was considered a sacrilege to laugh. Once the ideal of a non-laughing public sphere was established in modernity, laughter was banished into the private sphere. [. . .] This exclusion of laughter from the public sphere is part of the modern disciplining of bodily expressivity and has been pushed through in everyday life by means of innumerable rules and regulations.

Let us conclude this introduction to theories of humour, the comic, and laughter by suggesting a further dimension to laughter that pursues and even perpetuates Bakhtin’s notion of “full laughter” and that similarly stresses the role of the body. As Kamper and Wulf argue, laughter is a bodily reaction directed as much against abstraction as against the intellect. Full laughter implies that the body takes over, that it expresses itself and counteracts the instrumentalization and subjugation it suffers in daily life: Im lebenden Körper zeigt sich eine lange, verlorene, vielleicht nie wirklich gegebene Einheit. In seinen konvulsivischen Bewegungen schwinden die Sinne, die die Verbindung zur Außenwelt halten, mit ihnen der Sinn. Der Lachende braucht keinen Sinn, weder im Lachen noch anderswo (7). The living body displays a long-lost, perhaps never really existing, unity. Amid its convulsive movements, the senses connecting the body to the outside world are diminished and any sense of meaning is lost. To those that laugh meaning is irrelevant, whether in the act of laughing or otherwise.

Moreover, laughter can have a self-reflexive quality. If self-reflexivity initially seems to presuppose distance and, with Baudelaire, a dedoublement of the

42 human subject, a psychoanalytic perspective reveals that this doubling is not necessary since human beings are always already not only double but multiple, fragmented, and decentred. The old humanist unified subject is not only for Lacanian psychoanalysis largely a fiction or ongoing narration (cf. Rusch 374; Moi 8): If for Freud laughter arises because for a short moment in time we do not have to suppress our desires or drives and can conserve this energy while we remain securely integrated in our culture, i.e. the symbolic order, one should also ask whether the liberating, elevating and redemptive effect of laughter can not be regarded as the result of the fact that human beings are for a short moment allowed to discard the cultural edifice and fiction of the unified and rational Cartesian self. Maybe the Rabelaisian and Bakhtinian notion of full laughter stems, among other things, from the fact that by retrieving and having recourse to the corporeal human beings are ‘freed from themselves’ since they do not have to uphold the construction of a single and unified self: “Im Lachen wird das Ich vom Ich befreit. Der rationale Mensch weicht dem lachenden; er zeigt sich von etwas überwältigt, das er, um als autonome Persönlichkeit zu gelten, kontrollieren muß” (Kamper and Wulf 8) (“During laughter the ego is freed from itself. The rational being gives itself over to laughter; it reveals itself as being overwhelmed by something which, in order to function as an autonomous personality, it must control”). From this perspective, laughter could be understood 1) as a bodily reflex that exceeds sense and can only be converted into meaning a posteriori, and 2) as harbouring the potential to free human beings from their cultural obligations by laying open their decentredness and eccentricity (Plessner) as well as by subverting rationality, objectivity, and distance. Thus the enormous relief which laughter grants us would not only be the result of a conservation of psychical energy but also of the acknowledgment of the never fully knowable or controllable foundation of human existence. It is precisely because laughter can negate the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ that it has the power to attack and to expose the very basis of a culture founded on these presumably natural but ultimately constructed and culturally relative dichotomies. In this sense full laughter can be understood as the return of the body, the repressed, the abject, the semiotic (cf. Kristeva), the supplement, and the Other. Because full laughter is not subject to the principle of difference, it is beyond what founds the sign (cf. Greiner), and possesses the anonymous violence eines [. . .] überwältigenden, die Abwehrstrukturen durchbrechenden Fremden. Einbruch des Anderen, Entmachtung des Vertrauten auf der einen Seite und eine momentane, die Grenzziehung aufhebende Versöhnung, ein Einverständnis mit dem Fremden auf der anderen Seite, beides sind Erfahrungen des Lachens (Kamper and Wulf 8). of an [. . .] overwhelming Other that breaks through all defence mechanisms. On the one hand, there is the breaking in of the Other, the disempowerment of all that is

43 familiar, on the other hand, a reconciliation that momentarily suspends the boundary, a mutual agreement with the Other beyond, both being experiences of laughter.

In the final analysis full laughter implies the possible loss of balance, tears of laughter, the merging of laughing and crying, of pleasure and pain, and distantly evokes Lacan’s notion of jouissance. But if laughing is a privileged means to make the horror of existence bearable (cf. Nietzsche), this does not signify that laughter loses its ambivalence or that in laughing human beings can abolish once and for all their sense or premonition of the ultimate precariousness of their existence. The traces of memory, be it of the fragmented body (corps morcélé), of an original lack (manque) or of “a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord” (Lacan, The mirror stage 4), will always continue to haunt us on a sub- or unconscious level. What is remarkable, however, is that if in a paradoxical turn it is exactly this ‘other realm’ which makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is still our best means to deal with it: If our intrinsic otherness founds laughter, laughter is also its best remedy. Or, to close with Kamper and Wulf:24 Es gibt einen Taumel am Rande des Katastrophischen. Solange wir lachen, sind wir nicht in der Katastrophe, wir vermeiden es, besänftigen das drohende Schicksal. Die Erschütterung des Lachens birgt den Triumph über das Entkommen. Wenn nichts mehr geht, bietet das Lachen noch immer einen Ausweg, den man sich jedoch nicht suchen kann, der sich vielmehr von selbst ergibt oder verschließt (8). There is a feeling of giddiness at the edge of the catastrophe. As long as we laugh, we are not in the catastrophe, we avoid it, have put off the inevitable. The shock of laughter contains a sense of triumph at escaping. When nothing else seems possible, laughter offers a way out, which cannot however be sought but either occurs of itself or not at all.

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Andreas Böhn

Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic? The paper raises the question whether subversion of gender identities through laughter and the comic is possible and how subversive and affirmative laughter could be discerned with respect to gender matters. The difficulties in interpreting forms of the comic are compared to the interpretation of other forms of indirect communication such as parody or irony, and the relation of the comic to social norms is analysed in the light of this comparison. The discussion of three movies as examples of different comic treatments of gender roles and social norms reveals that it is more the type of normativity than the structure of the comic that explains the difference between ‘subversive’ and ‘affirmative’ laughter.

Research on laughter and the comic is a very serious thing. Although it is doubtful whether many jokes could survive scientific analysis, this theoretical and methodological reflection will start with a joke (Berger xiv). Some years ago I attended a conference which concluded a research program that had been ongoing for several years, all the time funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). The title of the research program was: “Theatre as Paradigm of Modernity”. The title of the concluding conference was “Theatre as Paradigm of Modernity?” (Balme et al.). I found this curious question mark to be a perfect symbol of the discrepancy between research in the humanities and its practical results. From that time on I have been looking for an opportunity to reproduce this joke. My aim is not to explain that joke, but to use it to explain the title of my contribution. In truth, it might not be the worst outcome of a scholarly effort if one can put a question mark to an assumption one has been dwelling on before, as long as one has sufficient reason to do so. And it might even appear as an advantage – not only to the admirers of Occam’s razor – if, by doing so, one can get rid of a terminological dilemma which has puzzled oneself and others before. In this case, the dilemma is the dichotomy of affirmative versus subversive laughter which still plays a major role in theories of the comic, and, significantly, in the context of exploring the way the comic works in relation to gender roles and gender identities. Other notions that often come up in this context are parody and travesty. In a cross-dressing comedy, for instance, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, gender roles are treated very much in the same way that literary texts or other works of art are treated in parodies or travesties of these works: they are imitated to a certain extent, but with minor differences, and one central element is completely

50 opposite, which results in our laughter. But what exactly is laughed at in crossdressing comedies? Is it the traditional gender roles, as the analogy to parody and travesty would suggest, because parodies and travesties usually make fun of their pre-texts? Or is it the protagonists who try to take on the gender role of the opposite sex but cannot fulfil this task properly? Or, conversely, is it their deceived victims? Or, is the object of ridicule the very existence of distinct gender roles and the boundaries that define them? That these and similar questions arise when we examine comical treatments of gender might result from a certain quality the comic shares with parody, travesty, and other literary and artistic, but also everyday modes of expression like irony. These modes do not convey normal, direct communication in which signs are used to designate conventional meanings, but rather indirect communication in which signs seemingly violate the convention on which their use is based (cf. Böhn, Thesen). If someone does not like at all what I have done and says to me: “You’ve done a good job!”, it seems that what he or she is saying is simply wrong, and that I can interpret his or her linguistic behaviour in two ways: I can deem this person insane, or I can look for an assumption, a specific frame, for the behaviour of that person which allows me to make sense of it. In this case, the frame would be irony; he or she speaks ironically, when saying the opposite of what he or she wants to express. Irony as a possible communicative mode is one we do not, and cannot, use all the time, since this would really subvert the conventions of communication. Therefore, the detection of irony and other forms of indirect communication always calls for a special interpretation, a re-framing of communication, and that is why ironic statements are often easily understood in different ways, and why they always raise questions of the kind that emerge in the context of cross-dressing comedies (Harras). Let us therefore take a closer look at the relation of the comic and indirect communication. The comic is based on incongruity (Palmer; Haider-Pregler), for example, the real behaviour of a person and the observer’s mental representation of normal, expected behaviour. Indirect communication is also based on incongruity; the element communicated in indirect communication is incongruent with the intended meaning. Irony, as in the previous example, has been characterized as ‘saying the opposite of what is meant’. If we are quoting someone, we ourselves do not necessarily agree with what was said, we merely state what someone else has said. Quotation would thus be another example of indirect communication, but some theorists even claim that all indirect communication can be reduced to the quotation of an actual or presupposed/ assumed communication. According to Sperber and Wilson’s study Relevance, irony would be the quotation of the actual or presupposed/assumed statement of another person, which is the opposite of one’s own statement. In any case, what makes clear that I am communicating indirectly is the incongruity of my actual communication and my expected communication in the given situation.

51 Indirect communication is based on two types of incongruity: a) incongruity of actual and expected communication; b) incongruity of what is said and what is meant. The first type of incongruity in indirect communication has the same basic structure as the incongruity in the comic. The second type of incongruity can also appear in specific modes of the comic. Indirect communication therefore can have comical effects (very often in the case of irony), but it does not necessarily need to (rather seldom in the case of metaphors). The voluntarily produced comical effect has developed certain modes which incorporate the two types of incongruity in indirect communication, namely parody and travesty. Parody reproduces a form and combines it with an unexpected content, thus creating incongruity of the first type; the form itself is not meant, but only quoted to state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type). Travesty reproduces a content and combines it with an unexpected form, thus creating incongruity of the first type; the content itself is not meant, but only quoted to state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type). In both cases the comic effect usually is produced by disparaging something highly valorised, or at least by making it more familiar. Parody seems to be less dependent on historical conditions than travesty, although parody’s status has undergone important changes. Travesty has been mainly used in historical periods that were characterized by a strict correspondence of form and content, in the field of art as well as in social interaction, in which one’s apparel, behaviour and actions were essentially related to a specific social background. Baroque poetics, for example, is founded precisely on such a strong connection between social status and adequate modes of representation, and thus incongruence of both can be easily produced. In our times, there is no such clear relation of status and appearance, which causes problems for travesty. Parody and travesty can use gender role models as form or content, thus producing cross-dressing or change of gender roles. The comical use of gender role models relies on certain conditions: a) a general assumption that sex can be discerned with certainty, independent of the actual behaviour of the person; b) a general assumption that to each sex there is related a corresponding appearance and habit (congruity of sex and gender); c) sex and gender are combined in a way that is not in accord with their usual or accepted correspondence (incongruity), which can happen in two different manners: A person of sex A exhibits an appearance in accord with sex B such that this person can be taken for a person of sex B by others, and behaves according to the conventions of sex B, the result being incongruity of two different assumptions about the sex of the person (cross-dressing). Or, alternatively, a person of sex A behaves according to the conventions of gender B, with respect to at least one element of the common role model of gender B, without necessarily exhibiting an appearance in accord with gender B; the result is incongruity between the assumption about

52 the sex and the assumption about the gender of the person, possibly also intragender incongruity of appearance and behaviour (change of gender roles). The same conditions apply to any stereotypical cultural difference. Gender role models are one instance of such differences, others being differences between national cultures or classes. Quotation can thus serve as the most general concept for an indirect statement of stereotypical cultural differences (Böhn, Das Formzitat 33–44, 100–105). The integration of the quotation in the surrounding communication and in the actual situation brings about incongruity of the first and of the second type and can also create comical effects, as in the case of irony, and usually does so in the case of generic comical modes like parody and travesty. In all these cases, incongruity can only be produced or occur if we expect congruity, which means that we have to have concepts of the normal or expectable, be it the conventional relation of signs and meaning in general which rules direct communication, or the more specific relation of sex and gender which forms the background of parodies and travesties founded upon that relation, cross-dressing and change of gender roles included. That leads us back to the distinction between affirmative and subversive laughter. On the one hand, these comical representations of gender rely on general assumptions of normality and conventionality which, in turn, these representations seem to affirm; on the other hand, these comical representations of gender produce incongruity between the expected and what is actually given and therefore seem to subvert the normal and the conventional. Now, what has the theory of the comic to say about this puzzling contradiction? Theories of the comic are numerous and heterogeneous, as Stefan Horlacher demonstrates in his theoretical overview in this volume. Such diversity is not an unusual phenomenon in the humanities, which often have been ascribed pluralism of methods and theories as one of their key characteristics. But theories of the comic are not only different from one another with respect to their subject, the aspect they emphasize, or the goal they are pursuing. They also differ in quite basic characterizations and explanations of their subject. Surveys of theories of the comic therefore have tried to categorize them according to their divergent views of the comic, distinguishing, namely, ‘laughing-at-theories’, which emphasize the aspects of comparison, exclusion, and denigration, from ‘laughing-with-theories’, which underline the possibility of exaltation, inclusion, and identification through the comic (Greiner 97–114). Theorists like Hobbes, Kant, Bergson, and Hegel are named as examples for the laughing-atposition, or the comic of denigration, whereas Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Bakhtin are nominated for the laughing-with-position, or the comic of exaltation. While Horlacher explores in more detail the historical ramifications of this distinction, I concentrate on its systematic and methodological aspects. As can already be seen by looking at the cited names of the theorists, the laughing-at-position is the older one. It seems to have always been quite clear that

53 laughing can be aggressive and used as a sanction for breaking social rules. Typically, a group laughs at someone who by this act is temporarily excluded from the group. The members of the group consider themselves as being in conformity with a certain norm which is accepted by the group, whereas the laughed-at person is considered as having violated this norm, being unable to meet its requirements. Being laughed at causes shame, a typical reaction to a loss of social acceptance. The shamed individual can seclude him- or herself from the group or can endeavour to modify his or her behaviour to regain acceptance. In both cases, the group successfully defends the norm at stake by less rigid means than, for example, direct violence or institutional disciplinary measures. The laughing-with-position is closely connected to modernism, although Bakhtin tries to trace it back to at least the Middle Ages and to the concept of the grotesque (4–27). The point of convergence between laughing-with and the grotesque occurs when they have an analogous relation to a norm. The grotesque violates an aesthetic norm, causing its rejection in classical aesthetics and poetics from Horace to Hegel. But in concordance with the general turn towards an aesthetics of deviation since the late eighteenth century, with its preference for the immoral, the deformed, the morbid, the uncanny, etc., the grotesque has also been revalorized as a positive term. Consequently, the norm it violates is questioned, or possibly even laughed at and, by this act, rejected. Seen from the standpoint of the laughing-at-position, the grotesque itself should be laughed at because it does not fulfil the requirements of the norm. Theorists like Bakhtin were able to argue that, on the contrary, we laugh with the grotesque character at the norm which we no longer accept. In fact, Bakhtin himself does not stress this point of laughing at a norm, which would be connected to comparison and exclusion. He conceives of the grotesque as something that transcends such boundaries set by norms, and that instead leads to inclusion and identification with the person who induces laughter (12, 26, 62, 92). The liberating force of such a comic emphasis on the corporeal and the creaturely added greatly to the attractiveness of Bakhtin’s concept and stimulated its reception in the context of post-structuralism and deconstruction, where it was often reduced to a means of subverting social norms such as, for instance, gender norms. The laughing-with-position in the form of a comic of subversion of norms would seem to form part of a modernist aesthetics with its key-concepts of the avant-garde, transgression and negation. These key-concepts are mainly negative and temporal; they conceive of modernism as something standing against another position. This opponent position is situated in the past, and modernism is moving away from it with the progress of time. Therefore it is not surprising that the laughing-with-position shares an inherent paradox of modernism. If modernism prevails, how can it continue if its essence is the negation and overcoming of a former position? What do we do and where do we go if there are

54 no more traditional boundaries to transgress? Like the concept of progress in the field of politics, modernism belongs to the ideology of an open and permissive society that encounters problems when standards are fully achieved. New or modified norms have to be constructed to justify the continuous struggle for modernity. (‘We have to go further still; that was only a first step, a false compromise, etc.’). The comic is possible only in situations in which the viewer does not experience physical danger or threat in any other way (Morreall 110). But would it not be a threat if one of my crucial norms were to be challenged? If laughing with A means laughing at the norm N, which is violated by A, then we can only laugh with A if we are willing to dismiss N. But if we are willing to do so, and therefore N is no longer really a norm for us, why do we still laugh? Possibly we do so because N is supported by a majority of the population or by a powerful elite which impose that norm on us. But if this is not the case, and nearly everyone laughs, and we conceive of this laughing as laughing with A at N, why do we laugh at all? To avoid this paradox, Bakhtin combines the laughing-at-theory with the social dimension of hegemony and suppression, be it the aristocracy and clergy suppressing the lower classes, the soviet hierarchy suppressing its citizens, or simply the mind suppressing the body. Yet, already Heinrich Heine formulated a comparable conception of a social and cultural superstratum suppressing a substratum that lashed back with laughter (cf. Goetschel; Böhn, Der fremde Mythos). The vast reception of Bakhtin’s work in the West, beginning in the 1960s, necessitated looking for other pairings of suppressor and suppressed and found them, even in the relation of modernism and postmodernism, explaining the latter’s mockery of the first. Eventually, the concept was taken up in gender studies generating the idea of a subversion of gender identities and relations through the comic (Butler, Gender Trouble 138f.), although the possibility of an affirmation of gender conceptions through laughter has also been taken into account (cf. Benedek and Binder 190f.; Lehnert 110). It has often been queried with whom and at whom we laugh as the viewers of cross-dressing comedies, what norm is affected thereby, and in what way it is affected (Garber; Benedek and Binder 218–232). This discussion will be taken up on a more general level with respect to the distinction between affirmative and subversive laughter (Jenkins). How can we decide which form of the comic we have at hand in a specific case, and what makes the difference on the structural level or on the level of concrete design of, for instance, a crossdressing comedy? Are we able to elaborate on a set of rules which allow us to explain why we regard one example as affirmative and another one as subversive? Most theorists of the comic have problems defining such rules: the general impression is that answers to these questions can only be found through analysis of each particular case, while such an approach would be unsatisfactory on the theoretical level.

55 My proposition is to examine things from a different perspective and to skip the affirmative-subversive distinction. Let us for heuristic purposes claim that everything comic is affirmative of an accepted norm, and its effect is laughing at someone who does not fulfil the requirements of this norm. Let us further claim that the differences we notice are not to be explained on the level of the comic and its structure and internal functioning, but on the level of the norms that are concerned. As I outlined above, the distinctions between different kinds of the comic have emerged since the late eighteenth century. In this period (Western) societies have changed considerably through a process which is usually summarized by the term ‘modernization’. To its main effects belong an increase in social differentiation and a shift from stratified differentiation through static social hierarchies to functional differentiation according to changing social contexts that the individual encounters (Luhmann). In a society differentiated by strata, norms of behaviour depend on the individual’s more or less fixed position in society; therefore, the norms are substantial. They can be formulated in ‘if. . ., then. . .’ clauses with a restricted set of variables because the types of situations that bind an individual are limited. In a functionally differentiated society, substantial norms can be given only for a specific functional area, and, given the ongoing differentiation and rising rate of social change, it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain a general orientation for behaviour from substantial norms. General guidelines have to be more structural and relational, putting emphasis on the ability to adjust substantial norms to changing circumstances or to infer rules for new situations from given ones which were formulated according to other conditions, instead of strictly applying a manual of behaviour in an inflexible manner. Actually, flexibility can be regarded as the super-norm of such societies. To be unable to fulfil the requirements of this norm (flexibility) can therefore consist, for example, of clinging too strongly to a substantial norm which appears to be at least partially inadequate to the given situation. This kind of rigid, inelastic behaviour is exactly what, according to Bergson, causes laughter. Bergson is one of the last theorists of the laughing-at-position, and not by chance does he defend it in a way that preserves the traditional concept of laughter as social punishment for violation of a norm, seemingly diminishing the norm to the somewhat vague idea of avoiding to weaken the élan vital. In my opinion, his theoretical position is the ‘missing link’ between the older tradition of the laughing-at-position that was connected to a system of substantial norms and the theoretical framework I would like to propose. Laughing-at implies laughing-with, and it affirms a norm which does not need to have any substantial content other than a specification of the imperative of flexibility. Revisiting the example of cross-dressing, we can discern several examples of laughing-at that illustrate certain aspects of this theoretical framework. The cross-dresser can be laughed at (and the spectators can laugh with characters in

56 the play laughing at the cross-dresser) because he or she does not behave according to substantial norms of gender-specific behaviour. Furthermore, the victims of the cross-dresser’s mimicry and disguise can be laughed at (and the spectators can laugh with the cross-dresser at them) because they take these norms for granted and are not able to adapt themselves to divergent standards of behaviour. We can explain both cases on the basis of the laughing-at-theory as affirmative of an accepted norm and do not need to use the affirmative/subversive distinction. In the following analysis of examples, I try to show that these theoretical tools are sufficient to fully explain seemingly subversive comical elements in the context of cross-dressing. My first example, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), is a US-American mainstream comedy directed by Beeban Kidron, with Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo in leading roles. They portray three drag queens on their way to Hollywood who get stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere, whose inhabitants seem quite provincial and not at all up-to-date as far as political correctness in gender matters is concerned. The town males are attracted to the three protagonists, but become hostile when they do not receive the reaction they had in mind. The women are impressed by their combination of extreme ‘femininity’ and toughness. In a way, the drag queens are the better women (comparable to Tootsie), who then give the real women in town a lesson in feminism, or simply how to fight their dull men. The trio’s most ardent enemy is sheriff Dollard, who is clearly homophobic and the most ridiculed character in the movie. In the end, the spectators are told in a very moralist way that one’s sex does not really matter, but one’s intrinsic values do. First, we laugh at the drag queens, which are played by actors who are known as attractive, athletic, tough males, possessing a certain macho allure: thus the difference between their popular image and their appearance in the movie is substantial. We can deduce from their representation the supposition that to produce laughter about men impersonating women we need to have very ‘male’, i.e. stereotypically male actors behaving in an exaggerated, stereotypically ‘female manner’. Then we laugh at the deceived males of the town who behave badly, get punished by the drag queens, and feel even more humiliated because they are dominated by women. But mostly we laugh at the sheriff, who is the only one to defend a norm the three protagonists could be said to violate. This norm of sex-gender-congruity is presented in the movie as obsolete and is supplanted by an ‘anything goes’ attitude that finds its ideological legitimization in the moral evident at the end of the film. The sheriff does not comply with this new norm, but sticks to the old one, drawing the laughter of others. The one who should be the embodiment of the norm is actually the only one who is not at all willing to accept the norm and is therefore excluded from the community – an aspect of the traditional comedy motif of a world turned topsy-turvy.

57 My second example, Tacones lejanos (High Heels), released in 1991, is a typical movie by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began as an underground artist in the Franco era and became a symbol of the cultural boom in the young Spanish democracy because of being eccentric, post-modern, and erotically overt. Like its filmic predecessor and model, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), it is a movie about a mother (Marisa Paredes), who is a famous artist, and her daughter (Victoria Abril), who feels neglected by her. In a sense, it is a sequel to Imitation of Life because the daughter is now grown up and married to a former lover of her mother’s. One of the new elements of the film is the character of Judge Dominguez (Miguel Bosé), who first appears as an impersonator of the mother, Becky del Páramo, rendering in drag an only slightly exaggerated portrayal of her already quite sophisticated and mannered behaviour. The daughter, Rebeca, is very attracted to the person who so successfully assumes the public role of Becky even though she always felt overwhelmed by the original. Dominguez himself has a very close relationship with his mother, who is a fan of Becky. As we learn later on, the real reason for Dominguez’s behaviour is that he is conducting an investigation under cover. When Rebeca’s husband is murdered, she meets Dominguez again in his role of judge without knowing that he is the same person who impersonates her mother. He appears to be disguised either way, both as a woman and as a man. Nevertheless, the only characteristic he can surely be identified by and through which the ‘anagnorisis’ can be fulfilled is a mark exactly on his penis. Although his male sex is never questioned, he appears as a virtuoso in gender matters. He is able to act as the iconic female Becky, as a vigorous and virile lover, and as the austere and distanced judge. In the role of the latter he represents social and juridical norms, and accordingly he shows a specific male gendered behaviour and appearance: formal suit, body language that signals distance, self-control, power, and elaborate and impersonal verbal expression. But despite all this, he breaks the rules when it seems necessary to him to pursue his goals, be it an altruistic fight for justice or for very personal interests. He is neither ridiculed as a person nor could we say that any of his different roles would be heavily derided. Although there are many comical scenes in the movie and nearly every character at some point causes laughter, no one is laughed at because she or he does not conform to a certain norm. The overall impression one draws from the film is that nothing really follows an expectable rule, although we are familiar with elements likewise found in other films, or, more generally, from our cultural traditions. Sirk’s Imitation of Life is a serious reflection upon changing gender role models and the individual’s problems with coming to terms with them, whereas Almodóvar’s Tacones lejanos depicts gender role models running wild, with characters changing from one stereotype to another, and praises the individual’s sovereignty in playing with these models and norms. If someone

58 lacks that sovereignty, because he or she is too much attached to a given norm, the result is tragic, not comic. Rebeca always feels incapable of attaining the oversized gender role model presented by her mother, and therefore the combination of homage and mockery in Dominguez’s impersonation of Becky is exactly what attracts her. So at whom or at what do we laugh at all? I would say we laugh at different characters, but primarily at Rebeca, during moments when the character cannot oversee the situation, is bound to an expectation that disappoints, is guided by a rule that does not fit, etc., and we can laugh at ourselves when we feel that we are in the same situation. Thus Almodóvar’s post-modern comedy with its exalted mix of genres, quotations, and stereotypes, revives an element of comedy that is quite old and can be found in older comedies that rely mainly on laughing at violations of given substantial norms. This element of laughing at a lack of both flexibility and power of judgement gains more and more dominance, for example in the popular theatre of the 19th century. Johann Nestroy, for instance, begins with plays showcasing moral correction and shifts more and more away from their clear structure of defined values. Especially the roles Nestroy wrote for himself as an actor in his own plays form a cultural model of this comical praise of flexibility. The protagonists played by Nestroy are diabolical in a very literal sense of the word: the Greek word diabolein means to mix up, to make a mess, to destroy existing structures. In pursuing their own selfish goals, his characters initiate the comical action and proceed to very successfully play bad tricks on other people, show a cynical attitude towards commonly accepted values, and often get in trouble towards the end of the play which results in a resolution that brings a new stability and an all-inclusive harmony. Nestroy’s later comedies are, however, very unusual, full of artistry and formal elegance, and lacking any realism and probability. The strange thing is that, although it is known that Nestroy had rather conservative personal opinions, the position of his comedies regarding the values at stake is in most cases not decidable if we analyse them carefully. This quality is something he shares with another great comedian of Austrian origin, Billy Wilder. A comparison between Nestroy’s 19th century plays and Billy Wilder’s 20th century movies makes clear that even comedies which at first glance seem quite conservative may appear subversive if we take a second look. But it would be better to say that they are affirmative of the norm of flexibility, which could be the genuine contribution of the comical to the process of modernization. Having said that, one example of such a comedy deserves more thorough analysis. Released in 1961, Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, is a comedy about the clashing of political systems, economies, cultures, classes, and gender roles. It thus serves as a good example demonstrating that what was said about gender identity applies also to social and cultural identity in general. The setting is Berlin after the Second World War. McNamara (James Cagney), the

59 US-American CEO of the local branch of Coca-Cola, endeavours to conduct business and to prepare the next step in his career. He must cope with employees who struggle to leave behind the militaristic habits from the Nazi era and present themselves as good democratic citizens, but nevertheless treat their American boss like a new Führer. That is exactly the address his wife constantly applies to him, revealing that in fact he is quite at ease with this behaviour. While the democratic West-Germans are former Nazis, the US-American CEO is a dictator whom his wife calls “mein Führer”. McNamara finds himself in serious trouble soon after his boss instructs him to mind his daughter who is coming to Berlin. The young girl, however, falls in love with an ardent supporter of communism from East-Berlin, Ludwig Otto Piffel (Horst Buchholz), and marries him. But love between a rich and naïve American girl and an equally naive young communist does not at all mean mutual understanding. He truly believes that she will give up all her wealth and her way of life in order to live with him in post-war socialist East German society, deprived of all luxury. She romanticizes their presumably very humble life as a couple into an intimate love-nest and dons her new role without hesitation, as if it were a new fancy dress. Even poverty can be fashionable if one only has to experience it infrequently, but in this comedy people seem to be able to take on a new personality by simply changing their clothes. The young communist must be transformed into an acceptable son-in-law, and this is quickly achieved by the right costume combined with a rushed adoption by an impoverished count. With this motif, One, Two, Three follows an old tradition in comedy. It is the clothes that make the man (or the woman). It is the manifestation of cultural difference on the surface that generates the ‘deep structure’ of personal identity, and not the other way round, as one might think. The same applies to gender, as Billy Wilder has shown more thoroughly in Some Like it Hot. Cross-dressing, however, also plays an important role in One, Two, Three. McNamara’s first strategy before giving Piffel a make-over is to get rid of him by letting him appear as a saboteur or even an American spy to the East-German police. This is a successful strategy, but McNamara soon learns that the daughter of his boss is pregnant. Now that he needs to extract Piffel from jail, he uses his contact with three corrupt Soviet officials eager to woo his good-looking secretary, an incarnation of the German Fräuleinwunder (Lieselotte Pulver). McNamara feigns consent to the arrangement, but forces his male employee Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar) to put on his secretary’s dress and assume her role. The Soviet officials get the fake American spy Piffel out of jail and exchange him for the fake secretary Schlemmer in a scene reminiscent of cold war espionage thrillers. Some comical episodes in One, Two, Three seem to simply follow the wellknown principle according to which comedies show the world turned topsy-turvy,

60 as, for example, when the fanatic young communist crosses the border at the Brandenburg gate and is taken for a saboteur because he unintentionally carries the slogan “Ami go home” and a cuckoo-clock with Uncle Sam as the cuckoo. We get the impression that the world in fact is topsy-turvy in relation to our expectations. Everyone is not, or not only, what he or she seems to be at first glance, but also the opposite; people transform from someone on one end of the cultural spectrum into someone on the other end in the shortest time by changing clothes and assuming a different habitus, like an actor on the stage. Cultural diversity is not represented by different characters inhabiting their respective positions, but rather seems to be inherent in the character, contained as a whole in each character and manifesting itself in various ways, depending on the situation and the circumstances. Everything is subject to dealing and is exchangeable for money. The only character who stubbornly opposes this principle is Piffel, and he is also the one who is changed in the most extreme and thorough manner. While the film’s anarchic and cynical undertones may have been the cause for its rejection and neglect by critics at the time of its first release, its popularity later, at least in Germany, is surely based on the fact that the confrontation between East and West and the actual situation in Berlin had lost a lot of its threatening potential in comparison to the early sixties. In its time, the movie was seemingly regarded by many viewers as by far too ambiguous and too disorientating in relation to central values that were at stake precisely at that moment. It gave the impression that the West-Germans had turned from Nazism to democracy as if they had changed from a brown shirt into a white one, that the one and only goal of Western (American) democracy was to sell Coke to everyone in the world, and that any communist could be turned into an aristocrat if you gave him a rich girl to marry and the right clothes. That was not to everyone’s taste in 1961. We are thus incited to re-examine our bearings because of the instability of things, of personal identities, and of relations. The signs which usually represent cultural differences are no longer reliable. We have to decide whether they are meant the way they normally are meant or if they are used in an indirect way to symbolize a specific way of seeing things or of representing the world. This applies to the mise-en-scène as well. The examination of Piffel by the police, for example, is as much a parody as a travesty of such interrogations seen in other movies, and so are the exchange of Piffel for the fake secretary and the car chase through East-Berlin. According to Judith Butler, laughter is able to weaken traditional, normative views of things and personal identities (Gender Trouble 138f.). In One, Two, Three, however, laughter seems to be the effect of such weakening of normative positions, while the cause appears to be something different: the struggle to earn one’s living or, when possible, to acquire wealth and power. The latter is

61 condensed in one motif: money. Money makes things and people change. While on the one hand money surely stabilizes social hierarchies, here it is the general source of instability. Money also plays a comparable role in other famous movies that Billy Wilder directed before and after One, Two, Three. In Some Like It Hot (1959) it is the main motif of the female protagonist, as it is of the male protagonists in the German movie Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love) from 1951 of which Some Like It Hot is a remake. Seemingly Wilder felt obliged to create a stronger motivation for the male protagonists to dress up as women for the American audience. In The Apartment (1960) the protagonist (Jack Lemmon) lets his boss use his apartment for his amorous adventures, which causes ongoing misunderstandings and a mixing-up of personal identities. Irma la Douce (1963) is a movie about a prostitute whose admirer tries to prevent her from selling her body to someone else by paying her himself with money earned by taking on another identity. In Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) a would-be songwriter is so desperate to succeed that he is willing to offer his wife to a popular singer in exchange for his help breaking into show business. In The Fortune Cookie (1966) Jack Lemmon portrays a man who pretends to be disabled in order to extort money from his insurance company. In all these movies laughter is not the cause of a weakening of the normal and expectable, but the effect of such a weakening, its cause being money. In these cases, money makes the world go round, but in topsy-turvy fashion. In One, Two, Three the protagonist embodying this principle of constant change is McNamara. He is not in the least a good guy. In fact, he is cynical, selfish, unscrupulous, and he surely is no liberal intellectual who wants to overcome binary oppositions and ideological boundaries. Actually, he is a conservative, if not a downright reactionary, who pursues with frankness his own personal goals against other people’s interests. In doing so he causes laughter, but in most cases not intentionally, and the laughter usually is not directed at him but at other people (which changes slightly towards the end). We probably would not like him in real life, but we can develop a tendency to like him in an ambivalent way during the comedy, as an effect of the laughter he causes. The position of the movie regarding the values at stake is, if we analyse it carefully, for the most part undecidable. For example: Piffel’s idealism is satirized as naive and ideological throughout One, Two, Three until a pivotal conversation takes place with McNamara and Peripetchikoff, a former Soviet official trying to become a business man in the West. After the ensuing controversy about Piffel’s and McNamara’s convictions, Piffel is devastated, becomes deeply melancholic, and expresses his hope that at least his children will be able to build a better world. At that moment McNamara tells him that he has just quoted Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the oath of the American army.

62 At this point, we might well ask what this comic moment could mean in relation to the aforementioned values. Should we regard the values as ridiculous, because it was formerly suggested to us that Piffel’s idealism is ridiculous? Or does this scene demonstrate that Piffel’s ideals are best represented by American democracy? But wouldn’t that mean that the values of democracy and communism are essentially the same? And is McNamara, the winner in this controversy about ethics, a good representative of these values? Analogous questions could be posed regarding the use of the cuckoo-clock as a leitmotif, which in a very condensed way constantly reminds us that One, Two, Three is a film about the American way of life and its values. The answers that individual spectators might give to these questions rely heavily on personal dispositions. If the spectators are able to elevate themselves above the situation they can regard the incongruity as comical and laugh; if not, they might either experience the incongruity as simply irritating and disorienting without causing laughter, or they might understand the intention to create a comic situation but deny their consent, and therefore not laugh. In the complex case of One, Two, Three viewers might even laugh at one person, group, or habitus that is ridiculed without laughing at another that is also ridiculed because the latter depends on structures so deeply internalized by the viewer that the incongruity does not cause a comical effect. I have tried to show that the comic in general and the comical display of cultural diversity in particular does not necessarily tend to overcome traditional oppositions and ideological boundaries, as theorists like Butler suggest, although it mixes up the normal and expectable state of things to a considerable extent. Comical effects are not necessarily the result of weakened normative structures, but can be produced by, for example, the representation of the role of money in capitalist society, which, on another level, surely creates and stabilizes normative structures. The comic is not the ultimate locus from which one can embark on revolutionizing the world: for scholars specializing in the field of humour, a topic long neglected by cultural studies, this conclusion could be a little bit disappointing. I leave it to the reader to decide whether he or she will accept McNamara’s concluding statement as a relief (also an effect often attributed to the comic): “Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad”, and laugh with him and me, or not.

Works Consulted Almodóvar, Pedro (Dir.): Tacones lejanos. Spain/France 1991. Bakhtin, Mikhail: Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984.

63 Balme, Christopher, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel (Eds.): Theater als Paradigma der Moderne? Positionen zwischen historischer Avantgarde und Medienzeitalter. Tübingen – Basel: Francke 2003. Benedek, Susanne, and Adolphe Binder: Von tanzenden Kleidern und sprechenden Leibern. Crossdressing als Auflösung der Geschlechterpolarität? Dortmund: Ebersbach 1996. Berger, Peter L.: Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997. Bergson, Henri: Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. by Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola (NY): Dover 2005. Böhn, Andreas: Das Formzitat. Bestimmung einer Textstrategie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Intertextualitätsforschung und Gattungstheorie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2001. —. Der fremde Mythos und die Mythisierung des Fremden. Heines politischliterarische Mythologie in ‘Vitzliputzli’. In: Aufklärung und Skepsis. Internationaler Heine-Kongreß 1997 zum 200. Geburtstag. Ed. by Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte, and Karin Füllner. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 1998. Pp. 367–378. —. Thesen zum Verhältnis von Indirektheit und Komik. In: Von Intentionalität zur Bedeutung konventionalisierter Zeichen. Festschrift für Gisela Harras zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by Kristel Proost and Edeltraud Winkler. Tübingen: Narr 2006. Pp. 219–225. Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London – New York: Routledge 1993. —. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London – New York: Routledge 1990. Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge 1992. Goetschel, Willi: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. In: The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 March 2007. ⬍http://www.litencyc.com⬎. Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992. Haider-Pregler, Hilde (Ed.): Komik. Ästhetik, Theorien, Strategien. Wien: Böhlau 2006. Harras, Gisela: Auf dem Weg zu einer einheitlichen Theorie der Indirektheit des Sprechens. In: Rhetorik – Figuration und Performanz. DFG-Symposion 2002. Ed. by Jürgen Fohrmann. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 2004. Pp. 219–245. Hoffmann, Kurt (Dir.): Fanfaren der Liebe. Germany 1951. Jenkins, Ron: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: The Free Press 1994. Kidron, Beeban (Dir.): To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. USA 1995. Lehnert, Gertrude: Wenn Frauen Männerkleider tragen. Geschlecht und Maskerade in Literatur und Geschichte. München: dtv 1997.

64 Luhmann, Niklas: The Differentiation of Society. Trans. by Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore. New York – Guildford: Columbia University Press 1982. Nestroy, Johann: Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Jürgen Hein, Johann Hüttner, Walter Obermaier and W. Edgar Yates. Wiem: Deuticke 1977ff. Morreall, John: Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York 1983. Palmer, Jerry: Taking Humour Seriously. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Sirk, Douglas (Dir.): Imitation of Life. USA 1959. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson: Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell 1986. Wilder, Billy (Dir.): Irma la Douce. USA 1963. —. Kiss Me, Stupid. USA 1964. —. One, Two, Three. USA 1961. —. Some Like it Hot. USA 1959. —. The Apartment. USA 1960. —. The Fortune Cookie. USA 1966.

II. Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration

Jessica Hamann

“Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”: Laughter, Blush, and Gender Roles in Gottfried Keller’s Novella Cycle A Formula for Love. The Epigram (1881) This contribution analyses the role of body language, laughter and blush, in Gottfried Keller’s novella cycle. The interpretation highlights the employment and subversion of the usual understanding of body language as natural, involuntarily produced and therefore a reliable sign of inherent characteristics of the person, namely gender. The male protagonist fails to find the ideal congruity between appearance and essence for which he is looking, but – or better therefore – achieves mutual acknowledgement and understanding.

The comic is probably one of the most frequently investigated topics when it comes to Gottfried Keller’s works. Although humour and the comic are central aspects of research on Keller (Preisendanz 190), analyses have tended to focus on irony and humour as a peculiarity of his narrative style. The following analysis of the text, however, reveals a broader functioning of comic strategies, which are entwined with gender roles and play an important role on different levels of Keller’s Das Sinngedicht (A Formula for Love),1 such as in the frame narrative, in the embedded narratives, and in Lucie’s commentaries on the novellas. Furthermore, the phenomenon of blushing is linked with laughter as both are at the centre of the Logau-epigram, which forms the starting point of the protagonist’s journey. The epigram: “Wie willst du weiße Lilien zu roten Rosen machen?/ Küß eine weiße Galathee: sie wird errötend lachen” (8) (“How do you want to turn white lilies into red roses?/ Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”), has often been read as dealing with the balanced relationship of sensuality and morality; one example being Ermatinger, who reads the blush as the limitation of manners felt by the subject, and the laughter as the joie de vivre of the intellectually free human being (527). The plot thus enacts the protagonist’s search for a woman matching these conditions, a woman who blushes and laughs when she is kissed. In my paper I want to take a closer look at how laughter and blush function in the text in comparison to what the Logau-epigram – when read as a recipe – suggests. Viewing the blush, like laughter, as a phenomenon that is both 1

The English version of the main title and chapter titles are borrowed from the translation by Washington whose new edition of Keller’s novella cycle was not available at the time of completion of this paper. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

68 physical and linguistic, it can be read as a sign of sensuality and the pleasure principle. Therefore, it can be claimed that A Formula for Love, on the one hand, foregrounds an apprehension of laughter and blushing as limitations of the subject, but, on the other hand, illuminates the liberating tendencies of these phenomena.

Blushing as Writing of the Body Scholarly work on the blush suggests that it renders body and character legible and can supplement language with an ephemeral materiality (O’Farrell 3–7). Furthermore, O’Farrell detects a shift in the nineteenth-century management of the blush from manners to self-consciousness. While in the Logau-epigram blushing seems to be a stable indicator of character, the novellas enact it as a product of circumstance. Apart from shame, often regarded as the only cause of blushing, a reddened complexion can be read in many different ways, for instance as a response to delight, alcohol consumption, anger, as self-expression of a truth, which can even contradict the spoken word. A scientist’s crisis of identity forms the beginning of the novella cycle. Reinhart has almost forgotten what ordinary human life consists of, including laughter, and he only engages in laughter when watching the “Komödien” (Das Sinngedicht 7) (“comedies”) of the chemical substances with which he is preoccupied. His laughter lacks any social function for he spends his life in total isolation in his Faustian laboratory. When examining light under his microscope, a sudden pain in his eyes causes him to reflect on his life and the meaning of the research he is doing. Unhappy that he lives in isolation, he begins to long for human company and discovers a dusty volume of Lachmann’s Lessing edition containing the Logau-epigram. But what does Reinhart intend to do with the epigram? He reads it as a guideline for social interaction and social conventions because the Lessing edition is found among books dealing with “halbvergessenen menschlichen Dingen” (8) (“half-forgotten human affairs”). Reinhart begins a quest, as it were, for the ‘Lost Laughter’, and especially for a woman’s laughter, which according to Logau’s epigram is supposed to occur in combination with blushing. This epigram, however, promotes patriarchal notions of femininity, distinguished by manners, virtue, and chastity. Furthermore, as Neumann points out, the Logau-epigram and the embedded narratives can be read as a reiteration of the Pygmalion myth (556). In the latter context laughter and blushing function as signs of revival. The single elements of white, red, and blush respectively, are to be found in each of the novellas. The epigram suggests that it is up to the man to bring the woman to life, who is then to laugh as a sign of her pleasure and enjoyment in his kiss and yet to blush, signifying her virtue and good manners. The Logau-epigram illustrates an asymmetric relationship between men and women by emphasizing the active role of men.

69 On the lookout for a woman who matches the conditions of the epigram, Reinhart leaves his laboratory and enters a series of situations designed to test his hypothesis. The ensuing encounters with women, however, make him realize that his project is not as easy as he thought. The first test subject Reinhart meets is a female customs officer who likes to spend her time laughing at her former lover, a master builder, who chose, instead of her, to marry an ugly woman in order to receive her father’s permission to build a bridge. Now the unhappy husband chooses to cross his own bridge as often as possible to see the customs officer he loves but at whom he dares not look. When Reinhart crosses the bridge and asks her for a kiss, she gives it laughingly, yet she does not blush, “obgleich auf ihrem weißen Gesicht der bequemste und anmutigste Platz dazu vorhanden war” (Das Sinngedicht 12) (“although on her pale face there was the easiest and most delightful space for it”). It is she kissing him, although the epigram explicitly employs the imperative “Küß” (8) (“Kiss”) from the male perspective. She laughs at Reinhart in the same way she laughs about her former lover; even when Reinhart is riding away she does not stop laughing. He has to experience that there are different forms of laughter and that the optical effect of laughing is not an unambiguous sign of love or pleasure. The customs officer treats Reinhart like her former lover, making him feel ridiculous and making a joke out of the kiss. Reinhart’s next encounter with a woman constitutes the second test of the Logau-epigram. Reinhart meets the daughter of a priest he is acquainted with, who often blushes without any visible reason. However, when Reinhart kisses her, she blushes over and over but does not laugh at all. Here, blush is a site of absolute moral obligation and leaves no space for pleasure. Everytime the priest’s daughter blushes, she runs away and thus flees from her complexion reflecting a readable self. She apparently feels discomfort in the company of men but is even more afraid of being held up to ridicule, which becomes clear when she feeds Reinhart’s horse by putting some bread in a knitting basket and some water in a watering can. The horse turns this situation into a comic scene by becoming entangled with the watering can and the knitting basket, and is unable to free itself from these bothersome items. Reinhart laughs about the whole scene and the priest’s daughter asks him to keep it secret so as to avoid controversy and ridicule. Eventually she gives him a letter for a friend who lives nearby and thus uses Reinhart as letter-carrier who is unable to read what he is carrying. He becomes the bearer of signifiers and transmitter of wishes (Prasse 121) of which he knows nothing. Later the reader learns that it is the small matter of a request for radish seeds. Keller’s staging of the blush in the case of the priest’s daughter illustrates the problem of a world that requires the individual to allow the external world to coerce and control his/her inner reality. The priest’s daughter appears to be the victim of the involuntary blush. It becomes clear that she has internalized the moral code to an extent that all passion and unfulfilled

70 desires can be naught but suppressed. The contrast between this episode and the story of the customs officer makes clear that the Logau-epigram fails to assert the degree of moral obligation and pleasure it demands. In the next chapter, Reinhart’s project becomes even more problematic. Reinhart encounters his prospective next test subject, the daughter of an innkeeper. He tries to get to the point of kissing through small talk but fails badly. The innkeeper’s daughter interrupts him: Da ich einmal die einsame Wirtstochter hier vorstelle, so wollen wir die wundervollen Dinge nicht verschweigen, welche man sich unter solchen Umständen sagt, und der Welt den Lauf lassen! Fangen sie an, Herr! Und seien sie witzig und vorlaut, und ich werde mich zieren und spröde tun! (Das Sinngedicht 18f.). For although I here represent the lonely daughter of an innkeeper, we should not try to conceal all the wonderful things to be said to each other under such circumstances and let the world take its course! Do start, sir! And be amusing and forward and I will be coy and prudish!

Reinhart is perfectly flabbergasted and does not know what to say. She then asks him if he would be willing to invert roles so that she might court him and tell him pleasant things while he would play coy. Without hesitation she puts it into practise and talks of her great liking for him, but in such a facetious and ironic way that he can only exclaim: “Sie sind ja der Teufel im Mieder! Ein starker Geist mit langen Haaren?” (20) (“You’re the devil in a girdle! A strong ghost with long hair?”). When Reinhart asks her for a kiss, she again adopts the active role and tells him “zum Dank für die angenehme Unterhaltung mit dem Schimpf davon [zu] reiten, geküßt worden zu sein wie ein kleines Mädchen” (ibid.) (“as a ‘thank you’ for the pleasant conversation, to ride off in disgrace for having been kissed like a small girl”). He agrees, but when she approaches him his face inadvertently adopts an expression of coldness and she withdraws. Although he has initially agreed to accepting her kiss, his contenance comes to tell a story that contradicts his words. While the blush as the language of colour performs a somatic act of confession, the coldness of Reinhart’s expression is obfuscating and even threatening: “In diesem Augenblick wallte aber ein kalter Schatten über sein Gesicht, die Augen funkelten unsicher zwischen Lust und Zorn, um den Mund zuckte ein halb spöttisches Lächeln” (21) (“But in this moment, a cold shadow swirled over his face, the eyes blazed diffidently both in lust and anger, the face twitched with half a mocking smile”). The narrator elaborates that Reinhart decides to kiss her but then refuses to do so because he is afraid that she will only laugh but not blush; being a conscientious scientist, he does not want to repeat this experience. In contrast to the priest’s daughter, the innkeeper’s daughter seems to lack a concept of moral obligation. Instead, she lives according to the pleasure principle, and all her pleasure is devoted to despising men and to playing with them, as Lucie later

71 on remarks when she tells Reinhart the background story of Salome, the innkeeper’s daughter. Salome’s conduct and especially the comedy inherent to the scene breaches convention, challenges assumptions of propriety, and reveals the performative aspect of gender roles. These first three encounters with women illustrate the problematic dimension of Reinhart’s project. When Reinhart reads the Logau-epigram as a guideline he seems to misinterpret it. According to Selbmann this kind of literature becomes only accessible through life (161) and since Reinhart’s isolation separates him from life, he is not able to understand it. Although Reinhart is not experienced concerning literature, the vision of femininity presented accords with his ideas about and ideals of women, which he tries to defend against Lucie’s criticism in their narrative duel. But before discussing this point in more detail, I first want to take a closer look at the embedded narrative Die Berlocken (The Charms) for it adds another dimension to the function of laughter and blushing in Keller’s A Formula for Love. In The Charms the blush is depicted as a misleading sign, and the European perspective on the savage as an idealized image of true nature and free humanity turns out to be a projection. Thibaut, who wears the charms as a sign of his masculinity, is subjected to misreadings in different ways: First, concerning the jewellery hearts that he obtained by devious means; second, when later giving these hearts to Quoneshi, the American-Indian woman he intends to marry. But the first misreading is already based on a previous one: Thibaut receives from Marie Antoinette a golden watch with the hint that he has to earn the charms for it himself. He is uncertain what she wants him to do and therefore asks his friends for advice. They tell him that he is supposed to collect the charms from small souvenirs of the ladies whose hearts he has broken. Consequently, Thibaut simulates love attachments to several women in order to gain small souvenirs for his watch. While the stories concerning the first three souvenirs are narrated in more detail, the following souvenirs are only briefly mentioned. In fact, what takes place is substitution: women are replaced by jewellery; the trophy takes the place of love. Ultimately, Thibaut no longer knows, “ob er das kleine Schmuckherz oder das liebende Menschenherz verlangte” (Das Sinngedicht 264) (“if he desired the small jewellery heart or the loving human heart”). As Brandstetter points out, the charms become a fetish (313). Thibaut desires the signs themselves, which initially represent women, but which eventually are not representations anymore because they only refer to themselves. But soon Thibaut’s deception is turned against him in a comic way. When he sets off for the New World, he meets the American-Indian girl Quoneshi and falls in love with her. He plans to marry her and bring her back to France. When they meet, they do not really understand each other, but even the inability to communicate does not make Thibaut think about what she really might want and after all, this is not a point he is interested in. When she points at his charms, she makes clear that she

72 wants to have them. At first, Thibaut is scared “über die Deutlichkeit des Verlangens” (269) (“of the explicitness of her desire”) and surprised “von der ungeheuerlichen Keckheit des Begehrens” (ibid.) (“by the impertinence of her wish”). He interprets the signs in his favour and tries to explain her behaviour by assuming that she does not have an idea of the worth and meaning of the charms. Bischoff points out that in respect to the cultural meaning of the charms this might be true (380). He mistakenly thinks that she wants to marry him. Believing he has the prospect of bringing her home as a living symbol of his masculinity, and attracted by her charms, exotic appearance, and naturalness, he gives her the charms. Quoneshi’s blush fulfils the first condition of the Logau-epigram but parodies it at the same time. Her blush is a reaction to receiving the charms from Thibaut; she is now delighted by possessing the object of her desire. Thibaut is duped by Quoneshi although he is still entirely convinced that she intends to marry him. Thibaut is only concerned with satisfying his vanity. He wants to bring home another trophy that is, in this case, not a piece of jewellery but the exotic woman herself. This time, it is not only a symbol of victory over a woman that is supposed to add another trophy to his watch, Quoneshi is also to be the symbol of his victory over the foreign world. Eventually, the joke he imagines when he thinks about the effect of bringing Quoneshi to his own culture is reversed. The story’s conclusion offers an unexpected turn of events. The next day, Thibaut has to look at his charms as they dangle from the nose of a dancing American-Indian warrior, who is endowed with all the attributes of male beauty, power, and threat by the narrator Lucie. He learns that this is Quoneshi’s fiancé whom she is going to marry the same day. The scene reveals to Thibaut his ethnological misreading of the other. The charms, the signs of his pathetic victories over women, become the signifiers of his arrogance. Their cultural significance is removed or rather shifts to being a signifier of a true love attachment (between Quoneshi and ThunderBear). Both Thibaut and the exaggerated European view of ‘primitive’ people become objects of ridicule. Thibaut’s misreading does not only refer to the impossibility of communication, but to the functioning of the blush, too. Thibaut fails to interpret Quoneshi’s blush for he assumes that it is directed towards him and reads it as a sign of agreement. The text emphasizes the illegibility of the blush when it makes the “zarte Rothaut des Urwalds [. . .] noch röter” (Das Sinngedicht 270) (“red skin of the jungle [. . .] even more red”). When a reddening complexion renders the body legible, how is it applicable in the case of the ‘red people’? Finally, the face of the dancing warrior ThunderBear turns out to be the ultimate parody of the discipline of reading complexions: “Ganz starr vor Erstaunen blickte Thibaut nach dem Tänzer hin, dessen schreckliches Gesicht in allen Farben zu blitzen schien, so daß er es nicht deutlich zu sehen vermochte in seiner Verwirrung” (272f.) (“Paralysed with

73 astonishment, Thibaut looked at the dancer whose terrifying face seemed to flash in all colours so that in confusion he could not see clearly anymore”). The Charms is the last story of the narrative duel between Lucie and Reinhart. While the previous stories were somehow more serious, Lucie turns her story into a farce which shows that she is tired of the narrative duel and perhaps even dissatisfied with the direction the stories are taking.

The Narrative Duel between Lucie and Reinhart A Formula for Love is a text which works with multiple points of view. The complex interconnection of frame narrative and embedded narratives results in the impossibility of identifying a single narrator who could guarantee unambiguously a stated view. This game with the dualism of two perspectives characterizes, according to Preisendanz, Keller’s narrative principle and can be defined as humour that manifests itself in the complexity, multidimensionality, and ambivalence of the narration (213). Keller changes the form of the frame narrative insofar as the meeting of Reinhart and Lucie is at the core of the plot structure and, moreover, the negotiation of their different points of view is thematically linked with the embedded narratives. Thus the relationship between Reinhart and Lucie becomes part of the embedded stories. This technique breaks open the traditional form of novella cycles such as Boccaccio’s Decamerone or Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Émigrés). While Boccaccio’s embedded narratives were interchangeable, in A Formula for Love each of them fulfils a certain purpose concerning the dynamics of the frame narrative. Reinhart’s first meeting with Lucie is a good example of the misreading of laughter and blushing as indicators of a traditional vision of femininity. When he first sees her, dressed in white, washing roses in a fountain, her image evokes Galathea of the Logau-epigram. Initially, Reinhart is unable to move and when he wants to hand over the letter he received from the priest’s daughter, he mistakenly gives Lucie the note with the Logau-epigram he kept in his pocket. As a result, this kind of Freudian slip makes Reinhart blush and Lucie laugh about the comic effect of the situation. Undeterred by the beginning of his encounter with Lucie, Reinhart plans to test the Logau-epigram one more time. When first they meet, Lucie almost asks him to leave her house because she senses in his behaviour his lack of self-awareness and desire for her to be his next test subject. Although he is fascinated by her, Lucie does not meet Reinhart’s expectations of how a woman should behave. Upon discovering that she owns a huge library, he inconsiderately asks her why she goes in for such things, referring to her interest in books. She does not answer his question but blushes and Reinhart is so embarrassed that he blushes, too. Reinhart’s blush reflects his

74 awareness of gender roles and shows that he feels uncomfortable in respect to his own critique of her education. In the sequel, the mutual telling of novellas presents different models of identity and alterity which serve as controversial role models in the narrative duel between Lucie and Reinhart. Both first must go through a process of maturing before being able to accept each other as equal partners. Eventually, they come together but their way of getting to know each other is linked to the mutual narration of stories. It is Lucie’s uncle who dubs this a narrative duel, which is itself an interesting formulation in view of the duel being an enactment of masculinity (Frevert 214–232). Each prepares a strategy: Reinhart tries through his stories to create a defence for his position; Lucie sends out rhetorical arrows in order to undermine Reinhart’s point of view. While Reinhart defends himself, Lucie becomes the attacker. Thus, a symbolical reversal of gender roles can be identified. Rhetorical and comic strategies play a leading role in this management of gender roles. In respect to the narrative duel, Lucie’s comments on Reinhart’s stories in particular subvert the readings of these stories and suggest a re-reading. In the beginning, both protagonists have extremely fixed and normative ideas of happiness and love. Lucie’s commentary on her story Von einer törichten Jungfrau (About a Foolish Maiden) makes clear that she is critical of Salome, who appears to be quite the opposite of an educated woman. Reinhart’s point of view is defined by considering it advantageous if the man occupies a socio-culturally higher position than the woman and adopts the role of her educator. Furthermore, getting pleasure from the face of the other is an important criterion for Reinhart when it comes to love. He is convinced that the basis of a relationship should be taking great personal pleasure in the face of the other: “Findet dies Phänomen statt, so kann man Berge versetzen, und jedes Verhältnis wird dadurch möglich gemacht” (Das Sinngedicht 47) (“If this phenomenon takes place, one is able to move mountains and every relationship becomes possible”). Reinhart trusts the legibility of the body and consequently is convinced that the face is able to articulate and reveal the truth of one’s character and morality. For him, the face is the index of a person’s mind and body. Lucie addresses Reinhart’s statement with a pointed analogy: “[D]as gefallene Gesicht wird zum Merkmal des Käufers, der auf den Sklavenmarkt geht und die Veredelungsfähigkeit der Ware prüft” (49) (“[T]he likeable face becomes a feature of the buyer who goes to the slave market to check the potential for improvement”). Reinhart reproaches Lucie for interpreting his point maliciously. His first story Regine is intended to be an argument in defence of his perspective, but it misses the point. It is a story of misinterpretations. When Erwin Altenhammer recognizes Regine’s blush as she talks to a horseman, he immediately interprets her reddened complexion as a sign of her love attachment to this man. Subsequently, it becomes known that the horseman was her

75 brother. But this is only the beginning of a whole series of misreadings which finally leads to Regine’s death. Kaiser emphasizes that Regine again and again sends out wrong signs and that her life finally becomes a terrible story of speechlessness (523). But it is also a story of identity. In Regine (as well as in Don Correa), women who are not equal and emancipated have to adjust to a man’s vision of femininity. Specifically Regine has problems to adopting her new (class) identity, an identity which was imposed on her by her husband. When she commits suicide in the end, she again dons the apparel of a maidservant and so symbolically returns to her former identity. Even Lucie, when she was a girl, had once been willing to give up her (religious) identity for her love of a man and to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. In the end, she recognizes that she was a fool. It is this last confession of Lucie that illustrates that Reinhart has changed in the course of the narrative duel. He says: “Beschämt ermesse ich an diesem Beispiele des Guten, wie teilnahmslos mein Leben verlaufen ist, wie inhaltslos, und auf wie leichtsinnige Weise ich sogar vor ihr Angesicht geraten bin!” (Das Sinngedicht 302) (“Ashamed I have to realize how indifferent my life has been, how empty and even how carelessly I came into your sight!”). Eventually, Reinhart’s idea of an ideal female identity becomes questionable to him. He changes his vision of femininity and at the same time redefines his male role. But this development occurs in several stages. After his failure with Regine, the story Die arme Baronin (The Poor Baroness), as part of Reinhart’s new argumentative strategy, is supposed to demonstrate that a woman cannot survive on her own, that she is dependent on a man’s support. Lucie criticizes Reinhart’s story for not granting the baroness a modicum of free will. She rejects his argument by mocking Brandolf as a noble selector of women, examines the story critically, and tries to reinterpret the motivations of the baroness. A heated discussion unfolds between Reinhart and Lucie which does not follow objective criteria, but rather consists of mutual ironic attacks: “Ei, mein ungnädiges Fräulein, warum denn so gereizt? Ich wehre mich ja lediglich für eine Frauengestalt, die durch ihre Hilflosigkeit nur gewinnt und dem Geschlecht zur Zierde gereicht!” (162f.) (“Well, my bad-tempered young lady, why are you so irritable? I only fight for a female character who profits from her helplessness and is a credit for all women!”). Lucie answers laughingly: “Ei natürlich, ja! So versteh ich es ja auch! [. . .] ein sanftes Wollschäfchen mehr auf dem Markte!” (ibid.) (“Well, of course, yes! That’s the way I see it, too! [. . .] another gentle little wool sheep on the market!”). To diffuse the discussion, Lucie’s uncle intervenes in the narrative duel with an autobiographical story. Die Geisterseher (The Ghost Seers) supports Lucie’s position to a certain extent and contradicts Reinhart’s image of women, for a woman’s choice of partner is narrated, which relativizes male “Wahlfreiheit und -herrlichkeit” (162) (“freedom of choice and magnificence”). The uncle’s

76 narration proves to be beneficial to the discussion because it provokes reactions in Lucie and Reinhart. Reinhart reflects on the experiment of his mother and experiences himself as the victim of female arbitrarity. Furthermore, he is confused by the increasingly powerful impression Lucie is making on him and tries to resist his inner stirrings. Reinhart’s third narration, Don Correa, is his strongest argument in the narrative duel. Among all the male characters of the embedded narratives, Don Correa corresponds most clearly to ascribed male role behaviour for he combines the attributes of a warrior, conqueror, and educator. The confrontations of Don Correa with Donna Ferniza and Zambo-Maria refer to a splitting in the vision of femininity that exposes the wishful and fearful notions projected on femininity by the male narrator. This critical dimension becomes clearer in Lucie’s reaction to Reinhart’s story. She mocks him with an allusion to the Bible: “ ‘Das haben sie gut gemacht!’ sagte Lucie; ‘wir andern wollen uns merken, wie nützlich die Demut ist und wie erhöht wird, wer sich erniedrigt hat!’” (256) (“ ‘Well done!’ Lucie said; ‘we others will try to remember how useful humility is and how he that shall humble himself shall be exalted!’ ”).2 Lucie then tells the story The Charms as a caricature of and counter to Don Correa, a point which has already been discussed in more detail above. After finishing her last story, Lucie leaves immediately, and Reinhart, slightly annoyed, asks her uncle: “Was hat ihre prächtige Nichte [. . .] nur für einen Zorn auf meine armen Schützlinge, daß sie so satirische Pfeile auf mich abschießt? Das geht ja fast über das Ziel hinaus!” “Je nun”, erwiderte der Oberst lachend, “sie wehrt sich doch eigentlich nur ihrer Haut, die übrigens ein feines Fell ist! Und merken sie denn nicht, daß es weniger schmeichelhaft für Sie wäre, wenn sich die Lux [Lucie] gleichgültig dafür zeigte, daß Sie für allerhand unwissende und arme Kreaturen schwärmen, zu denen sie einmal nicht zu zählen das Glück oder Verdienst hat?” (274). “Why is your splendid niece [. . .] so furious with my poor protégés that she shoots such satirical arrows at me? That almost goes over the top!” “Well,” the Colonel replied laughingly, “she is only standing up for herself [. . .]! And haven’t you recognized that it would be less flattering for you if Lux [Lucie] was indifferent towards you being keen on all sorts of ignorant and poor creatures to which she is not lucky enough or has not the merit to belong to?”.

The uncle’s revelations seem to surprise Reinhart because he has not thought about the issue, yet. As a result of the inner warmth the words of Lucie’s uncle provoke in him, he blushes and merely remarks: “So geht es [. . .] wenn man immer in Bildern und Gleichnissen spricht, so versteht man die Wirklichkeit 2

Referring to Lucas 14,11: “Denn jeder, der sich selbst erhöht, wird erniedrigt werden, und wer sich selbst erniedrigt, wird erhöht werden” (“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted”).

77 zuletzt nicht mehr” (274) (“That’s the way it goes [. . .] when one always speaks in images and allegories, in the end one does not understand reality anymore”). But Reinhart goes astray; it is rather the other way round: The reality of Lucie and Reinhart is in need of telling stories and the models they create put them into the position to understand and deal with it. In the course of the narrative duel, Lucie and Reinhart have come closer, though admittedly, not on the level of the narratives but on the level of thought and feelings. The important function of the narratives consists in their getting to know each other and their perspectives better, thereby allowing them to reflect their own positions. The text exposes Reinhart’s ideas of marriage and femininity as constructs and male wishful thinking. Especially Lucie’s stories, but even more her commentaries on his stories, undermine his project and reveal its problematic dimensions. Her analogies of marriage market and slave market (the customer tests the capacity for the improvement of goods) and of marriage market and cattle market (wife as a gentle little wool sheep) can be read as a criticism of the ways marriages were arranged in the 19th century, when women often were nothing more than objects to be exchanged like goods among men.

Conclusion Collectively, the novellas and Lucie’s commentaries attack the social pressures placed on women to conform to a certain vision of femininity as constructed by the Logau-epigram. Although A Formula for Love reads as enacting asymmetrical gender roles, the behaviour and performance of the characters oppose this perception. The Logau-epigram marks a certain vision of femininity that proves to be unattainable and is, in the end, revealed to be a (literary) construction. Quite the reverse is the case with Goethe’s poem Mit einem gemalten Band (With a Painted Ribbon) which is quoted at the end of the frame narrative and can be realized because of its true-to-life context. While in the beginning of the frame narrative, Reinhart is not able to read the Logau-epigram other than as a formula, in the end, the context of the Goethe poem illustrates that it is shifted into a concrete life situation. While the Logau-epigram offers a vision of femininity which underscores the passive role of women and suggests that their character features become revealed by the blush as a signifier of their virtue and manners, and their laughter as approval of their gender roles, Reinhart’s encounters with women, as well as many of the novellas of the narrative duel, disrupt the rigidity of gender roles. Keller’s staging of the gesture of the blush emphasizes its function as a response to and product of circumstance, as an act of self-consciousness, rather than being a reliable index of character and virtue. Laughter, like blushing, turns out to be an ambiguous sign. Both phenomena do not seem to be reliable

78 indicators of virtue, manners, and chastity and reveal their constructedness. As bodily signs they counteract a vision of femininity that promotes gender as something ‘natural’ and are, therefore, signs which are not natural, as Reinhart believes, but cultural constructs. Laughter and blushing appear to be products of circumstance and not limited to expressing an unambiguous attitude. This might be at least one reason for the comic quality of Keller’s A Formula for Love. The readers take part in Reinhart’s unsophisticated approach to women, are confronted with women who repeatedly do not act in a way that is expected of them, and finally they see how the protagonist gives up on his narrow outlook. This ambiguity becomes especially clear in the first encounter between Lucie and Reinhart. At first Lucie clearly seems to represent the Galathea of the Logau-epigram because she apparently conforms to its premises: she wears a white dress and washes roses in a fountain. But the reader’s expectation, that now the time has come the Logau-epigram will be fulfilled, is quickly disappointed. It is not Lucie, but Reinhart who blushes, and the phenomenon of laughter which is supposed to accompany the blush in this situation turns out to be highly ambiguous. There is a twist to Lucie’s face which does not clearly indicate if she is mad at Reinhart’s Freudian slip or is instead amused by the situation. The two phenomena, laughter and blushing, that constitute the Logauepigram somehow seem to be displaced and this play with the demands of the ‘recipe’ causes a comic effect. This structure is reiterated throughout A Formula for Love as was demonstrated in the case of The Charms or Regine. Reading the Logau-epigram, according to Neumann, as the bringing back to life of a woman through the kiss of a man, seems at least problematical. Ultimately, it seems to be the other way round: Lucie brings Reinhart back to life. Although the male characters in the embedded narratives of Reinhart can be associated with Pygmalion, this does not necessarily apply to Reinhart himself because the text does not satisfactorily demonstrate that Reinhart identifies with his male characters. So it appears that A Formula for Love is less concerned with the balanced relationship of sensuality and morality but rather is a text about the form of intersubjective relationships, about the understanding of another human being away from the way she or he presents her- or himself to the other. This becomes clear in the words of Donna Ferniza and Don Correa: “Was bist du für ein Weib? Was bist du für ein Mann?” (217) (“What kind of woman are you? What kind of man are you?”).

Works Consulted Amrein, Ursula: Augenkur und Brautschau. Zur diskursiven Logik der Geschlechterdifferenz in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. Bern – Berlin – Frankfurt/M.: Lang 1994.

79 Bischoff, Doerte: Eroberungen und Verwicklungen. Fremdes Begehren in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. In: Fremdes Begehren. Transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien. Ed. by Eva Lezzi and Monika Ehlers. Köln – Weimar – Wien: Böhlau 2003. Brandstetter, Gabriele: Fremde Zeichen. Zu Gottfried Kellers Novelle “Die Berlocken”. Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturpoetik. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 43 (1999). Pp. 305–312. Die Bibel. Altes Testament und Neues Testament. Einheitsübersetzung. Freiburg – Basel – Wien: Herder 1980. Ermatinger, Emil: Gottfried Keller. Eine Biographie. Zürich: Diogenes 1990. Frevert, Ute: Ehrenmänner. Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. München: Beck 1991. Kaiser, Gerhard: Gottfried Keller. Das gedichtete Leben. Frankfurt/M.: Insel-Verlag 1981. Keller, Gottfried: A Formula for Love. The Epigram, a translation of “Das Sinngedicht” by Gottfried Keller. Trans. by Lawrence M. Washington. Weybridge (VT): Cherry Tree Books 2006. —. Das Sinngedicht. Stuttgart: Reclam 2002. Neumann, Bernd: Gottfried Keller. Eine Einführung in sein Werk. Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum 1982. Neumann, Gerhard: Der Körper des Menschen und die belebte Statue. Zu einer Grundformel in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. In: Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. by Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach 1997. Pp. 555–591. O’Farrell, Mary Ann: Telling Complexions. The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush. Durham – London: Durham University Press 1997. Prasse, Jutta: Der Sinn der Gattung in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’ oder: Wie findet ein Wissenschaftler eine Frau. In: Sprache und Fremdsprache. Psychoanalytische Aufsätze. Ed. by Claus-Dieter Rath. Bielefeld: Transcript 2004. Pp. 111–138. Preisendanz, Wolfgang: Humor als dichterische Einbildungskraft. Studien zur Erzählkunst des bürgerlichen Realismus. München: Fink 1976. Selbmann, Rolf: Gottfried Keller. Romane und Erzählungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2001. The Holy Bible. Containing the Old and New Testaments. Revised Standard Version. London – Edinburgh – Paris: Thomas Nelson and Sons 1957.

Beth Pentney

“A comic turn, turned serious”: Humour, Body Modification, and the Natural in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983) produces humour which has been argued to subvert gender norms through sarcasm and irony; although, it may be that the text re-inscribes gender norms in the process of interrogating such feminine tropes as beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm. The parallels between transformation of the body and the environment are examined as reflective of struggles over power. In identifying the humour in this novel as “ressentiment humor” (Streip), possibilities emerge for an interpretation that may shed new light on the tensions between feminism, women, the natural, and the comic.

Feminists are routinely charged with lacking a sense of humour in relation to women, social and systemic inequality, and sexuality (notably illustrated in the familiar joke: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “That’s not funny!”). In fact, feminist writers have often utilized elements of the comic in an attempt to subvert gender norms, or to trouble normative modes of thought among women and men. If we consider just a few female authors who either identify as feminist or are commonly associated with feminist aims, such as Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Hélène Cixous, Dorothy Parker, and Angela Carter, it becomes difficult to locate the exact place where feminist humour lies. However, Katharine Streip suggests that women should make “ideal comics” because, like comics, they “participate in a double logic related to that of the scapegoat, who both unsettles and reassures the community” (136). Employing Streip’s model of “ressentiment humor” developed in her study of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, I intend to examine the popular British novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil to determine whether and how Fay Weldon’s feminist humour subverts gender norms, or rather re-inscribes them in the process of disrupting such feminine tropes as beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm. British author Fay Weldon has built a prolific body of work tinged with wry humour that illuminates the conflict-ridden and contradictory positions of women’s lives. Often mixing the mundane with the fantastic, Weldon’s novels, essays, plays, and television series have circulated through British and North American popular culture since the 1960s; her work has remained culturally salient and, some might argue, prophetic in its representation of ‘women’s issues’. While Weldon has been charged with political fluctuation and ambiguity

82 throughout her career by interviewers and feminists alike, she has also been celebrated for this tendency by postmodernists who would argue that nothing is stable or complete, least of all one’s political leanings. On Fay Weldon’s feminism, Lana Faulks writes: “Weldon’s feminist perspective evades categories, though her viewpoint appears more pragmatic than ideological. Her fiction scrutinizes the actual social condition of women, their economic well-being, for example, rather than offering homilies about female liberation” (8). Put another way, Weldon’s work “‘freaks out’ feminism” (Peterson 293). Her fiction overlaps genres, evades narrative consistency, and is characterized by short, punchy prose. This regularly creates a tone of universal mockery that is sometimes confusing, often hilarious, and always ripe with multiple meanings. The Life and Loves of a She Devil, published in 1983, is Weldon’s most widely known novel; it has been produced as a BBC miniseries (1986) of the same name, and as a Hollywood film, entitled She Devil (1989), staring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep. In the novel, Weldon employs satire and irony to explore the parallels between violence inflicted upon the environment and violence inflicted upon women’s bodies, through environmental alteration and cosmetic surgery. She also challenges both the narrative conventions of the romance novel and those who would critique traditional ‘women’s genres’ (such as soap opera, ‘the chick flick’, and the romance novel). In doing so, Weldon reframes heterosexual concepts of romance, marriage, and child-rearing as something other than the natural course for women. While The Life and Loves of a She Devil may be read as subversive for its literary sneer at gender conventions, by the end of the text it is clear that a challenge to the status quo does not necessarily lead to revolution, but rather to reinforcement of normative structures, a product of the comic that Andreas Böhn identifies in his analysis of gender subversion through the comic in this volume. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ressentiment is “a term introduced by Nietzsche to describe an attitude which arises, often unconsciously, from aggressive feelings frustrated by the sensed inferiority of one’s situation or personality and frequently results in some form of self-abasement” (OED online). It has been developed by the disciplines of psychology and Existentialist philosophy, but for our purposes, it works well with a consideration of women’s humour as outlined by Katharine Streip. Streip’s identification of ressentiment humour in her analysis of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight provides a useful model for interpreting the subtle and contradictory comedic elements at work in Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil. Streip observes: In ressentiment humor, where the object of the joke is to bring about a narcissistic triumph for the joker, an initial sense of injury and rage becomes transformed into comedy through self-laceration. The joker claims, “you can’t hurt me more than I can hurt myself – watch me take pleasure in this pain and compel you to share my

83 pleasure.” Anger remains the inexpressible source of this comedy that is both revenge and “just a joke which is all about me.” (118).

She continues by suggesting that ressentiment humour implicates the reader in the discomfort engendered in the text, and most importantly, “ressentiment humor aims for discomfort without catharsis” (128). This is not to suggest that the ‘joker’ is, or remains, an inevitable victim, but that the joke is inexplicably linked with the pain of self-deprecation and, simultaneously, the pleasure of revenge by the joker. Weldon’s novel fits into the model proposed by Streip, by creating a narrative that confounds essentializing feminist claims, particularly those that imply women are inherently moral beings, less inclined to violence or revenge. Weldon’s protagonist Ruth Patchett is a disgruntled, middle-aged housewife who serves as the anti-archetypal, twentieth-century middle-class wife and mother. Her husband Bobbo is an attractive, successful, adulterous man and her children are lazy and disappointing. Her role as wife and mother is pre-fabricated, and, as a result, is much too constricting for Ruth’s 6⬘ 2⬙ dark and lumbering frame. She is bitter that a woman’s social currency is determined by her beauty and sexual desirability, and feels slighted by ideologies that would scorn women cast from a different mould. Ruth’s existence in the idyllic suburb Eden Grove is shaped by artifice, and she recognizes that her neighbours, while singling her out as deviant because of her ugliness and stature, are similarly disappointed with their own lives, but they mask their pain with habitual consumerism and colourfully-themed dinner parties (Weldon 12). The Patchetts embody the post-script of the romance novel; that place we never get to in the narrative, the place after the passionate love affair and marriage proposal. In fact, Ruth repeatedly accuses romance novelist Mary Fisher of “telling lies to herself, and to the world” (7) because the romance novel ideal is an unattainable fiction, and one that disappoints so many who experience love and loss through adultery. When Ruth is left by her husband for Mary Fisher, she decides that she will have her retribution, in effect shifting the roles between herself and Bobbo. Ruth activates this process by methodically burning down their suburban home, abandoning her children to the care of Bobbo and Mary Fisher (disrupting their romantic hideaway by the sea with the trappings of parenthood), and adopting the mythical role of a She Devil: a title Bobbo bestowed upon her before leaving her. Transforming into a She Devil requires purging the woman, according to Ruth. She sheds her womanliness like the skin of a snake and, in the process, amputates her maternal love, her sexual ambivalence, and her desire for reciprocal love. In doing so, she gains power, wilfulness, and an almost god-like omniscience. Ruth’s “initial sense of injury and rage becomes transformed into comedy through self-laceration”, evidence of the ressentiment humour at work

84 in the text (Streip 118). Ruth’s symbolic transformation from wife to She Devil is activated by her intensified recognition that women who lack beauty are undervalued no matter how much they try and compensate through their actions: So. I see. I thought I was a good wife tried temporarily and understandably beyond endurance, but no. He says I am a she devil. I expect he is right. In fact, since he does so well in the world and I do so badly, I really must assume he is right. I am a she devil. But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she devil the mind clears at once. The spirits rise [. . .] There is only, in the end, what you want [. . .] I want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return (Weldon 49).

Ruth’s thoughts are clearly devilish here, and yet the reader is encouraged to maintain allegiance to Ruth despite her vengeful plans. This allegiance is nourished throughout the first fifty pages of the novel using elements of the comic that encompass and stretch beyond sympathetic affiliation with the perceived ‘underdog’. Rather, the knowing sarcasm that Ruth shares with the reader positions her as the wise woman who can decipher the unjustness of so many common, everyday actions and relations. We stick with her because she is undeniably smarter than everyone else in the novel thus far. After burning down her house and leaving her children with their father, Ruth strategically immerses herself in the circles of society that are marginalized or demonized in order to plot her revenge and bide her time: she cares for the elderly, the insane, and the young; she becomes sexually involved with a priest, a sadist judge, an elderly half-wit, and an outcast female nurse. She joins and then abandons a feminist commune in order to lose weight, she frames Bobbo for theft, and she sends Mary Fisher’s incontinent mother to live in the converted lighthouse with Mary Fisher, Bobbo, and the children. She gains financial independence, and she councils numerous others toward their own enlightenment and liberation from cultural constraints by operating an employment agency for women who have been hampered by domestic duties. Ruth’s actions arguably produce positive effects for those around her, but she acts out of self-determination and with calculated manipulation. It becomes more and more difficult to support Ruth’s quest for revenge, and the humour becomes tainted by discomfort for the reader, especially as Mary Fisher begins to suffer the effects of parenthood and creative-loss: “Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower and nearly, nearly prefers death to life [. . .] What shall she do to be saved? [. . .] she cannot escape. She nearly did [. . .] But I stopped her. I, the she devil [. . .] And she needn’t think I’ll stop there. I’ve only just begun” (117). Bobbo’s affair with Mary Fisher connects and simultaneously polarizes Ruth and Mary. Mary embodies everything that Ruth does not: ideal female sexuality,

85 vulnerability, coyness, beauty, and independence. The landscape that divides and defines these women is also polarized – Mary lives in the High Tower on the coast, 108 kilometres from the suburb of Eden Grove. Throughout the novel, one can trace the symbolic attraction, collision, and repulsion of these two women as Ruth circles like the moving foot of the compass around the static geographic location that was once a lighthouse. Through this process Weldon equalizes the binaries Ruth and Mary represent, and also satirizes the heterosexual competition encouraged among women. Ruth is physically transformed into the image of Mary Fisher and, by the end of the text, she takes on Mary’s life by becoming motherless, independent, wealthy, sexualized, and powerful. Mary Fisher, whose life shifts to mirror Ruth’s, becomes mother and wife. By sabotaging Mary Fisher’s fantasy existence with Ruth’s former reality, Mary Fisher is made weak, haggard, jealous, and dependant. Accordingly, Mary Fisher loses her beauty and grace and dies slowly of a mixture of cancer, longing, and financial ruin. Ruth’s status as the underdog, and the bitterness with which she attacks normative gender roles (literally and philosophically), creates allegiance to the character from the beginning. However, this allegiance is troubled since it also has us rooting for a character who wants nothing more than to climb to the top of normative systems of power and dominance. Over a seven-year period Ruth surgically transforms herself into the mirror image of Mary Fisher; in the process, she has her teeth extracted, her jaw wired, her face and body sculpted and re-shaped, and her arms and legs shortened by several inches. Ruth’s goal is to dethrone the woman who has tempted her husband, and reinstate herself into her marriage on her terms. Her decision to refashion her body in the image of her Doppelgänger, Mary Fisher, is constructed as devilish and violent, and yet Ruth succeeds financially, sexually, and personally. In this way, Ruth’s achievements challenge feminist binary thinking, which often characterizes cosmetic surgery patients as either hapless victims or, alternatively, empowered agents. Ruth is neither wholly victim, nor agent, at once. The notion of female empowerment in this framework is ambiguous, to say the least. According to Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Weldon’s novel offers us a heroine who chooses to do violence to her own body in order to empower herself in a world in which gender relations still disadvantage women. The Gothic text’s concern with shifting and unstable subjectivities is here itself exploited in order to offer a more liberating narrative for women readers” (174). Ruth’s internalization of a lifetime of verbal abuse and hegemonic beauty pressures cause her to choose this body work (and subsequent scarring, bruising, and pain), but self-acceptance is recognized as idealistic by Ruth, who explains that she “was unlucky [. . .] in the great Lucky Dip that is woman’s life” (Weldon 11). She claims: “I have tried many ways of fitting myself to my original body, and the world into which I was born, and have failed. I am no revolutionary. Since I cannot change them, I will change myself ” (217).

86 Through allusions to the Little Mermaid fairytale and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ruth is situated among mythical characters that have similarly chosen pain or death rather than suffer ridicule and shame for being different. However, by describing in graphic detail the physical mutilation undertaken in the name of ideal beauty, ideal beauty is defamiliarized, and beauty practices become offensive. As Finuala Dowling suggests: “Ruth’s stylized revenge and her self-transformation are not a call to readers to follow her example [. . .] The enjoyment of fantasy [by the reader], then, is an indictment [. . .] of the society that leaves so much to be desired” (108). Weldon shifts the burden of criticism from the woman who elects cosmetic surgery, to the society that would encourage/demand such action. Ruth’s success through body modification exposes ideologies about love, beauty, and romance that are unhealthy and traumatic, but also impossible to ignore or avoid. Her monstrous and hyperbolic transformation creates humour because it seems ridiculous and evil, but it also leads to her upward mobility, despite Weldon’s implicit critique of the societal systems of power within which Ruth becomes a player. In a world that shuns and mocks ugly women, Ruth believes that she has no choice but to construct artificially that which she was not granted by nature or god. Jean Dubino explains why success in this text is characterized by Ruth’s ability to reinstall herself in her marriage with Bobbo, even though she no longer loves him or seems to need him at all: “patriarchy demands that women find their greatest happiness in marriage, and so Ruth ironically aspires to live the Cinderella plot that she exposes” (110). Since Ruth can physically become Mary through surgery, she is not resigned to a fixed identity imposed upon her from above. Her transformation exposes the superficiality and performativity of femininity, since, for a price, anyone can put it on. Moreover, if we return to Katharine Streip’s consideration of ressentiment humour, in which the source of the comic is the conjunction of pleasure and (self-inflicted) pain as a means of revenge, it becomes clear that the humour in The Life and Loves of a She Devil is motivated by Ruth’s anger, and her body modification is a way to both claim ownership of her pain, and neutralize the power that Bobbo, the plastic surgeons, and her mother have attempted to appropriate from her. Ruth’s “narcissistic triumph”, to use Streip’s term, is in removing the power others have over her in causing pain, such that pain becomes her ally. The bruising and breaking of Ruth’s body by a team of male plastic surgeons and dentists would seem to reveal the extent to which patriarchy violates women’s bodies in a capitalist system. According to Lana Faulks, “physical augmentation in Weldon’s novels is pointedly absurd, based on a desire to please men, an expression of self-hatred in the woman attempting to change herself to create a more socially pleasing image” (50). However, Horner and Zlosnik argue that Weldon “implicitly challenge[s] the tendency of early second

87 wave feminism to construct women as victims” (171), as Ruth is decidedly in control of her process of body modification. Ruth’s plastics surgeons, contrary to conventional patient/doctor relationships, are castrated of their benevolent power by Ruth as she subjugates them by making them mere extensions of the medical tools used in her self-fashioning. She states: “I do not put my trust in fate, nor my faith in God. I will be what I want, not what He ordained. I will mould a new image for myself out of the earth of my creation. I will defy my Maker, and remake myself ” (170). Weldon exposes the paternalism embedded in conventional patient/doctor relationships as Ruth refuses to become a pliable object in the hands of Dr. Ghengis and Dr. Black, the plastic surgeons who simultaneously envision her as their scientific creation and a reflection of their artistic and god-like skills. Instead, she treats her surgeries as business transactions, and denies the doctors their own narcissistic pleasure through her. As Böhn concludes, the comic in general [. . .] does not necessarily tend to overcome traditional oppositions and ideological boundaries, as theorists like Butler suggest, although it mixes up the normal and expectable state of things to a considerable extent. Comical effects are not necessarily the result of weakened normative structures, but can be produced by, for example, the representation of the role of money in capitalist society, which, on another level, surely creates and stabilizes normative structures (Böhn, in this volume).

Böhn’s argument that gender norms are not necessarily subverted through the comic is exemplified in the relations between Ruth and her surgeons. The shift in power roles seems to imply a subversion of gendered power, and yet Ruth’s capitalist manœuvering only reasserts an intrinsically oppressive institution, whereby economic currency leads to cultural currency. The American film adaptation of the novel, She Devil, casts Roseanne Barr as Ruth Patchett, and omits the sarcasm that propels the social commentary in the novel. In the film, Ruth is a dowdy housewife whose bitterness stems from her husband’s affair rather than from the unfair power imbalance Ruth observes between men and women in the novel. Moreover, the humour engendered in the film occurs at Ruth’s expense: we laugh at her failed femininity (she does not meet the standard requirements of feminine beauty, as the casting of Roseanne Barr makes clear), and then at her neurotic behaviour. The humour created in the novel by Ruth’s identification as a She Devil, and her corresponding sense of omniscience which cuts a critical path through the artifice of her surroundings, is altogether neutralized in the film. As a result, any feminist analysis of patriarchal systems of power is minimized and the story is altered to tell one woman’s experience with adultery and retribution, rather than to address larger systems of inequity such as heteronormativity and the institution of marriage which creates financial dependence on men for women; Christianity, which

88 binds women to maternity; the workforce, which punishes women for having children; and the welfare system, which breeds laziness and not ambition (all of which are scrutinized in the novel). Significantly, the American film adaptation She Devil leaves out the cosmetic surgery procedures entirely. Rather than reversing roles with Mary Fisher, physically and economically, Ruth only succeeds at making Mary Fisher more like the housewife and mother that Ruth embodied, who was so repulsive to Bobbo in the beginning of the film. In typical postfeminist fashion the film demonizes the successful, sexually-independent Mary Fisher as a home-wrecker by punishing her with motherhood and domestic responsibility, while at the same time desexualizing Ruth as the housewife and then celebrating her at the end of film, when her maternal role is reinstated and it is implied that Bobbo wants reconciliation. Again, Streip’s discussion of ressentiment humour in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, is useful for comparing the humour of the novel with the humour of the film: “Rhys’s humor does not simply provide distance from a disturbing situation; it defuses unhappiness by compounding it through a ressentiment that implicates the laughers [. . .] in the muck” (Streip 120). Likewise, The Life and Loves of a She Devil implicates the laugher/reader “in the muck” that is dominant Western ideology, whereas the film She Devil evacuates the discomfort produced by implicating the audience, and instead focuses the humour on Ruth as a failed woman, on Bobbo as a bumbling fool, and on Mary Fisher as a melodramatic mistress. Another site in the novel where humour is used to inadvertently implicate the reader ‘in the muck’, is in the treatment of the ‘natural’ world, in terms of landscape and animal life. Throughout the novel the landscape symbolically parallels the transformative and traumatic violence of Ruth’s surgical practices, implicitly critiquing the artificial environment humans have created for themselves. Eden Grove, the suburb where Ruth and her family live before Bobbo leaves and Ruth burns down their home, has an archetypal, universal quality characterized as both nowhere and everywhere. Through it Weldon brings together the mythic and the real, alluding to theological roots of Eden and the ideology of suburban life as a site of manicured, measured nature. However, the ornamentality of the suburb barely conceals the festering human relationships among the square plots of foreign grasses and carefully-arranged flowers. This tension is conveyed through comic glimpses at neurotic housewives and philandering husbands who attack their lawns rather than each other. Similarly, the Hermione Clinic, situated on the outskirts of Los Angeles and home to the plastic surgeons who conduct Ruth’s body work, parallels Ruth’s unnatural transformation. The oasis in the desert is described as a mutated and artificial universe that mimics the inauthentic women who are born from the clinic. It is a place “where herbicides, fertilizers, insecticides and pumped water, stolen from Colorado, had created an oasis of lush and stunning green,

89 where the facelift patients most loved to raise their bruised countenances to the dappled sun” (Weldon 247). This extended metaphor initially seems to suggest that the landscape is just another thing to be contorted and changed, but the Hermione Clinic is also the site of intense electrical storms that threaten human achievement by destroying machinery and cutting off the power supply. These storms coincide with Ruth’s leg-shortening surgery and reveal the power of the traditionally-feminized natural world to retaliate against unnatural human intervention. Thus, Weldon’s use of pathetic fallacy gives a mythical quality to Ruth’s cosmetic-surgery procedures, and emphasizes the clash between the natural and the artificial. Moreover, the comic treatment of the landscape as retaliatory disrupts the passivity often associated with feminine nature, providing subversive potential to undercut the gender dichotomies of feminine nature and masculine technology. Weldon reveals that human attempts to disassociate ourselves from the natural (through technology) are as constructed and artificial as the plastic-surgery patient’s body; Dr. Ghengis claims, “There is no such thing as the essential self [. . .] It is all inessential, and all liable to change and flux, and usually the better for it” (234f.). Accordingly, Ruth’s moles force their way back to the surface after her surgery, an image that suggests that cutting and slicing the body is not a permanent solution to the discordance of nature or the inevitability of death. A caged and drugged polar bear, ironically used as a mascot for a “Save-The-Bear Society” fundraiser, escapes from his cage and terrorizes a suburb before being shot by local police. Mary Fisher’s body “return[s] to disorder [and] misrule”, and is eaten by cancer (226). What occurs in these moments of transgression, mutation, and retaliation is a challenge to those who would assign implicit morality to the natural world. Unlike the Hermione Clinic and the suburb Eden Grove, Mary Fisher’s converted lighthouse, the High Tower, is perched on the edge of the roaring ocean and is potentially treacherous because of its proximity to unbridled nature. Whereas the landscape of the suburb is easily managed, the danger of the cliffs is much greater and seemingly impossible to tame. When Ruth purchases the High Tower after Mary Fisher’s death, she has the cliff-face reinforced by a team of engineers, who “managed marginally to alter the configuration of the entire harbour so that the force of the waves was no longer directed at the tower” (253). Digging, forcing, and building up the grounds of Mary Fisher’s old estate become an extension of Ruth’s sexual and social power at the end of the novel. She states: Life is very pleasant. I sit up in bed in the morning and look out over the landscape. Some people say I’ve ruined it, with artificial copses and granite-fountained fish ponds and the rest, but I like it. Nature gets away with far too much. It needs controlling. I have many friends. I am very hospitable, and charming, and there’s always a nervy excitement at my parties (256).

90 Ruth’s manipulation of the natural landscape emphasizes the power that commodification affords her, to be able to enter the system that previously punished her for deviating from acceptable womanhood. This is directly associated with her social power in the previous quotation, and her ability to charm the very people who have always stigmatized her, once again, encourages the reader to laugh along with Ruth at the shallowness of others; we recognize Ruth’s skills at deception and creation, and we are invited to ally with her. Yet, it is impossible to ignore the fact that her position of power emerges from her adherence and mastery of traditional gender norms; beauty, sexual desirability, and access to finances ensure her success. As ressentiment humour, The Life and Loves of a She Devil “aims for discomfort without catharsis” (Streip 128). Ruth’s success is not cathartic, but hollow. The humour of the text engenders hybridity on multiple levels. Weldon forces the reader to consider the pattern of judgement used to categorize Ruth as immoral, in order to challenge a hegemonic order that labels women ugly/ beautiful, good/evil, and moral/immoral based on physical appearance and traditional norms of femininity: Ruth “put[s] on femininity with a vengeance [. . .] and in so doing, [she] spotlight[s] the performative function of both freaks and females within patriarchy” (Peterson 299). Ruth and Mary Fisher are not simply protagonist and antagonist, beauty and monster, they are Doppelgänger; their associated charactonyms hint at this connection (Marlene Hunter, Ruth’s name at the end of the text, and Mary Fisher; where one looks inland, the other out to sea). The form of the novel replicates this hybridity, as it incorporates continually shifting narrative voices. Ruth’s first person account and an omniscient narrator alternate back and forth, until Ruth becomes omniscient and we are faced with a protagonist that is both accessible and completely foreign. Ruth’s hybridity (both in terms of her evolving physical appearance and her shifting identities) undermines generic expectations of the novel and creates a main character that is difficult to identify with. This textual and narrative hybridity highlights the relative nature of moral judgement on bodily and environmental alteration, such that it becomes misguided to attempt to determine whether the comic aspects of the novel are either subversive or normative. In fact, the comic is both subversive and normative in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, in fitting with the ressentiment humour at work in the text. Sara Martin’s concluding analysis of The Life and Loves of a She Devil is decidedly negative: “Weldon’s Ruth sheds her powerlessness and her freakish body to become not a powerful woman, but a pathetic, grotesque moral monster” (8). Somewhat similarly, Lana Faulks claims: “To maintain her power and control of others, [Ruth] effectively loses her own humanity to gain possession of the tower” (51f.). I would argue that Martin and Faulks are off the mark in defining Ruth in this way because the central conflict of the text addresses the contradictions inherent in pinning down morality. Weldon reminds the reader

91 that beauty and ugliness, power and weakness, are not mutually exclusive terms. Ruth is not an inhuman monster, she is a product of the society of which she is a part; if she is horrific, it is because she magnifies our flawed social codes and the behaviours that we encourage in women every day, which is why the humour of the novel is both liberating and anxiety-ridden for its familiarity. We are not afforded the luxury of the fairytale ending; rather, the ressentiment humour of the text leaves us with discomfort and ambiguity. In the final lines of the novel Ruth identifies herself as “a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious” (256). The She Devil is still the woman, and Marlene Hunter is not Ruth-less. What begins as a humorous examination of the contradictions of contemporary femininity, becomes a serious inquiry into the power relations between men and women, and a commentary on the ineffectual legacy of modern definitions of moral worth.

Works Consulted Dowling, Finuala: Fay Weldon’s Fiction. Mississauga: Associated University Press 1998. Dubino, Jeanne: The Cinderella Complex. Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism. In: Journal of Popular Culture 27.3 (1993). Pp. 103–118. Faulks, Lana: Fay Weldon. Toronto: Prentice-Hall 1998. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik: Agriculture, Body Sculpture, Gothic Culture, Gothic Parody in Gibbons, Atwood and Weldon. In: Gothic Studies 4.2 (2002). Pp. 167–177. Martin, Sara: The Power of Monstrous Women. Fay Weldon’s “The Life and Loves of a She Devil” (1983), Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus” (1984) and Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” (1989). In: Journal of Gender Studies 8.2 (1999). Pp. 193–211. Peterson, Shirley: Freaking Feminism. “The Life and Loves of a She Devil” and “Nights at the Circus” as Narrative Freak Shows. In: Freakery. Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson New York: New York University Press 1996. Ressentiment. In: Oxford English Dictionary Online. 17 February 2007. ⬍http:// dictionary.oed.com⬎. Seidelman, Susan (Dir.): She Devil. Orion Pictures 1989. Streip, Katharine: “Just a Cérébrale:” Jean Rhys, Women’s Humor, and Ressentiment. In: Representations 45 (1994). Pp. 117–144. Saville, Philip (Dir.): The Life and Loves of a She Devil. BBC 1986. Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a She Devil. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1983.

Raluca Cernahoschi

“From now on, I am Carmen”: Imagining Cross-Dressing as Comic Protest in the Life and Work of Romanian-German Author Franz Hodjak This essay analyses an attempt at comic subversion through cross-dressing as Bizet’s “Carmen” in the life of Romanian-German author Franz Hodjak, which later found its way into Hodjak’s debut novel Grenzsteine (Boundary Stones) (1995). The essay explores how the cross-dressing works as political and gender subversion in both contexts and points out the development of the idea of cross-dressing from real life to novel: what was once a tool for political subversion is re-imagined as a freeing act in and of itself, a suspension of fixed personal identity.

The Carmen Episode The editor, poet, and novelist Franz Hodjak is one of the few RomanianGerman literary personalities to have lived and worked in Romania until the fall of the country’s communist regime. As the German editor at Dacia, one of the four Romanian publishing houses with German-language programme, Hodjak promoted a Romanian-German literature that was a sharp departure from both the bucolic verses of the past and the socialist panegyrics of his day. As a poet, he strove for the same stylistic and thematic innovation, as well as for the creation of a lyric space for free self-assertion.1 Despite the criticism of the communist regime implicit in his poetic enterprise, Hodjak is not counted as a “politischer Schriftsteller im engeren Sinn” (Dauer 2) (“political writer in the narrow sense of the word”),2 yet the pervasive presence of Romanian power politics left a large imprint on his work, as on his life, and was met, at least in one instance, with remarkable resistance. This instance was first recorded in an article in the Siebenbürgische Zeitung on the occasion of Hodjak’s 50th birthday and in anticipation of his first novel, Grenzsteine (Boundary Stones), which appeared a year later, in 1995. The article contains all the usual landmarks of Hodjak’s career, from his stint in the 1

The titles of Hodjak’s early volumes of poetry announce again and again his striving for open self-expression, from Spielräume (Elbow Rooms, 1974) over offene briefe (Open Letters, 1976) to mit Polly Knall spricht man über selbstverständliche dinge als wären sie selbstverständlich (With Polly Knall One Can Speak About Self-Evident Things as if They Were Self-Evident, 1979). 2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original.

94 military, over his literary and editorial debut in 1970, when Romania seemed open to new possibilities, over the gradual darkening of his hopes and poetic voice in the 1980s, to his success on the German market since 1990. Being penned by literary critic Peter Motzan, Hodjak’s long-term friend and collaborator, the article also offers some less-known details about Hodjak’s life. One of these details, referring to the author’s struggles with the authorities who refused him the right to travel outside of Romania until 1988 despite