Difference and Repetition: Deleuze on the Comic

While I was plodding through "Repetition for Itself" feeling drowsy, I was suddenly wakened up by the passage "Note on the Three Repetitions." The reason was simple. The comic was involved:

According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short--that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation. Comic (end of Page 91) travesty replaces tragic metamorphosis. However, it appears that for Marx this comic or grotesque repetition necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition ('all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second as farce'). This temporal order does not, however, seem to be absolutely justified. Comic repetition works by means of some defect, in the mode of the past properly so called. The hero necessarily confronts this repetition so long as 'the act is too big for him': Polonius's murder by mistake is comic, as is Oedipus's enquiry. The moment of metamorphosis, tragic repetition, follows. It is true that these two moments are not independent, existing as they do only for the third moment beyond the comic and the tragic: the production of something new entails a dramatic repetition which excludes even the hero. However, once the first two elements acquire an abstract independence or become genres, then the comic succeeds the tragic as though the failure of metamorphosis, raised to the absolute, presupposed an earlier metamorphosis already completed.

--Difference and Repetition* (91-92)

*Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (1968). Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Humor in The Logic of Sense by Deleuze

It is inevitable that some articles here appear not in chronological order (Stuart Tave, Lesley Stephen, and this one, Gilles Deleuze). It so happens that some modern thinkers covered in some of my courses likewise deal with humor directly or indirectly. I can't bear to let them slip by. Today, in our class of Literary Theory, we came across the “Second Series of Paradoxes—Of Surface Effects” in The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze. With Lewis Carroll in mind, Deleuze likens humor to the Deleuzean Surface:

[I]t is the task of language both to establish limits and to go beyond them. Therefore language includes terms which do not cease to displace their extension and which make possible a reversal of the connection in a given series (thus too much and not enough, few and many). The event is coextensive with becoming, and becoming is itself coextensive with language; the paradox is thus essentially a “sorites,” that is a series of interrogative propositions which, following becoming, proceed through successive additions and retrenchments. Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions. Chrysippus taught: “If you say something, it passes through your lips; so, if you say “chariot,” a chariot passes through your lips.” Here is a use of paradox the only equivalents of which are to be found in Zen Buddhism on one hand and in English or American nonsense on the other. In one case, that which is (end of Page 8) most profound is the immediate, in the other, the immediate is found in language. Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights. The Sophists and Cynics had already made humor a philosophical weapon against Socratic irony; but with the Stoics, humor found its dialectics, its dialectical principle or its natural place and its pure philosophical concept.
Lewis Carroll carries out this operation, inaugurated by the  Stoics,...

—The Logic of Sense*(8-9)

*Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense (1968). Trans. Mark Lester. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Humour as a Virtue: Lesley Stephen & Others

The English people have always been proud of their sense of humor which constitutes a major part of English culture and characterizes the English identity as one renown for its sometimes sophistry and oftentimes sophistication.

In the first edition of OED (The Oxford English Dictionary, 1884-1928), “humour” starts to stand apart from “wit,” being defined as “distinguished from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos.” Either henceforth or around this time, humor (in its modern sense) claims its significant presence in the English society (Figueroa-Dorrego & Larkin-Galiñanes 313). What follows are a couple of examples of the burgeoning “sense” of humour at that time:

Sir Lesley Stephen:

A fashion has sprung up of late years regarding the sense of humour as one of the cardinal virtues. […] It is indeed rarer to meet man, woman, or child who will confess to any deficiency in humour than to a want of logic. Many people will confess that they are indolent, superstitious, unjust, fond of money, of good living, or of flattery: women will make a boast of cowardice and men of coarseness; but nobody ever admits that he or she can’t see a joke or take an argument. If people were to be taken at their own valuation, logical acumen and a keen perception of the humourous would be the two most universal qualities in the world.

—Humour (1876)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The English humour is the most thoughtful, the Spanish the most ethereal—the most ideal—of modern literature. Amongst the classic ancients there was little or no humour. […] the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French, and that of images to the English. […] [It] constitutes the larger and more peculiar part of the wit of Shakespeare.

—“Wit and Humour” (1818)*

*Coleridge’s attitude is obviously different from the typical English attitude towards “their national pride.” William Congreve’s, however, speaks for it: “[T]here is more of Humour in our English writers than in any of the other comic poets, ancient or modern” (“Concerning Humour in Comedy,” 1695). Following this logic, typical English taunts related to humor often target other nations for the (alleged) lack of it. The absence of humor goes to the German; the lack of wit is said to characterize the French; the Italian are too busy dulling their brains with debauchery. The list may go a lot longer than this, and from this point, nationality and regionality are closely related to English humor. (For a posh, snobbish English person, even neighbors may fall easy targets: Scousers always confuse talking with coughing; Geordies can’t tell their A’s from E’s; the Irish, when not drunk, still tink instead of think; the Welsh and the Scotts, after shxgging so many sheep, don’t even speak English anymore.)

Stuart Tave on Restoration Theory of Comedy

Frontispiece to The Wits or Sport upon Sport (London, 1662). Attributed to Francis Kirkman. Taken from Wikipedia entry "Droll" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droll; 2010/10/13)

Stuart M. Tave is the William Rainey Harper Professor Emeritus in the College and the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1960); New Essay by De Quincy (Princeton, 1966); Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago, 1973); Robert Bage's "Hermsprong" (Pennsylvania State, 1982); and Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies: an Essay on Comedies (Chicago, 1993). On June 3, 2000, he received the 2000 Norman Maclean Faculty Award at an Alumni Assembly in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Here is a passage by Stuart Tave on Restoration theory of comedy:

In Restoration theory of comedy, largely a derivative and a reduction of Renaissance theory, it was a commonplace that the function of comedy is to copy the foolish and knavish originals of the age and to expose, ridicule, satirize them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that the best comic works present amiable originals, often models of good nature, whose little peculiarities are not satirically instructive, but objects of delight and love.

—The Amiable Humorist*viii

*Tave, Stuart M. The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

A Few Loose Ends: Antiquity and the Middle Ages

I have left out some influential figures and their works, and am planning to get back to them later:

Late Classical:

Pliny the Younger—Letters (ca. 100 A.D.);

Plutarch—Symposiacs/Quaestiones Conviviales (Table Talk);

Epictetus—Encheiridion (Handbook, 2^nd century A.D.);

Church Fathers:

Thomas Aquinas—Summa Theologica (page number: 1265-1272);

Clement of Alexandria—Paedagogus (Guide, 2^nd-3^rd century A.D.);

John Chrysostom—“Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews”;

Ambrose of Milan (4^th century A.D.)—Concerning Virgins;

The Middle Ages:

Benedict of Nursia—Holy Rule (ca. 530 A.D.)

Regula Magistri (6^th century A.D.)

St. Gregory—Regula Pastoralis (Pastoral Rule)

So end Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Charge forward to the Early Modern Period!

A Few More Books on Humor & Laughter

Never have I dragged my feet like this in updating this blog. My current schedule has drained my "humor" and muted my laughter. Yesterday, a message from the library came to tell me to pick up my reserved books on humor and laughter, and hence reminded me of my long neglected blog.

Here are a few more books to read:

1. Chapman, Antony J. and Hugh C. Foot ed. Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
2. Ghose, Indira. Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008.
3. Gibson, Walter S. Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
4. Joubert, Laurent. Treatise on Laughter (Traité du ris). Trans. Gregory David de Rocher. Alabama: Alabama UP, 1980.
5. Klein, Sheri. Art and Laughter. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.
6. Partington, Alan. The Linguistics of Laughter: A Courpus-assisted Study of Laughter-Talk. London: Routledge, 2006.
7. Pfister, Manfred. A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett   and Beyond. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.