by Lance Lee
Paradoxically, we expect comic elements to exist within serious drama, a taste rooted in the deliberate mix of Elizabethan theatre at the root of our own sense of dramatic reality. That theatre’s combination of native romance, popular farce, and university drama embodying the Renaissance attempt to revive tragedy with the nature of the Elizabethan stage and the short temper of the groundlings created the flowing, variegated style reembodied in screenplays that we take so much for granted. Witness may be serious, but Book is forced to pause with his mouth full of food as Rachel and Samuel say grace in a fast food outlet. Later, the Amish clothes Rachel gives Book to wear are too short: the effect is ludicrous. On the Waterfront is unusual in its lack of humorous elements, but they are certainly present in The Godfather, whether as Luca stumbles over his speech or Sonny makes love upstairs at the marriage party while Hagen listens at the door and smiles at the woman’s ecstatic moans.
Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose imagines the rediscovery of Aristotle’s lost work on comedy in a medieval monastery wracked by murders. A faction of the monks dreads the release of those chapters into common knowledge and kills to prevent that happening; in an apocalyptic ending, the library is burned down, Aristotle’s work on comedy once again lost, the murders resolved, and the murderer incinerated. Why go to such lengths to block the dissemination of a treatise on comedy? The monks dread the subversive character of laughter, of people being taught to laugh instead of, say, to worship: of the danger that laughter will make the serious absurd, which is, indeed, the essence of the comic angle of vision. That perspective goes a long way toward explaining why crossover writers are so unusual, and so honored when they appear: they are the true masters of reality in all its facets.
Aristotle devotes very little comment to comedy in the existing Poetics, the heart of which is:
Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.2
Book in Witness in his too-short Amish trousers is an excellent example of a “defect” making a character ludicrous, though there it is a matter of costuming. The defect is certainly not painful or destructive. On the other hand, Book is certainly not a character of a lower type, an object of derision and farce, like Dogberry and his fellow constables in Much Ado about Nothing, so tellingly adapted into film by Branagh, or like Paul’s thugs in Analyze This. Nor is a defect inherently comic: serious, let alone tragic characters often suffer from a flaw, like Sonny’s unmanageable temper in The Godfather or Oedipus’s in Oedipus Rex. It is the comic angle of vision where laughter replaces tears that separates the serious from comic writer and determines whether a story is developed in which inevitably flawed characters are funny or not.
That the ludicrous might have a philosophical element, a perception of the absurdity of experience, is also absent from what we have of Aristotle, as well as the perception of the subversive possibility of laughter. Tootsie may have farcical elements and be out to make us laugh, yet it also contains an assault on our easy separation of masculine and feminine. Ted is more successful as Tootsie than as a man without any implication that he is not masculine. Political comedy takes this a step farther as Billie in Born Yesterday recites the Bill of Rights to the tune of “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.”
Finally, we may agree that the comic mask may not imply pain but must ask, pain for whom? Certainly comic figures routinely feel all the emotions felt by the noncomedic, whether we consider Charlie in Roxanne as he pours out his love in letters credited to another, or the duel in Smiles of a Summer Night, or Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing who is so deeply wounded by Beatrice’s sharp tongue he wants to flee. In Analyze This Paul at one point is reduced to deep, near-fatal grief.
But do we always feel their pain? Sometimes, we answer; at other times we simply laugh at the characters in proportion to their suffering. These are the two main directions of comic story development, covered below in “The Two Roads”: flirting with tragedy, and farce. The heavy as an experience for ourselves seems ruled out by the nature of comedy: what could be less comedic than a willed descent into the experience of destructiveness for its own sake through a hero or heroine? Freud offers little insight into the comedic world, it seems: nothing in his views contributes to a sense that humor is the order of the day in the psychoanalytic universe. His early work on slips in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is at pains to show how these betray underlying psychic, often neurotic, conflict.
So we must answer the question of what it is that makes suffering funny, if we want to understand the comic angle of vision, remembering we undergo that laughing experience in the realm of the imagination.
Winnicott and Play
The insights of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, 1896–1971, provide some invaluable tools for understanding this problem and even more so for the later consideration of the true nature of dramatic action. Winnicott imagined himself Freud’s true successor, and the very sweep of his thought has slowed its progress in the psychoanalytic field and beyond. Play and creativity are central to his thinking, together with an entirely original way of considering destructiveness that liberates it from Freud’s dichotomy of Eros and Thanatos. Winnicott establishes the idea of a third reality in defiance of the dualistic “me vs. not me” at the center of the argument our culture is having with itself. His work is only starting to come into its own now.
He calls the third reality in the “me vs. not me” universe we think we live in the transitional space, and rewrites our dualism into: “me–transitional space–not me.” At one point he uses Kantian terminology, talking of the “thing in itself,” although he does not consciously elaborate a philosophical position in contrast to Kant’s.3 But that is implicit in his work which offers a fresh way of viewing experience.
Winnicott labors to separate his views from those of Melanie Klein, who bridges the gap between the late Freud and Winnicott.4 She developed Freud’s Thanatos into a clinical death instinct and set in motion a “Kleinian” belief system espoused by Kleinian analysts who often behave with evangelical fervor. For Klein the newborn is immediately subject to primal fantasy without any perception of a reality separate from the self in a state of primary Freudian infantile omniscience. In that state an infant splits good experiences from bad, which are then experienced as persecutory elements. Infantile rage is experienced as attacking and destroying even good objects when desire is thwarted, leading to further splitting, repression, and guilt. I use the term “object(s)” because it is standard psychoanalytic language for whole or part persons, remarkably dehumanizing in so human a science.
These terrible infantile transports go on regardless of the environment, of how a mother or father acts: there is only the infantile realm, the infantile self, the infant’s imagination, in Klein’s view. Klein moves beyond the Freudian perception that the power of guilt results from the repression of aggressiveness from within or without and ultimately from our inherent ambivalence. In Klein the external is guiltless. It’s an odd view for a woman to develop who experienced a markedly unhappy childhood. In fact, this view of a guiltless environment in which all faults stem from infantile fantasy, a kind a psychoanalytic version of original sin, provoked her daughter, also an analyst, to denounce Klein in a public psychoanalytic meeting for attempting to put these ideas into her as an invasive, inhibiting act that evaded self-responsibility.
All this accumulating destructiveness for which the infant is wholly responsible happens in the first six months and is given a suitably Kleinian name: the paranoid-schizoid position. For the next year and a half an infant enters the depressive position, marked by reparative efforts to one’s objects. The imaginary nature of the infant’s destructiveness does nothing to diminish its impact: as we have seen, psychoanalysis has known from its start that the imaginary can mak
e us ill, just as at his end Freud saw in Constructions in Analysis it can make us well.
It’s worth pausing here to remind ourselves again the imagined isn’t unreal: it is just a different order of reality. Just as a play may not be real in a way a car is, or our own immediate anger or laughter, a play is real in a way that a car is not.
For Klein the infant’s primal rage demonstrates the presence of a death instinct. That is manifested in self-destructiveness as well as the destruction of the infant’s objects. This divorce of the death instinct from environmental features amounts to a view of extreme solipsism, one that is always a peril for psychoanalytic theory, let alone psychology more generally, both of which reflect our underlying conception of reality: there is a knowable “me” at the center of “my” experience, but an ultimately unknowable “you,” a “not me” that equals the environment, beyond. It is a culturally and personally unhealthy view.
This brings us to the radical nature of Winnicott’s thought, which redefines our way of thinking about the nature of experience itself and so encounters the considerable resistance in understanding and acceptance such ideas generate. The power of Hume’s vision of the role of habit in human affairs is not diminished by time or limited to trivia, but applies to the intellect and its fashions as well: however uncomfortable we may be with our way of viewing things, it is our way and changing it is more of a wrench than many can bear.
Winnicott reacts against Klein’s extreme rethinking of psychoanalysis and statement of dualism decisively by insisting that the environment is as important as the psyche in development and becomes part of internal structure. An infant doesn’t have enough of a self to pursue the organized mayhem, destructive and schizoid, imagined by Klein. Primal fantasy is a feature of human beings, and primal rage, and the Freudian state of infantile omniscience, but there is also usually a “good enough mother,” who at first conspires to maintain an infant’s omniscience by meeting its every need, as she must at the start of life, and then progressively begins to fail that omniscience in order to wean the infant as mental structures slowly make their appearance. At the moment that the weaning process begins, the infant starts to establish external object relations, and often makes use of a “transitional object” whose use is not challenged or questioned—like a blanket, a special toy, or a pacifier—to ease its transition.
The transitional object is at once imagined by the infant and supported by the mother: it stands in Winnicott’s view as a substitute for the mother who is progressively withdrawing herself to facilitate the infant’s adaptation to external reality. The transitional object reflects a loss of omniscience and denies that loss at the same time. It is at once the first symbol and first external object that is also not wholly external because of its meaning. Here Winnicott takes a decisive plunge: the transitional object is in another sense a doorway into a third area of experiencing, being at once the unseparated mother and her absence.
Thus the Winnicottian facilitating environment of the mother at first abets her infant’s omniscience out of a sense of its need, then progressively thwarts that omniscience through weaning so external reality can be reached as mental capacity develops. That opens the way to the development of a “transitional space” which continues to have this simultaneous quality of being and not being what it is, of being “me” and “not me” simultaneously.
The transitional object and the transitional space it opens experience to bring us to play, for the transitional object is clearly a play object too.
Play arises from the infant being able to use a transitional object in the mother’s absence, trusting she will return; in other words, to play with her in her absence, which then grows into being able to play with the mother in her presence now perceived as a fact of external reality. From there, as we mature, play grows into the world of shared experience. That world of experience is not mysterious but where we live most of the time, whether seeing a film or working with others in a scientific laboratory, whether we are involved in a game of golf, playing with our children, or enacting a role that others in an audience identify with and enjoy. It is not all of experience: there is still the world of just “me” and the world that is only yours, “not me,” also.
Play and creativity are inseparable: play is the primary form of creativity. Winnicott spoke of the need for psychoanalysis to familiarize itself with Jungian thought, in which, among other things, creativity is treated as a “complex” on a par with any other basic mental complex, like the Freudian libido, and not reducible to something else. Winnicott has found a scientific, psychoanalytic language for this primary importance of creativity.
As we mature more specialized areas begin to emerge in our creative play. In the Winnicottian view creativity is the fundamental characteristic of a healthy person, whether in arranging a bouquet, setting a table, or writing a poem. It is not some special preserve of artists but characterizes a key, common component of our psyches. Such a healthy person is able to engage with internal and external reality in a fluid, progressive way, for reality for Winnicott, as for Aristotle, is an experience of flow, of becoming. It is not set. Moreover, it is through play that we experience our whole personality and find ourself, for the behavior of the environment in which we live is part of our development and sense of self, and we experience the environment and ourself simultaneously in the transitional space.
In fact, at the mature level the transitional space finally makes sense out of the difficulties Freud runs into when he speaks of the cultural superego. How the private and cultural could echo one another, encounter one another, and in what medium, is answered by Winnicott. That encounter is in the transitional space, which is the space of our and others’ experience, where we join together in activity, which as adults we call culture. For Winnicott we live in a cultural space, where the “me” and “not me” join as elements of one another. Freud lacked the language and, implicitly, the philosophical ground that would have allowed him to see this.5
If, however, we are compliant with others’ expectations in this realm of experience, then we exhibit a false self: if we express our true self, which can only be expressed in creative interaction in this third area, the area of experience, then we are in a state of health. The self, however, is not simply this interactive reality: the true self, in itself, is secretive and not shared. We can only be in accord with it through our experience, or act against it by complying entirely with others’ expectations in the realm of experience, the “third area” in which we primarily live, Winnicott’s transitional space.
When we treat a character as flat, let alone as a type, and when we first encounter the protagonist in a dumb relation to his or her experience, then we are not in a state of ill health but one of limited humanity. If it endures, then ill health is the right way to label such experience because, among other things, it indicates a compliance with others’ views of our nature instead of expressing our true self. Terry is in a bad way because he conforms to Johnny Friendly and Charley’s expectations: Edie arouses in him a painful desire to act in accordance with his true self. But that can only be found through exploring in concert with others the choices open to him, a Winnicottian form of play, meaning experience, in which Terry begins to react creatively to his circumstances rather than being bound by them. In drama we don’t dismiss “types” as neurotic, but neither do we accord them the fullness of our response: we do not feel ourselves fully echoed there. Identity in all its forms bespeaks a sense of consonance of ourselves to another: we may recognize types as representing human possibility, but only in the sense of being reduced to one of its aspects.
Psychoanalytic experience itself, however scientific its aims and researches, is in this sense an example of play for Winnicott, as would be any other shared, defined activity. And when we play, we play, if you will, one game at a time: play is defining, though we are capable of playing in many ways. If patient and analyst, we are not consumer and producer, teacher and student, doctor and nurse, or co
wboy and Indian, regardless of what aspects of these other ways of playing may spill over. When, in Unbearable Lightness, we move abruptly from a personal, romantic conflict to political, we are disjointed because the nature of the reality we have been relating to and “playing along with” as audience has changed. We can no more substitute one kind of playing in the midst of another than the conscious mind can tolerate two stories being told simultaneously; however, we may realize later the story we have watched is not the one we thought it was, as in The Usual Suspects. This is just another instance of the profound way dramatic structure is rooted in psychic structure.
Even more interesting than these aspects of Winnicott is his work on destructiveness. Play in its creative variety is not a sublimation of the libido, as Freud would have it, or of the destructive impulse; in fact, to the extent libido, or aggression, desire, or destructiveness, erupts into our creative activity, it destroys play. To play presumes instinct is controlled and does not overwhelm our creative response to experience. Yet what are we to make of the destructiveness the late Freud and then Klein elevated into Thanatos and an instinct toward death? Both Klein and Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, speak to the terrible force of our destructive impulses, as if the lamentable sagas of our history are not sufficient to remind us in themselves. If such destructiveness is a fact of life, then what role does it play in a view where the creative response to experience is synonymous with health?
Winnicott understands the paradox so rampant in Nietzsche’s view of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. There as the Dionysian impulse sweeps away, which means destroys, some stultifying Apollonian, rational, ordered response to reality, it simultaneously makes possible a renewed, fresh reaction to experience and thereby restores creative possibility to living. Is it, then, destructive?
