What do we laugh at in comedy? The answer is everything we deem to be base and normally conceal: the life of the body, excrement, copulation, bodily noises, and all human properties that pretend to be something they are not, impossible for a person to admit to: envy, conceit, avarice, self-righteousness, self-effacement, unscrupulousness, ambition, demanding esteem when none is appropriate. The striving to be something other than what one is, is the theme of comedy. Comedy exposes, and the humor lies in the gap revealed between the world as it wants to be and the world as it is. In that exposure lies an insight to the effect that the social world is a game that proceeds according to certain rules, some things are hidden, some are shown, and that in a way we live an illusion. The game depends on everyone taking part, the illusion that everyone believes in it. Comedy breaks that contract and as such it is the truest and most realistic of all genres. It is liberating in the sense that what it says is: this is what it really means to be human, and all of us are human. Yet it also constrains, a hindrance to anyone who wishes for something else and who believes it possible to elevate himself above this lowly world of excrement, copulation, envy, conceit, and constant misunderstandings, in other words anyone who insists on ought and should instead of is. Laughter is in this respect a powerful social force, one of the strongest corrective mechanisms of all; few things are more humiliating than being laughed at in public, and in order to avoid it a person must keep his head down and stay with everyone else. In this way, laughter on the one hand exposes the social game, and on the other keeps it going. Laughter is counterrevolutionary and anti-utopian: he who laughs at everything laughs also at the dictatorship of the proletariat, and if everyone laughs at the revolutionary there will be no revolution. If everyone had laughed at Semmelweis, mothers and newborn infants would still be dying of childbed fever. If the Germans had laughed at Hitler, he and his ideas would have been rendered harmless. But they did not laugh, they were earnest, they wanted something, the supreme, and in the supreme tragedy prevails, and tragedy is no laughing matter.
But if comedy is the truest and most realistic of all genres, drawing all things and all people into the real world, the body and its illusionless reality, how are we then to understand tragedy? Tragedy concerns the same thing as comedy: the rise and the fall. So why is the fall comical in the comedy and tragic in the tragedy? How come we don’t laugh at Oedipus? He thinks he’s something other than what he is. How come we don’t laugh at Hamlet? He doesn’t know who he is or what to do; ignorance and restlessness are his plight. How come we don’t laugh at little Hedvig who shoots herself? Hasn’t she misunderstood everything?
In that which is at one with itself there is no distance, and since distance is laughter’s and comedy’s point of departure, nonidentity its prerequisite, the only thing comedy and laughter cannot disturb is identity. That which does not pretend, which is not something else, that which is what it is. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Idiot is about just that. The novel was born as a comic genre with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which the author allowed the idea of the great, cultured world to be played out in the small, mundane world, which is to say the world as it was, with windmills, sheep, decrepit steeds, donkeys, and drunken bandits, through which rode a thin and ailing old man and his fat little companion. With Madame Bovary, Flaubert pursued that novel’s demystifying, reality-oriented aspect; in this case it is the idea of romantic love that collides with the world as it actually is, and which drives the main character to her death. Both Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are cynical novels insofar as they do not believe, yet scorn those who do. That what Don Quixote and Madame Bovary believe in is made so clearly illusory, thereby positioning the novels on the side of truth, and that both are lovingly portrayed, recognizing the universally human nature of their weaknesses and flights from reality, does nothing to alter this. The Idiot is the opposite of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. The Idiot is an anti-comedy. It turns the logic of comedy on its head, exposing the cynical world, scorning those who laugh at the emptiness of life, doing so by means of its confrontation with the unaffected human. Oh, what is it about the unaffected as a human quality that causes everyone in its vicinity to despair, unease to swell, chaos to loom, for no other reason than its mere existence? Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin believes that what he sees, what is shown to him, is what it is, and that whatever is said is meant sincerely. He is oblivious to the ulterior motive, he does not understand irony, he is blind to the roles people play. He has no idea that the social world is a game. He is at one with himself, and assumes everyone else is too. But they are not, and his ignorance of this is sufficient on its own for the game to disintegrate, in that he gives them a vantage point from which to view it from the outside, a place outside the social world from where it becomes visible to them, thereby exposing its arbitrary nature. Roles are meaningful within the framework of the game, but as soon as the game is revealed to be just that, a game, they become meaningless. Who do you then become? The person you are? What does that mean? Myshkin is himself, the person he is. He is genuine. He is indivisible, no one’s twin, no doppelgänger. For that very reason he is doomed to remain outside humanity. A society comprising genuine individuals taking everything at face value is a society in which nothing can be concealed, nothing kept secret, no real variation established. In other words, the genuine is the opposite of the social. The social world classifies and groups, excludes, suppresses, elevates. The social world is a system of differences, a world in which everything and everyone is graded and differentiated. The idiot nullifies all differences, in his realm everyone is equal. It is not his goodness that causes the social world such problems, but his authenticity. From a revolutionary perspective in which the complexity of the literary character is seen to develop from Odysseus’s simple, archaic smartness to explode, as it were, in Hamlet’s wild and contradictory Renaissance self, heralding the modern individual we know, Dostoevsky’s Mishkyn represents a regression, something deeply reactionary and unmodern, if not directly archaic, a kind of pre-Homerian man, on whom both Odysseus’s ingenuity in fooling the Cyclops with his clever name game and Plato’s cave allegory would be lost. Indeed, is Myshkin not somewhat reminiscent of that Cyclops, the one-eyed enemy imprisoned by his literal understanding of language, unable to comprehend that Odysseus is not being straight with him when he tells him his name is Nobody? Dostoevsky was a deeply reactionary author, firstly in the fact that he was searching for meaning, in all seriousness and with eyes open, secondly in the fact that he was searching for it not in politics or ideology, in science or philosophy, but in religion, and that he found it there, in simplicity. The great threat in all of Dostoevsky’s novels is nihilism, the spinning, flashing tombola of the social world on the fairground of meaninglessness, in the black night of emptiness, and what he defends himself so fiercely with, time and again, is the holy and the simplicity of the holy. Dostoevsky cherishes simplicity. His novels are hugely complex and chaotic, a tumult of characters and voices, not a quiet moment in one of them, quite without the slow and sleepily hypnotic passages, the lazy days of summer in which little or nothing happens, that occur in Proust, for instance; Dostoevsky is all pace, a series of highly intense, near-hysterical scenes on the brink of madness, but in all his depictions of a violent and uncontrolledly spiraling world, in his best books there is always, sooner or later, a light, and surrounding the light is silence. Dostoevsky’s light is not dim and soft like an oil lamp, nor bright and dissecting like our modern strip lighting, but white and almost all-obliterating, like flaming magnesium, one might imagine, which burns away details and nuances and gives one the feeling that it is not what is illuminated that is important, but the light itself. That difference, between the light and what is illuminated, is the difference between premodern reality and modern reality, and where the former is singular and simple, the latter is plural and grotesquely complex. Dostoevsky turned toward that light, he wanted to believe in it, but the will of that wanting, which only a person living i
n the complexity of the illuminated knows, made it impossible, it being the very opposite of belief. Wanting to believe is impossible, a contradiction in terms. Had he believed, he would not have written. But he could feel it.
What was it he felt he wanted? What is the light in Dostoevsky’s novels? It is grace. And grace is the undifferentiated, that which is without difference. It cannot be grasped by language because language is in its very nature differentiating. In that way, Dostoevsky’s grace resembles Hölderlin’s concept of “the open,” but whereas Hölderlin’s open pertains to the material world of rivers and clouds, Dostoevsky’s grace pertains to the social world. In that world grace nullifies all distinctions, in grace all are equal. The radicalism of this is huge and almost unthinkable. Yet it is this, and nothing else, that Christianity is about. There is no difference between anyone. The most despicable person is as worthy as the best. Jesus said, whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. He is a man, as you are a man; he is you. Strike him not. Such a thought is inhuman in that it comes from outside the social world. Indeed, it is a divine thought. Adolf Hitler is as worthy as the Jews he gassed to death. In this our identity dissolves, being established by our very differences, and this is what makes Christianity unfeasible, we cannot think ourselves into oblivion, it would be too much to lose, since it is all we have. Nor can we remain the same without losing everyone else. The undifferentiated is not a category, it is a place in which all meaning vanishes; regardless of what you possess and how inalienable it is to you, it has no value there. This is what none of us grasps. And no matter Dostoevsky’s intentions when he wrote his masterpiece, what Myshkin brings with him none of us wants, it is almost a nightmare vision. The idiot is he who gapes and laughs with those who laugh at him, his face a question mark. The idiot is the cynic’s antipode. Between them lies the choice. The cynic asks, But who will forgive? The idiot replies, I will.
* * *
The sun that shone directly down on the balcony where we sat was so warm that beads of sweat trickled from my hairline, though it was well into evening, and so bright I wondered whether to go in and get my sunglasses. I wondered too if I should pinch a couple of prawns, their faint salty smell and the sight of the pink, armored creatures in itself awoke in me an urge to taste their fresh oceanic flesh. But I decided not to. Wearing sunglasses during a meal was bad form, and digging in before everyone had come to the table was even worse.
Geir sighed.
“What are you moaning about?” I said.
“Who’s moaning? That’s your department.”
I lit a cigarette and leaned forward in my chair, resting my forearms against my thighs.
“All right, so I’m moaning. Can I make amends with a joke?”
“Jokes and moaning, it’s all the same in your case.”
“What did Stevie Wonder say when he walked past a prawn trawler on the quayside?”
“I don’t know, what did he say?”
“Hi, girls!”
Geir grinned and put his feet up on the balcony. I leaned back in my chair and swept the perspiration into my hair with my middle and ring fingers, making sure the burning cigarette between my index and middle fingers didn’t make contact.
The sounds from the children’s room had died down; most likely they were listening to a story. I took a sip of the wine. I’d never told anyone that I preferred a soft drink. Nor that I favored drinking tea with prawns, even in the summer, the way I’d done when I was growing up, ever since then I’d always felt the two things went together.
A prawn’s eye had separated from its head and lay on its own on the side of the bowl. It looked like a peppercorn. Their tentacles, strewn about their chubby bodies, resembled whiskers. That live prawns were pale and sleet-colored, bordering on the transparent, much like dirty windows, hardly seemed credible when you saw them cooked, their color being such a strong and splendid characteristic you could hardly imagine that nature should squander it on something dead. The lobster, on the other hand, in its somber, steely armor not unlike certain suits of armor in the Italian Renaissance, black and articulated, was certainly finer living than when the boiling water so swiftly extinguished its life and the red-orange color seeped into the shell. To be sure it was a delicate thing to behold, and more elegant, but compared to the beauty of the black and all its associations with power and strength, the refinement of red was nothing. How different in the case of the prawns. Alive they looked almost like office workers of the ocean, in death like a company of ballet dancers.
Below us a bus stopped with a sigh at a red light. The traffic that streamed along the street, which continued out to the grassy coastline and the beach, slowed to a halt on the other side of the lights. Now it was the turn of those coming from the north, but the street on that side was deserted. The pedestrian crossing, ticking with the appearance of its green man, or green person as I supposed it was called now, was deserted too. A sliver of the feeling that could come over me at night, when the lights changed in the empty streets without anyone there to see them, implanted itself in my mind like a note slipped under a door. The image it conjured, which I could so vividly entertain, was of a world without people. All the houses empty, all the streets deserted, no cars, no buses, just the lights changing back and forth at the crossing down below, and at other crossings throughout the city. There would be movement, vegetation creeping forth everywhere, albeit at its own inimitably slow pace, pushing up through the concrete and the asphalt, gradually subsuming everything around it, and there would be animals in the streets. But none would heed the lights and their ticking men. They would belong to an empty system. The beings that once inhabited that system, which had created these lights in order to regulate their own movements, existed no more and would never return.
I leaned forward and stubbed my cigarette out against the upright of the railing in front of me, dropping the end at my feet for want of an ashtray, the discreetest thing I could think of to do with it. It lay there like a man under a tree, I thought to myself, and downed the rest of my wine, putting the empty glass on the table next to my plate, then looked up: at the other end of the balcony, some ten meters away, the door had opened. It was Christina. She smiled and raised her hand halfway in the air, as if we wouldn’t be able to understand she was there if all we saw was her body, and she needed a gesture to convince us.
She closed the door behind her with one hand, sweeping her long hair to the side with the other, and came toward us.
“How nice,” she said. “And such a lovely evening for sitting out!”
“Is he asleep?” asked Geir.
She shook her head and sat down on the chair up against the wall, blinking at the sun.
“But he’s in bed at least. It’s such an adventure for him to sleep with the other three.”
“Do you want some wine?” I said, holding up the bottle toward her.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’d like some Ramlösa, though.”
I put the wine down, picked up the bottle of mineral water, and poured. The glassy, bubbly liquid, fizzing faintly, settled itself in the transparent receptacle. Some of the bubbles released from the surface leaping four, five centimeters in the air, visible in the light of the sun which made them sparkle.
She put the glass to her lips and drank.
“Are mine in bed too?” I asked.
She nodded and swallowed, lowering the glass, though without putting it down on the table, holding it in one hand, her elbow resting against her thigh.
“Yes,” she said. “But John’s standing up in his crib and wants to join the others.”
Christina had a reserved quality about her, not in the substance of what she said or talked about, more in the way she spoke; it was as if she didn’t want to let go of her gestures, I sometimes thought. The same was true of her facial expressions, which she always seemed like she wanted to keep under control; not that they were forced in any way or false, because they weren’t, it was more lik
e she was wary of giving too much away, as if that would be dangerous, and was always holding some part of herself back, something she kept inside. In many ways she was Geir’s complete opposite, he was much more casual about himself, his body language, and his expressions; his need to control had the external world as its object, which he organized meticulously, the material aspects, where nothing was left to chance, as well as the immaterial, the realm of ideas, where he was unable to write anything at all without accounting for its origin in a footnote.
Christina was always well-dressed, not in a showy way but classy and elegant. It wasn’t surprising, seeing as she was a trained fashion designer. I always studied what she was wearing when we met, it filled me with a kind of satisfaction, perhaps it was the sureness of her choices that did it, the way everything complemented each other without calling attention to itself, because that would have been an unnecessary demonstration, the way the little details, like a scarf or a belt, brought out the maximum in all the other elements, raising them and presenting them, as it were, at the same time as they were foregrounded, by the chunkiness of a buckle, for instance, and yet backgrounded in that the buckle also served to set off something else. Color, cut, material, pattern; all were measured against each other with a sureness that could only be intuitive. This was something she was good at, something she didn’t need to make an effort to achieve. In that respect she managed what few people can, which was to erase the discrepancies between what was new and what was old, between what was expensive and what was cheap, by looking away from those properties and looking instead at the inherent properties of each item, each accessory. Labels didn’t exist for her; brand didn’t come into it when I thought about her clothes. Of those I’d seen, I was especially fond of a light brown leather jacket she sometimes wore, there was something extremely appealing about it, though I had no idea what exactly. What was the source of that feeling? It was something I vaguely associated with the seventies, even if it wasn’t especially seventies-looking in itself. Perhaps it was more the wamth of its tone, and the cut, but at the same time it possessed an almost aggressive quality, as leather jackets often do, and that combination might have been what I found so appealing. Big buttons. Feminine, in an unfrilly kind of way. Elegant. Yes, that was the word. The jacket was elegant.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 42
