If I Were A Freudian this Post Would Be Called "The Mother's Penis": A Note On Daisy Fried

"Hot damn!" I thought, "it's Daisy Fried!"  I was paging through the May issue of Poetry, and there, on page 138, was Fried's poem "The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn't Stop It."  I've never actually met Daisy Fried, but I've been reading her forever, and we both spend too much time hanging out on Facebook.  One reason I feel closer to her than I do to many of the poets I read is that we both have small daughters, and post about them with some frequency (actually, the fact that we're both on Facebook a lot, rather than dizzily pouring ourselves off some barstool somewhere, is also probably a parent thing).  Anyway, I was happy to see a new poem by her, and doubly happy to see that it was on a topic close to my own experience.  The poem's first line nails something very true about being a parent:"The girl grew and grew," writes Fried,  "her mother couldn't stop it; it terrorized."  The phrasing seems like something out of a horror story—where some kind of Frankenstein's monster grows too strong for its master and runs amok.  But the terror here is subtler than that: its primarily the terror of losing one's small child, the inevitable result of successful parenting: they grow up, these children, they grow away from you, and you, acutely aware of their vulnerability, let them go.

What follows is, for a time, a nicely-drawn and keenly observed catalog of children's experience, a world of play and crafts and school projects, behind which we sense the child's ravenous acquisition of skills and symbolic codes—geometry, biology, systems of writing, fine motor skills, and the like: 

     What would the finger-dance do?  Kindergarten art a buffet of markers
gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer's pools drying clear.
     A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes
for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper
     into paper dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small
and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers.  And silver rain.
     And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored
in reverse rainbow.  Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles.  A bird.
     Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane,

I enjoyed this as I read it, but wondered where it might go, how (if at all) the poem would turn.  And then there was this:

and knowledge: that the sky's full of blackstruck Ms and Ws, drifting
     clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn't reach
down to meet the earth;

Okay, I thought: we're getting a bit of a generalization, after all those particulars ("knowledge"), and we're getting a sense of the child's difference from the adult, the way the sky isn't represented according to the canons of adult realism.  But then something really interesting happened: the final half of the final line comes along, with an end-word that turns the poem so sharply in a new direction that I'm surprised the page doesn't emit an audible shriek of squealing tires:

                                     mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

What to do with this?  Well, okay, there's the literal to consider: we're talking about a kid drawing something, and in that drawing the mother could indeed be the size of a penis.  And we are invited to think about the diminishing importance mothers play in a child's life as that child grows up—the same diminishment that was so terrorizing at the beginning of the poem.  But one could have said "doll" or "crayon" or, for that matter, "vagina."  Why say penis?  It's such an incongruously masculine word to apply to the diminishing role of the mother.

One thing that's in play is simply surprise and novelty: it's an incongruous image, by being so masculine in a poem about motherhood, but there's a rightness in it too, in scale and in having to do with reproduction and therefore parenthood.  And then there's a real sense of disempowerment that you wouldn't really get, at least not in the same way, with another image: the penis is so connected to connotations of power that whole schools of psychology, from Freud to Lacan, use the term "phallus" to mean something like "empowerment" and "castration" to mean "disempowerment." We get a sense of the mother's disempowerment as the child, through all of the innocent and sweet seeming play and craft-making detailed in the poem, grows beyond the mother's control—and putting the word "shrinks" near the word "penis" gives us a sense of the detumescent loss of power or potency.

There's more than this, too, I think: there's also the simple fact that the penis, here, becomes not just another iteration of the traditional symbol of power and potency: it becomes an image of smallness and disempowerment.  There's something feminist in this, a reversal of the old Freudian model of masculinity as power and femininity as disempowerment.  In a way, then, the poem isn't just a mother's lament for her loss of authority in the life of her growing child. It's that same mother's intervention in the realm of symbolism, aiming to undo some of the patriarchal imagery that still contributes to the disempowerment of women.  It's a mother's attempt—as her daughter gains independence—to make the world that daughter will enter into a place less hostile to her.  The mother works hard to help the daughter grow into strength and knowledge and independence—and, in the end, she also works to make the world itself a place better fit to receive that daughter.

The Ego as Hero in Victorian Literature

Tintin is my Tintern Abbey

A couple of weeks ago I was poking around in a local bookstore, and had just given up on the poetry section when I noticed a few tall, svelte spines sticking up above their squat, chunky peers in the graphic novels section nearby. Having grown up reading a whole slew of French and Belgian comics—Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke, Iznogoud, and others—I knew at once what these were: English translations of various volumes of Hergé's series The Adventures of Tintin, in the British Metheun and Magnet editions and the slightly glossier, more luxurious American editions put out by Little, Brown. I scooped them up and headed for the cash register with all the speed and purpose of an addict on his way home with the first score after a long dry spell. I've been reading them compulsively ever since, and I think I know why. It's not just that most of them make for inherently compelling reading, with page-turning narrative cliffhangers and the forward thrust of all good whodunnits. It's that reading Tintin's adventures, as he chases around the globe with his dog Snowy and, at times, the bearish company of Captain Haddock, gives me a kind of double exposure. These were the books of my childhood, and reading them again in my forties both allows me to remember how I saw them when I first read them, and forces me to contrast that with how I see them now. What happens to me as I turn the brightly colored pages of The Broken Ear or The Secret of the Unicorn is like what happened to Wordsworth when he returned to his childhood haunts in "Tintern Abbey": I see myself as I was, and the world as I once saw it. Like Wordsworth, I realize that my perception of the world has become, in some crucial sense, a diminished thing.

The first thing everyone notices, coming back to Tintin after many years, is a certain cringe-worthiness in the depictions of non-Westerners.  While there are certainly characters of all ethnicities that Hergé intends as sympathetic, it's hard to get past the hook-nosed Arabs, buck-teethed Japanese, "Ugh!" and "How!" uttering Native Americans, and so-dark-they're-shiny Africans.  Indeed, this seems to have been a concern for the publishers, who have all-but-suppressed the most offensive volume, Tintin in the Congo, which does not appear listed with the other volumes on the back cover of the books after about 1980, even though other, more marginal volumes—the very early, black and white Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and the posthumous, incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art—make the cut.  It's certainly true that Hergé (the pen name of Georges Prosper Remi) didn't share our sensibilities on these issues.  In some ways, he held quite humane views: King Ottokar's Scepter is an anti-fascist work, and various books in the series express disdain for imperialism: in The Blue Lotus Tintin stops a western businessman in Shanghai from beating a Chinese rickshaw driver.  But nevertheless there's an uncomfortableness in coming back to these books and seeing some of the images.

When I first encountered Tintin, none of this was an issue for me, and I took the wide-ranging internationalism of the books in the spirit in which it was intended: as a kind of invitation to identify with the intrepid boy reporter as his adventures pulled him into all manner of exotic places.  The idea of a wide world spread out for me had an appeal, and a wonder, to it that I find hard to describe.  The best I can do to convey how I felt when I saw the cover of each new adventure—with Tintin striding out of a Balkan castle gate, or waving from a raft in a sea of sharks, or fleeing from the shadow of a Mayan pyramid, or intrepidly piloting a motorboat out to a black rock in the sea north of Scotland—is to quote a poem by the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro that I had the good fortune to publish in Samizdat some years ago.  It's called "Idiolect," and it describes the way Svenbro, the son of a Lutheran minister, felt when his father spoke of "the world":

In my use of the word “world” there is a strangeness

which I have never been able to shake:

the word carries a hopefulness

which has no strict foundation

in the real world.

The world being what it is!

For although I know it cannot be used

in the sense I want to give it 

it is the same picture that faithfully

returns in my memory

whenever I pronounce it to myself—

it is the light space over my childhood,

white April sun over a province

whose horizon trembles in the distance:

The world rests over there.

It is the late 1940s. In those days

I went to Sunday school every week

in our northern Galilee. To me

Palestine was still a country

with heights, fields, and rivers such as ours;

and by a miracle

the hills of Rönneberga just outside of town

became the light green mountain

where on one spring day Jesus

had said to his pupils: “Go out into the whole world!”

Languages were buzzing in the air.

Jews, Arabs, Kappadocians, Egyptians!

We were in the Holy Land,

coltsfoots were blooming

along the ditch-banks of the whole world.

And among all the tongues that I heard 

was also the sound of my own.

Svenbro gets it exactly, that sense of the promise and the call of the whole world, languages buzzing in the air among exotic peoples, a world rich and strange, and about to include us—in the person of the dauntless and indomitable Tintin, to whom every door opened, for whom every scrape presented an unlikely deus ex machina rushing to the rescue.  What kid doesn't yearn for the world beyond the horizon, where the colors must be brighter and the streets more abuzz with life?  I certainly yearned for such a world away from my dusty, dry city on the Canadian prairies, and it seemed so tantalizingly possible to get there: how I envied my father, an artist always jetting off to then-forbidden China, or Japan, or some other enticing elsewhere, his rugged red duffle bag in the hallway, packed for unknown adventures.  My dad could do it, and Tintin, too: surely I'd soon be on my way.  And the possibilities were broad indeed, as one particularly resonant title in the Tintin series made clear: Destination Moon.  Tintin's globe-trotting appeared to me in the aspect of infinity, of possibility.  Political disapproval of his black-face Africans didn't appear on any map of my reading.

Likewise, the near-total absence of women in Tintin's world escaped my notice when I first read the books.  It can't escape my notice now.  You can go many, many pages with Tintin without a woman even appearing in the background.  I was surprised, when I recently re-read Cigars of the Pharoah, to find a woman appearing as early as page nine.  She even seems, for several frames, as if she's about to speak, but in the end she merely stands there, silently indignant at the goings-on: a fit emblem, if ever there was one, for the place of women in Hergé's boyish universe.  It's an utterly de-sexed universe, where men behave the way boys imagine they behave, and where anything resembling romance takes on the aspect of a comic trap: when the opera singer Bianca Castafiore takes an interest in Captain Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald, she becomes a figure for the Captain to escape, much as a boy might seek to escape from the cheek-pinching and embraces of an embarrassingly expressive and affectionate aunt.  It reminds one of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster series, where women are out, for reasons beyond a chap's understanding, to tie a fellow down, when all he wants is a good adventure with the lads.

But these matters of one's adult awareness of racial politics and sexuality, contrasted with one's childhood naïveté, are minor league stuff compared with the really important difference in perception one notices coming back to the books after many years away.  I see those pages differently than I did when I was a boy, and it's in noting the specifics of how I see them differently that I notice that these books are a kind of Tintern Abbey for me.

For Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey was a haunted place—not in the literal sense, but in the sense that it was shrouded with past associations.  If you were ever to want an illustration for Wordsworth's precept that, in poetry, feeling gives importance to action, and not action to feeling, the poem "Tintern Abbey" is for you.  Here, the whole action of the poem involves the speaker (let's call him "Wordsworth," since in the convention of the Romantic descriptive-meditative poem the distance between author and speaker largely collapses) standing near the ruined abbey he used to visit a child, remembering things and glancing over at his sister Dorothy.  What's important is the aura of memories and associations surrounding the place—the specific feelings that haunt Wordsworth when he comes back to a location he'd known intimately as a boy, and sees it with both his adult eyes and the eyes of his childhood self.  Here's how he describes the return of his childhood sense of the place, and the difference between that sense and how he experiences the place as an adult:  

...with gleams of half-extinguish'd thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by,)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. 

He cannot paint what then he was: it's all just too different, too alien, yet uncannily, it is his own experience, and he bears it within himself.  He experiences the place as if he were himself a part of the natural landscape, one of the deer that ran through the scene, and all the sense details passed into and through him as if unmediated.  When he sees the abbey now, he experiences it screened through thought and memory and judgement and layers of experience.  He's analyzing and sorting it—a process that provides its own satisfactions, but it is a "remoter charm" than the charms of youthful experience, something supplied by thought and reflection. The earlier experience was more primitive, more vital—an appetite, a haunting, a fear and a love.

In the end, the difference between adult and childhood perception in "Tintern Abbey" is the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian modes of experience: he stands back and understands things, now; but as a child he experienced no real division between himself and the world.  Freud, echoing Romain Rolland, called this the "oceanic feeling," the mystical oneness of self and other, and the preservation of a sense of this experience lies at the root of Wordsworth's pantheistic mysticism.

When I came back to Tintin, one of the things I noticed about the difference between how I read the books now and how I had read them as a boy was quite simple—and apparently quite trivial, compared to the differences Wordsworth felt vis-a-vis his childhood self: I read the books much faster now. This isn't a simple matter of being a better reader, being able to parse out sentences and arcs with the speed and skill of a longtime English professor, who totes around enough advanced degrees in literary studies to wallpaper a small faculty lounge. It's a matter of intuitively choosing the details that I'll treat as important. That is: I zip along in the narrative, noting which characters have entered the plot-arc, noticing the various narrative gaps that need to be filled in, and anticipating the curves in the road down which this plot-driven vehicle is heading.  I spend a lot less time than I did on seemingly irrelevant details: no longer do I pore over the depiction of a car's radiator grille, or the way a little Egyptian tea table in the background is put together, or how a Russian soldier's overcoat buttons up.  I remember how I lavished attention on these sorts of details, how I felt like I could spend a whole day sucking the juice out of each detail-rich page.  And it wasn't just visual details that held me: I remember trying to imagine the worlds in which those details would make sense.  In The Broken Ear, for example, Tintin's adventures take him to a couple of Latin American banana republics, and he ends up wearing an elaborate colonel's uniform—but it differs in cut and color from other uniforms worn by other colonels in the same army.  I tried to imagine the different branches of the military that might give rise to such differences, the social world and bureaucracy in which they'd make sense.  It haunted me for hours.  Or, in The Cigars of the Pharoah, I'd stare fascinated at a scene in which Tintin begins to hallucinate from the effects of a poison gas while trapped in an ancient Egyptian tomb.  He sees images out of Egyptian mythology, combined with the faces of people he knows, and as he passes out sees an image of his own face on the body of a baby crying in a cradle.  It all had a quality I'd recognize instantly when, as a teenager, I read a paperback copy of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater—and that I would recognize again a few years later when I first took certain hallucinogens in the company of a bunch of grad students in anthropology.  I remember groping for the significance of the image, and building a kind of nightmare vision of helplessness, of my own smallness in the vastness of that ancient Egyptian architecture and the huge duration of civilizational time.  It was one of my earliest intuitions of the sublime.  I could never get a sense like that from the image now: there's just no way it could cut through me like that.  I see the frame on the page, note the significance ("Tintin hallucinates, is helpless: plot point logged, time to move on") and turn the page.

The difference between how I read Tintin as a boy and how I read Tintin now is best understood by appealing to Aldous Huxley's notion of the mind as a "reducing valve."  In The Doors of Perception Huxley quotes the philosopher C.D. Broad, who says

The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. 

Huxley then adds his own commentary, including these remarks

… in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet…. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve…. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows… something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

We adults are experts at screening material for relevance, at editing out phenomena that are, or seem to be, of no particular use to us. We need to do this just to get through the day, and, depending on the kind of things we do in our highly-specialized society, we screen out very different things. I still remember going on bicycle rides with a field biologist friend, and being perpetually humbled by how much more he saw on the trails around us, how he could read the nuance and significance of the way a dead cicada's body had decayed. He was hopeless at reading a poem, though, having no idea what to look for in terms of allusion or alliteration, a fact in which my wounded pride found some comfort.  He'd learned a framework of understanding that revealed a great deal to him, but also took him away from whole swathes of experience, and I'd done the same in a different way.  We were both living in highly screened worlds, sorted for relevance to the way we lived and the things we did in our daily experience.  These are adult ways of perceiving: a child sees things differently.  A child does not yet have a framework of relevance to use as a screen, and as a result the child's experience is radically different from the adult's.

Or perhaps this isn't quite right.  Perhaps it's not just that, as children, we don't know what's relevant to us, and thus experience the world in a less thoroughly mediated way than do adults.  Perhaps it's that, as a necessary part of our building up of our mental worlds, we're taking in as much as we can about all things at all times.  Maybe I pored over those Latin American colonel's uniforms to learn about the visual manifestations of authority (shoulder braid and jodhpurs and peaked caps), and to learn about the possible varieties of hierarchy and social organization.  Perhaps it's not that I had no sense of relevance, but that so much more was relevant to me, back when the mental tabula was so much more rasa than it has since become.  Either way, the physiological differences between the child's brain—in which the channels for, say, language acquisition are so much more open than they are later in life—must surely play a role.

This screening of experience for relevance is a powerful thing.  It certainly allows me to absorb a great deal of information quickly: when one "guts" a critical book, taking from its 250 pages everything one needs in an hour of selective reading, one is screening quite efficiently.  But something very real is lost in the process of learning to screen for relevance.  In fact, what's lost is every bit as profound as what Wordsworth feels he's lost in "Tintern Abbey"—and may amount to much the same thing.

What Wordsworth lost was a kind of selflessness, not in the sense of being a giving or unselfish person, but in the sense of not feeling, immediately and intuitively, any division between the self and the world.  He lost the oceanic feeling, the mystical intuition of the essential unity of all things.  When I read Tintin without regard for the usefulness of particular details for my understanding of the plot, I was reading in what a Kantian philosopher might describe as a disinterested way.  Not uninterested (far from it), but without self-interest, without a desire to limit perception to what is relevant to my intentions and goals.  This is pure aesthetic experience, for Kant, and it takes us out of our individual desires and goals and self-interests—it takes us, that is, out of our selves.  We become like the ecstatic Ralph Waldo Emerson when, in "Nature," he depicts himself in a state where "all mean egotism vanishes" and, as he says, "I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me."  It's no small thing to Emerson, who continues his sentence by adding that, in such a state, he is "part or particle of God."

When I recall how I read, without self or self-interest, without the screening for relevance to my adult sense of what is significant, I feel that not having that experience any more is an enormous loss.  I feel the entry into self and self-interest—the entry into identity—is a loss, much as it is in Wordsworth's famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," where it is an entry into the "shades of the prison-house."  But, just as Wordsworth could recall his early, selfless self by returning to his childhood haunts, I can recall of my prior state by going back to the things over which I lavished my attention as a child—the two dozen or so volumes of The Adventures of Tintin.

Some might think there's a sad process of decline to be seen here, in that Wordsworth had his experiences of this sort at the dramatic ruins of an ancient abbey, and in the sublime forms of nature, and I'm describing mine as having occurred while reading the pages of that still-despised genre, the comic book.  But to think in this way is to miss out on a couple of things.  Firstly, there's the fact that Wordsworth's setting for such experiences only seems appropriately significance and literary to us because we live in the shadow of two centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics.  Not too long before Wordsworth wrote, it would have seemed undignified and odd to locate significant experiences in a place as trivial and specific as an old, beat-up building in the boondocks.  When Milton wanted sublimity and significance, he took us to Eden, Heaven, and the halls of Pandemonium.  Secondly, it's less worthwhile to judge differences between the old abbey and the Tintin books than it is to understand their significance.  And there is, I think, some significance to the difference between how Wordsworth came to understand what he'd lost, in terms of childhood perception, and how I came to understand the same thing.

Wordsworth didn't experience his world as deeply rooted and traditional (his great poem "Michael," for example, is about the destruction of the rooted and the traditional).  But compared to us, he and his generation were astonishingly rooted—and this plays out in the ways we have our important experiences.  He has his by returning to a place he knew well as a child, a place near which he spent almost the entirety of his youth.  I, like a lot of people of my generation, had a much more mobile childhood—I lived in a city on the prairies of Canada, but I'd spend many weekends at a house on a lake up in the great evergreen forests, and part of each year in an industrial town in Ohio, and much of the summer in our house in Maine.  I moved houses more times than I can remember, often every year, and I've kept on moving ever since.  This may not be exactly typical, but it's indicative: we are no longer a people who grow up in one place, close to where our parents grew up, and then return to the same area for our adult lives.  We are a mobile people, and I think it's appropriate that my own early experience of self-loss, and my later experience of the difference between that early state and the world of adulthood, with it's very different charms, happened not in the rich experience of a physical locality, but in the act of reading.  Like other wanderers before us, we are a people of the book.

Nasty, Brutish, & Short — but Funny: Hobbes on Comedy

The leaves are dying, people, but the semester itself refuses to die, sprouting new, snarling dragon-heads of academic minutia like the Hydra of Greek legend just when I think I've finally put the beast down.  What to do, in such a situation?  Grade the papers, correct the galley proofs, and haul oneself to the meetings?  Hardly.  My usual plan involves popping on my noise-cancelling headphones and listening to bootlegs of old Mitch Hedberg comedy shows.  Maybe it's because of this that I've been thinking a little about the theory of comedy.  Or maybe it's that I'm scheduled to speak in February on a panel about wit and contemporary poetry at the Louisville conference on literature since 1900 (Joyelle McSweeney will be there talking about Harryette Mullen, and Mike Theune will have something to say about wit and poetic form, so don't let my presence put you off coming).  Whatever the reason, I've been thinking about the nature of humor, and have been having bit of a disagreement with that most unlikely theorist of humor, Thomas Hobbes.

Most people who talk about humor theory seem to break the field down into three different areas: incongruity theory, relief theory, and superiority theory.  Incongruity theory is pretty much what you'd expect it to be: the idea that humor comes from strange, unexpected juxtaposition.  Kant is one of the bigwigs in this area, claiming, in The Critique of Judgment, "everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction)."  You know this sort of thing: since we’re talking about philosophers, let’s use an example involving that soft-handed tribe: Monty Python’s famous skit involving philosophers playing soccer:

You know: there’s no why to the juxtaposition: it’s just weird, inexplicable, and incongruous, and the understanding, questing for an explanation for the juxtaposition, can find no satisfaction.  I’m actually not sure the skit holds up all that well, since between the filming of the skit and our own time there’s been a considerable diminishing of the notion that crossing high-culture with pop-culture involves incongruity.  So if you didn’t laugh, you can blame postmodernity.  But you get the idea.

Much of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thinking about laughter also involves incongruity, albeit of a somewhat more specific kind: his famous notion (propagated by his best advocates, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White) being the idea of “transcoding” — of juxtaposing the high or sacred with the low or profane, especially when the low and profane involve bodily functions. 

Relief theory is probably best exemplified by Freud, who argued that humor involved violating social taboos, giving us a sense of relief by letting us say the unsayable.  Lenny Bruce-style profanity falls under this category, as do many gender or ethnicity jokes, which allow the presentation of forbidden stereotypes in the special context of comedy.  This sort of thing can, of course, go badly, badly wrong, as it did in Michael Richards’ career-ending n-word gaffe of 2006.  It’s because of the potential for it to go so badly wrong that I’m restraining myself from adding a couple of my favorite examples (one ending “but it’s always money with you people” and the other ending “no, man, I never found the head” and both bound to offend someone, that being the nature of taboo-shattering humor).

Thomas Hobbes looks at things differently: the author of Leviathan was the pioneer of the superiority theory of humor, which maintains that comedy and laughter are found in the “sudden glory” we feel when we experience “some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”  There are certainly plenty of instances when this is true.  I remember taking a bunch of my student on a field trip to Chicago’s Millennium Park (it was for a class on the art and literature of Chicago I was co-teaching with an art prof, and we were doing a unit on public sculpture).  A couple of students took advantage of the early-September heat to walk into the reflective pool of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, a very postmodern, interactive piece of public art that encourages such things.  As the first student stood in the pool, she was blasted by one of the small jets of water that suddenly shoot up from the pool, getting pretty wet in the process.  Her friend thought this was hysterically funny — and it was, in a very Hobbesian way: suddenly, the observer, in her dryness and prudence, was superior to the soaked friend.  Just then, though, the laughing student got doused by one of the cascades that come from above, ending up much wetter than her pal, who hooted in appropriately Hobbesian derision at the fate of her hapless former mocker.  The unexpectedly superior position is the position from which we laugh.

Hobbes extends his theory a bit, too, saying that we can feel a “sudden eminency” not only with regard to others, but to our former selves: so, for example, if we were trudging along down a slippery, muddy hill, and suddenly started to slide down, but managed to maintain our balance and arrive quite suddenly at the end of the slippery slope, unsullied and no longer having to trudge tediously on, we’d laugh at our sudden unexpected superiority to our former position.

This is all well and good, but it’s far from exhaustive.  I’d like to propose an amendment to the Hobbesian theory, an amendment I’m deriving from two things that happened to my wife, Valerie, yesterday, both of which she found hilarious, and neither of which can quite be accommodated by the Hobbesian theory.

First, there’s the matter of Valerie’s morning commute.  She takes the mighty Metra train into Chicago every morning, but yesterday, due to some weird mechanical fiasco, the trains on her line were running very late.  She stood in the cold waiting for her train to arrive, but when it did, it didn’t stop.  Instead, in some attempt to get the commuter rails back on schedule, it blew by her at incredible speed, actually blowing her hat off her head.  This left her late and laughing at her predicament, with an emotion that could best be described as “well, fuck me, then.”  Something similar happened later in the day, when she returned home.  The sunroom in Stately Archambeau Manor is equipped with old-school blinds, the kind that roll down, and can be a bit temperamental, wanting to roll back up rather than stay where you’ve put them.  Valerie took a long time to carefully adjust and balance the blind so it would stay at the exact level she desired.  Then, as she turned her back and began to walk away, the blind rolled up at incredible speed, made a kind of Don Martin of Mad Magazine series of sound effects (FWAP FWAP FWAP, among others) and somehow, in defiance of the laws of God and physics, tore itself loose from its bearings, unrolling all the way to the floor like some kind of red carpet laid in front of a visiting dignitary, and finally cut loose from its roll altogether, drifting elegantly to the floor.  Shortly thereafter, the wooden roll itself dropped from the window, hitting the ground with a clunk and frightening the cat.

From my perch on the sofa this all seemed quite hilarious, in a strictly Hobbesian way: I hadn’t just invested my time in setting the blind just-so, so I was superior to She Whose Labors Had Come To Naught.  But Valerie laughed even harder than I did, once again feeling the humor of “well, fuck me, then.”

So here’s what I think was going on.  I think there’s a strange, pseudo-Hobbesian effect that comes into play when we experience a sudden sense of superiority not to someone else, and not to our former selves, but to ourselves in the present moment, a kind of doubled-consciousness.  Maybe the best way to get at it is to turn not to Hobbes, but to Jung.  Jung argued that one of the ways people deal successfully with difficult situations is to gain a certain detachment from their situation, without losing their sense of being within that situation.  Of the emotions produced by problematic situations Jung said “one certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it,” but, he continues, “at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the effect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say ‘I know that I suffer.’”  So there’s the part of you that is upset at having fallen on your ass into the mud, with everyone looking on and laughing.  But, if you are able to develop a little distance, and not just suffer, but watch yourself suffer, you participate in the same Hobbesian sense of superiority, and laugh along with the giggling observers.  Sure, you’re humiliated.  But you’re also aware of your humiliated self as if from the outside, and you feel superior to the humiliation even as you experience it: you play a kind of emotional chord, with one note of suffering and one of the “sudden glory” of Hobbesian superiority.

We might call this the “well, fuck me, then” effect.  And, as a habitual faller-out-of-hammocks and dropper-of-meatballs-down-the-front-of-my-shirt, I can assure you, developing the doubled consciousness of the “well, fuck me, then” effect is a skill well-worth having.  It even got me through the second half of a speech I was giving in front of several hundred people after my glorious academic robes had been shat upon by an errant seagull.