“…Laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasants entertainment, the drunkards license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humours and distracts from other desires and other ambitions…Still, laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians.
That laughter is proper to man is a sign of our limitations, sinners that we are. But from this book many corrupt minds like yours would draw the extreme syllogism, whereby laughter is man’s end! Laughter for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for cancelling fear.”
The character Jorge’s explanation for hiding Aristotle’s second book of the Poetics (a treatise on comedy and laughter) less it contaminate and subvert Catholic theological dogma. From The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco.
Jorge is terrified that the kitsch pomposity and linear narratives of the Christian faith will be destabilised by Aristotle’s very learned, reduction of the sublime to the ridiculous; the ‘revelation’ that The Word, language itself, and therefore truth - when laughter is elevated to an art form by syllogism, metaphor and pun – becomes fragile, deceitful and absurd.
Laughter is also the engine for creativity and change, which is another reason Jorge, the dogmatic reactionary, fears the dissemination of Aristotle’s sacred text. He begins tearing up the pages of the book (already poisoned) and eating them – the levels of irony, simile and metaphor are brain numbing in Eco’s novel, but that’s the point.
In his book ‘The Act of Creation’ Arthur Koestler sees human creativity as having three distinct aspects, a tri-valency, illustrated by his triptych: The Jester, The Sage and The Artist – which can be reduced to humour, discovery and art.
Jorge knows that the slippery slope begins with the aggression of the comic comparison, then comes the objective analogy, and finally the poetic image: a new synthesis, a new aesthetic truth.
The importance of aesthetic persuasion in every field of human endeavour is what Koestler is attempting to explore by isolating the important trigger mechanism of laughter, as was Aristotle in his second book of the Poetics.
Out of laughter comes comparison, juxtaposition, simile, satire, metaphor – synthesis.
Koestler said:
“That the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship: the word ‘witticism’ is derived from ‘wit’ in its original sense of ingenuity, inventiveness. Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits’; and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful backdoor entry, as it were, into the inner workshop of creative originality”.
The philosopher Nietzsche understood perfectly how the subjective aesthetic force is always threatening the narrative ‘slave moralities’ as exemplified by Jorge’s Catholic dogma.
Nietzsche was searching for an aesthetic justification of man as an individual - the life as a work of art – using metaphor, allegory and his favourite literary weapon, the aphorism. The poetic sensibility overcomes the objective seriousness of systematic narrative thinking.
Nietzsche announced the death of God by using his aphorism’s as sophisticated jokes to kick the cycle off from the comic, to the abstract, to the poetic – and back again. Jorge would have loved Nietzsche!
In our day, postmodernism has weakened and diluted the power of the aphorism and metaphor somewhat – it has been reduced to casual irony without much subversive/creative possibility. The end of history? (Although, conspiracy theories can be seen as interesting little subversive, creative jokes.)
As the natural successor to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the purest example of the Ubermensch, Morrissey is still aphorising the ridiculous into the sublime, the banal into an epiphany, and laughing at the crashing kitsch obsessed Jorge-like bores.
It is Morrissey who is truly beyond good and evil and responsible for the Death of God:
“Outside the prison gates, I love the romance of crime,
And I wonder, does anybody feel the way I do,
And evil is just something you are, or something you do?”
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt,
as the flames rose to her Roman nose,
and her Walkman started to melt.”
Quite.
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