Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media. (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur Neueren Germanistik)

Gender and Laughter Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media

Herausgegeben von

Norbert Otto Eke Martha B. Helfer Gerhard P. Knapp Gerd Labroisse

70

2009

Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik

Gender and Laughter Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media

Edited by Gaby Pailer, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Die 1972 gegründete Reihe erscheint seit 1977 in zwangloser Folge in der Form von Thema-Bänden mit jeweils verantwortlichem Herausgeber. Reihen-Herausgeber: Prof. Dr. Norbert Otto Eke Universität Paderborn Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Warburger Str. 100, D - 33098 Paderborn, Deutschland, E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Martha B. Helfer Rutgers University 172 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 Tel.: (732) 932-7201, Fax: (732) 932-1111, E-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Gerhard P. Knapp University of Utah Dept. of Languages & Literature, 255 S. Central Campus Dr. Rm. 1400 Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA E-Mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Gerd Labroisse Sylter Str. 13A, 14199 Berlin, Deutschland Tel./Fax: (49)30 89724235 E-Mail: [email protected]

Cover Image: watercolour by Charlotte Litzenburger All titles in the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik (from 1999 onwards) are available online: See www.rodopi.nl Electronic access is included in print subscriptions. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2672-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2673-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents Gaby Pailer: Introduction I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings Stefan Horlacher: A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter Andreas Böhn: Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic? II. Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration Jessica Hamann: “Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”: Laughter, Blush, and Gender Roles in Gottfried Keller’s Novella Cycle A Formula for Love. The Epigram (1881) Beth Pentney: “A comic turn, turned serious”: Humour, Body Modification, and the Natural in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil Raluca Cernahoschi: “From now on, I am Carmen”: Imagining Cross-Dressing as Comic Protest in the Life and Work of Romanian-German Author Franz Hodjak Ulrich Scheck: Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Humour and Gender Crossing in Star Trek’s Voyager and Enterprise Markus Hallensleben: “To be educated is to become a Harlequin”: Cross-Skinning as Carnivalesque Hybridity in Michel Serres, Hannah Höch’s Dada, and Orlan’s Body Art III. Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender, and the Comic Gaby Pailer: Multi-Layered Conflicts with the Norm: Gender and Cultural Diversity in Two Comedies of the German Enlightenment Sabine Wilke: Indigenous Laughter: The Voice of the Other in Tales from the “South Seas” Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza: Subverting the Pantragic Heroine: Nestroy against Hebbel Jakub Kazecki: Black and White in Color or Black Victory? The Comic Effect of Displacement in the Film Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976) by Jean-Jacques Annaud

7 15 17 49 65

67

81

93 103

119 139

141 155 169

187

6 Karin Lornsen: The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn IV. Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio, Television, and Cinema Andreas Seidler: Moral Ideal and Physical Desire: Gender Roles, Sex, and Comic Elements in the Rococo Tales of Christoph Martin Wieland Birte Giesler: Social Satire, Literary Parody, and Gender Critique in French and German Fairy Tales of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger Ellie Kennedy: “But I’m a Lady!” Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy Peter Stear: Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy Christine Mielke: Couples and Friends: Comic Strategies and Social Structures in German and American Comedy Series Frank Degler: Affirmative Humour in Bully Herbig’s Parody of Star Wars/Star Trek: (T)Raumschiff Surprise V. Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art Susanne Bach: May I Laugh about Women’s Lib? or: The Difficult Relationship of Humour and Feminism in Margaret Atwood, Caryl Churchill, and Helen Fielding Stefan Börnchen: Aletheia as Striptease: Gendered Allegories of Truth in Heidegger, Gorgias, and Barthes Volker Helbig: Judith Butler and the Problem of Adequacy, or: The Epistemological Dimension of Laughter Caroline L. Rieger: Comparing Same-Gender and Opposite-Gender Conversations: a Laughing Matter? Oliver C. Speck: The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada List of Contributors

201 219

221

233 251 269 285 297 313

315 329 347 355 371 383

Gaby Pailer

Introduction “Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic in Literature, Theatre, and Modern Media: Chances and Limits” was the rather stern heading of what was to become a pleasurable three-year collaborative research programme. Dealing with the crossroads of gender, laughter, and media from a multitude of theoretical and practical perspectives, researchers involved would soon label it more succinctly the “Gender – Laughter – Media” project. This volume documents the refined results of the respective series of workshops and final conference held in Germany and Canada from the spring of 2004 to the fall of 2006. The point of departure was the observation of a remarkable intersection between gender theories and theories of laughter, the comic, and comedy: in both areas the question of physicality for shaping or expressing identity is a major issue, and in both fields critics claim the subversive potential of bodily acts towards a cultural norm. Yet the results presented in both fields are very different, and the overlap has only rarely been considered in groundbreaking research. Therefore the research programme aimed to address both the overlapping issues and differing results by focusing on a wide range of traditional and modern media in western societies of the last 250 years. Among other issues literature deals with the shaping of gender identity through ‘intertextuality’, or ‘citational’ acts; visual media transform this procedure into scenic presentations, or ‘performative’ acts. If we look at the intersections with theories of gender and laughter, crucial questions arise, for example: How can gender identities, their performance and perception, be influenced and shaped by comic genres and strategies? What impact does the communicative function of laughter have on the traditional binary view of gender roles in textual and visual media? Which possibilities and limitations in changing heterosexual norms does one encounter in various comic paradigms? A brief glance at the theoretical backgrounds concerned – gender, laughter, and media – will help to understand their interrelatedness as conceived in this volume. As to the first aspect, the most widely addressed theorist is Judith Butler, who considers gender identities to be primarily performative, that is, constituted by the recognition, creation, and performance of differing interpretations of the body and physicality. She seeks to expose the heterosexual norm that governs everyday perceptions of gender, and to open new possibilities for imagining gender beyond the dominant paradigms. Referencing Jacques Lacan, she claims that the construction of identity is driven by the imitation or

8 citation of the symbolic order; conversely, as the symbolic originates from individual citational acts, a subversion of the heterosexual norm is possible by citing the law differently “in order to reiterate and co-opt its power” (Butler, Bodies 14) employing satirical, parodistic, and ironic practices. Another theorist, who questions the concept of ‘nature’ and the primordial binary sexual categories as naturally given, is Donna Haraway. With her works about contemporary constructions of bodies and genders in the context of bio-medicine she also refers to the aspect of construction in research itself and claims that the same as scholars in the humanities and arts, scientists should be aware that they are producing ‘narratives’ rather than finding the truth about human ‘nature’ (Haraway, Primate Visions). Yet, in general, gender theorists do not tend to see the claims of comedy and laughter as a major opportunity of subversion. Of course, studies on several genres in different national cultures have analysed various comic models (for example the following monographs and essay collections: Little; Lowe; Sochen; Finney; Rowe; Hengen; Walker; Chirico; Uecker), but most of the existing studies tend to set aside the positive impact of laughter for understanding physicality and social relations. When it comes to gender issues, the basic claim of “subversive laughter” through comedy (cf. Jenkins) is often already questioned in titles such as A very serious thing, women’s humor (Jochum), or That’s not funny, that’s sick (Hurst). As for the second cornerstone of our approach, the interrelatedness of laughter, the comic, and comedy deserves consideration. Laughter is one of the most fascinating human functions, a non-verbal, bodily response to a conflict of perception as well as a discharge or relief that acts as a satisfactory solution for the subject who experiences such a perceptual conflict. The anthropological, physiological, psychological, and social experiences of laughter and the comic play significant roles in the relation between the ‘nature’ and the ‘culture’ of human beings. The comic appears in the everyday world as the failure or breakdown of an event that is met with laughter (Stierle). It can also be used deliberately, either to smooth over differences or to exacerbate them, in order, for example, to reassert hierarchical distinctions within groups, to exclude others, or to undermine hierarchical relations and their presumptions. It can be an instrument of discrimination, or of ridicule and humiliation, or of celebration, appreciation, and recognition (Greiner). To be sure, theories of laughter and the comic have a long tradition. The causes and forms of laughter have been studied extensively from different points of view. Prominent theories (for example: Freud; Bergson; Bakhtin; Plessner) have influenced more than a century of research. By contrast, the functions of laughter and the comic in constructing or undermining gender identities have only recently been considered (for example: Jochum; O’Neal; Gilbert; Furman). And there have been team approaches such as an interdisciplinary research programme at the University of Konstanz (Germany) which included anthropological, psychological, and sociological perspectives (cf. Kotthof).

9 The performance aspect is what links gender and laughter to the third field of our approach, media in their various traditional and modern forms. In literature, theatre, radio, and film, types of comedy derive from performative acts and the intention to provoke the kind of surprise that ends in laughter. These kinds of laughter – laughing or sympathizing with people in contrast to ridiculing or laughing at them – depends on the manners and kinds of comic figures presented (Jauß). Similarly, there are at least two kinds of comedy that involve the subjugation of the body under a cultural or societal norm, implying either the subversion or the affirmation of existing socio-cultural structures (Greiner). In addition to the theatre as the classical medium for comedy, we encouraged the scholars in our programme to consider other genres of literary writing, such as, for example, the picaresque novel or verse narratives. Above all, newer media such as film, and television were analysed for their comic functions. It is noteworthy that media in this context are not just ‘vehicles’ to transport funny contents, but provide a specific frame for the production of the comic itself. Physicality as a comic-producing dimension appears in literature completely different than in a scenic presentation. Modern visual media offer a variety of possibilities to visualize and transform different aspects of the body such as, for example, movement or voice. For the purposes of our project, we asked all participants to focus on the performance aspects of gender and their potential power of subversion specifically from the perspective of the comic import; conversely, laughter, or the production and reception of comedy, satire, and irony, was intended to be analysed primarily from a gender perspective. In regard to the intersection among gender theories and theories of laughter and the comic, a leading question was how the heterosexual norm gender theorists seek to subvert is comparable to the societal norm that is subverted or affirmed in different forms of comedy. Another aspect concerns the gendered organization of social, political, and familial groups and the question of how gender is marked by different forms of laughter. In social interaction, laughter often works as an instrument of power: superiors only rarely make fun of themselves, whereas employees tend to make themselves a target of laughter (Laub Coser). Gender plays a significant role in such processes, since women and men seem to joke and laugh in very different ways (Kotthof). Hence, the research would also ask: How do the respective participants of different groups respond to given norms, and how can these norms be influenced by humour? Or, on another level: What implied gender bias or acceptance of the heterosexual norm is there in theories that claim to be objective in their concept of human ‘nature’? How are these normative discourses of ‘culture’ versus ‘nature’ employed for the fictional display of laughter? This leads finally to the aspect of cultural diversity, with acts of joking and laughing as means of ethnic group solidarity or rejection. One part of the research thus reflected on the different roles of cultural history and intercultural relations.

10 The research programme included investigations on traditional and modern media from western cultures (Germany, England, France, Spain, USA, Canada) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Important aspects to focus on were, for example, the transformation of comic materials from the stage into film, or the study of certain motifs – such as cross-dressing and gender bending – in their historical and cross-cultural transformation in different media. More synchronic studies would investigate the differences between modern media in their treatment of relations between gender aspects and the comic. With this bundle of questions we opened up a series of meetings, in which several teams of scholars reflected on aspects such as the multiple forms of gender transformation in different media, the relation of gender and laughter in the context of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and the subversive power of laughter and the comic in regard to comic genres and strategies. Three workshops were held at German and Canadian venues in 2004 and 2005, concluded by a conference in 2006. The opening workshop in Bronnbach, Germany (May 2004) focused on the multiple forms of cross-dressing and gender transformation. The contributions concerned textual and medial forms of gender bending and the change of sexual orientation, including the cultural and historical complexes of clothing, fashion, and transvestism. The symbolic constructions of identity were discussed, as well as the emergence of ‘artificial’ human beings and their – possibly ‘new’ – gender concepts. The second workshop in Vancouver, held in August the same year, concentrated on gender identities, cultural diversity, and intercultural relations. The group of researchers reflected on the traditional view of two ‘genders’ as two ‘cultures’ within a heteronormative framework of thinking and connected this question with post-colonial approaches to ethnicity, hybridity, and national stereotypes. The third workshop in Kingston, Ontario (August 2005) dealt with comic genres and strategies and the apparently more dominant resistance to innovative gender concepts within various genres and media. The participants presented diachronic and synchronic studies of traditional and modern genres and media, as well as comparative studies of related genres and media in North America and Europe, for example film comedies and TV series. The programme was concluded by an international conference at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C., in August 2006. The format of these meetings was intended to allow for team research and peer-mentoring, with groups of approximately 20 participants, senior and junior scholars from North America and Europe. All participants of the individual workshops were asked to submit their contribution in writing two months prior to the meetings in order to circulate them to the entire group. This turned out to be a successful strategy in order to enhance discussions and to create a forum for communicating the ongoing research and developing results. The original workshop contributions with abstracts and minutes of deliberations are posted on the website of the research programme, whereas the 23 articles selected for

11 this research anthology are all revised or extended versions of former contributions. Since the collaborative approach enhanced the opportunity to include various initially unexpected subject matters and arguments, the editors of this volume did not wish to narrow down the thematic scope by focusing too closely on the original workshop topics. The articles were therefore arranged in a slightly different form in five thematic sections. The opening section, Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings, presents two survey chapters, based on keynote lectures at previous meetings. Stefan Horlacher presents a philosophical-historical survey establishing a nexus between gender, laughter, and media, and demonstrating the complexity of the question to what extent laughter can be considered a liberating social and bodily means. Andreas Böhn contributes a systematical approach. Based on examples of modern film productions, he investigates the possibility of subversion in gender roles as related to changing modes of cultural norms in modern societies. The second section, Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration, explores the multiple forms of irritating stereotypical gender perceptions and their comic impact. The first two contributions investigate works of literature in German and English. While Jessica Hamann focuses on the role of body language in narratives of Swiss Realism, Beth Pentney investigates beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm in a contemporary novel by Fay Weldon. Two further papers explore acts of gender bending as acts of cross-dressing and beyond in different contexts: Raluca Cernahoschi reflects on a unique act of transvestism as a famous opera figure, Bizet’s Carmen, by Romanian-German author Franz Hodjak, an episode, which he later transformed into the medium of the novel. Ulrich Scheck investigates the potentially subversive gender role changes in the imaginary spatial environment of Star Trek; Markus Hallensleben examines processes of ‘cross-skinning’ as statements on race, class, and gender in modern bio-art by performers such as Orlan. The essays in the third section, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender and the Comic, explore aspects of (post-)colonialism and multiculturalism as related to gender and laughter. The first chapter establishes a nexus between gender, the comic, and postcolonial discourse and investigates German 18th century comedies that deal with cross-national and cross-religious encounters (Gaby Pailer), followed by Sabine Wilke’s analysis and discussion of early contact narratives between Polynesians and Europeans in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century and their depictions of ‘native laughter’. The tragedy of the ancient Jewish heroine Judith and its parody – as a struggle between 19th century dramatists Hebbel and Nestroy – comes into view in Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza’s paper; Jakub Kazecki treats encounters between French and German colonists in Africa during WWI as parodied in the medium of film.

12 Karin Lornsen explores the city as a stage of Turkish-German encounters in contemporary German narrative prose. The fourth section, Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio, Television, and Cinema, focuses on literary and media genres and the question of affirmation or subversion of the comic with respect to different national cultures. The first two papers focus on German and French 18th century literature. Andreas Seidler treats conflicts between intellect and sensibility as a source of comic situations in texts by German Enlightenment author Christoph Martin Wieland; Birte Giesler compares the ridiculing of gender identity formation in French and German fairytales by Friederike Helene Unger and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Two further chapters explore contemporary British radio comedies (Ellie Kennedy) and television series (Peter Stear), followed by a comparative study of German and US-American sitcoms (Christine Mielke). The final chapter deals with the Star Trek/Star Wars parodies by the German film director Bully Herbig (Frank Degler). Section five, Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art, approaches the gender-laughter interrelationship by looking at the different comic strategies in fictional, philosophical, artistic or real life communication: It starts with Susanne Bach’s considerations of the affirmative or subversive impact of English literary texts that poke fun at feminism. Stefan Börnchen investigates the comic impact of gendered allegories of truth in western philosophy, and Volker Helbig re-examines the notions of subversive laughter as claimed in Judith Butler’s gender theory. Caroline L. Rieger contributes an approach from applied linguistics on gender aspects of laughter in everyday conversations. The section concludes with a discussion of the event art form of Dadaism and its humorous strategies (Oliver C. Speck). It was a pleasure to develop and conduct this programme over the period of three years in cooperation with Andreas Böhn (University of Karlsruhe), Stefan Horlacher (University of Dresden), and Ulrich Scheck (Thompson Rivers University). I would especially like to acknowledge the work of all research assistants involved on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Frank Degler (University of Mannheim) co-organized the workshops in Bronnbach, Germany, and Kingston, Ontario; Raluca Cernahoschi (UBC Vancouver) co-organized the one in Vancouver, and Peter Stear (University of Dresden) helped with the editing and proofreading of some of the contributions. I would also like to thank the administrative staff of Ulrich Scheck at both Queen’s University and Thompson Rivers University. Following the first workshop we posted a project website created by Jakub Kazecki with the assistance of Sonja Bichsel and, later-on, Jamie Lee. As for the preparation of this research anthology for print, I cannot be thankful enough to my research assistant Melissa Kerr (UBC Vancouver) for her work of proofreading and editing the whole manuscript. Our special thanks go to Charlotte Litzenburger who provided us with her art

13 work for workshop and conference posters, our website, as well as for the cover of this volume. Research programmes of this format are not possible without the financial assistance of major research funding institutions. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, who provided a three-year Standard Research Grant, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), who was gracious in granting substantial travel support as a matching fund from the German side. Finally, all major collaborators of this research programme would like to thank their institutions for the support received in order to conduct and successfully complete this research programme. Vancouver, August 2008

Works Consulted Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich: Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur. Trans. by Alexander Kaempfe. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1990. Bergson, Henri: Das Lachen. Ein Essay über die Bedeutung des Komischen. Zürich: Arche 1972. Butler, Judith: Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York – London: Routledge 1993. —: Gender Trouble. New York, London: Routledge 1990. Chirico, Miriam M.: Female Laughter and Comic Possibilities. Uncommon Women and Others. In: Modern Dramatists. A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. Ed. King Kimball. New York: Routledge 2001. Pp. 339–359. Finney, Gail (Ed.): Look Who’s Laughing. Gender and Comedy. Langhorne: Gordon and Breach 1994. Freud, Sigmund: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1992. Furman, Suzanne Nay: Exploration of gender, attitudes toward women, and anger in perceptions of gender-typed humor. Ph.D. Thesis. University of South Florida 1995. Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic in Literature, Theatre, and Modern Media. Project webpage by Jakub Kazecki. ⬍http://www.cenes.ubc.ca ⬎. Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992. Haraway/Donna: Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge 1989. —. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge 1991. Hengen, Shannon (Ed.): Performing Gender and Comedy. Theories, Texts and Contexts. Williston (VT): Gordon and Breach 1998.

14 Hurst, Raymond: That’s not Funny, that’s Sick. Humor, Leadership and Gender. La Verne: University of La Verne Press 2000. Jauß, Hans Robert: Über den Grund des Vergnügens am komischen Helden. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 103–132. Jenkins, Ronald Scott: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: Free Press et. al. 1994. Jochum, Petra-Angelika: A Very Serious Thing, Women’s Humor. Gender Differences in the Production and Appreciation of Humor. Ph.D. Thesis. West Virginia University 1990. Kotthoff, Helga (Ed.): Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz 1996. Laub Coser, Rose: Lachen in der Fakultät. In: Das Gelächter der Geschlechter. Humor und Macht in Gesprächen von Frauen und Männern. Ed. by Helga Kotthoff. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag 1996. Pp. 97–120. Little, Judy: Comedy and the Woman Writer. Woolf, Spark, and Feminism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1983. —. Humoring the Sentence. Women’s Dialogic Comedy. In: Women’s Comic Visions. Ed. by June Sochen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991. Pp. 19–32. Lowe, Mary Leah: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Wedding. Gender Ideology and Narrative Structure in Romantic Comedy. Ph.D. Thesis. Florida State University 2001. O’Neal, Beverly S.: Gender and Humor Elicitation. How Males and Females Elaborate Offensive Humor. Jefferson City: Carson-Newman College 1993. Plessner, Helmut: Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens. Arnheim: Leo Lehnen 1941. Rowe, Kathleen: The Unruly Women. Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press 1995. Sochen, June (Ed.): Women’s Comic Visions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1991. Stierle, Karlheinz: Komik der Handlung, Komik der Sprachhandlung, Komik der Komödie. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 237–268. Uecker, Karin: Hat das Lachen ein Geschlecht? Zur Charakteristik von komischen weiblichen Figuren in Theaterstücken zeitgenössischer Autorinnen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2002. Walker, Nancy A.: What’s so Funny? Humor in American Culture. Wilmington (DW): Scholarly Resources Inc. 1998.

I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings

Stefan Horlacher

A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter Establishing a decisive nexus between gender, laughter, and media, this article not only critically discusses the often contradictorily defined concepts of humour, the comic, and laughter but also introduces to the most important theories in these fields with reference to Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Helmuth Plessner, Anton C. Zijderveld, Judith Butler, Bernhard Greiner, Hans Robert Jauß, Peter L. Berger, and others. Basic concepts such as the “significantly comic” versus the “absolutely comic” or the “comedy of denigration and exclusion” versus the “comedy of valorization and inclusion” are interrogated and the link between comedy, citationality, performativity as well as parody is established. Moreover, this article explores the sociological, psychoanalytical, bodily and theological dimensions to laughter and questions notions such as the carnivalesque and the grotesque. It is argued that the liberating potential of “full laughter” can be understood as the return of the body, of the repressed, and of the Other, and that if it is precisely this ‘other realm’ which ultimately makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is humankind’s best means of dealing with it. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; [. . .] laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians. [. . .] Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil [. . .]. Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God.1

Gender – Laughter – Media For more than three years, the Canadian-German research project and conference series “Gender – Laughter – Media” has concentrated on how humour, the comic, and laughter question, subvert, criticize, ‘correct’ but also strengthen and affirm gender identities and gender norms. By doing so, “Gender – Laughter – Media” has related the vast territory of laughter – which oscillates between valorisation and denigration, inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and subversion, and extends to the grotesque, the ludicrous, nonsense2, and the plainly silly – to gender identities and their representation and construction across various media. That there is indeed a decisive nexus between gender, 1

Jorge of Burgos (Eco 474f.). For a more detailed discussion of nonsense and of linguistic manifestations of humour such as spoonerisms and puns cf. Stemmler and Horlacher; Horlacher, Nonsense; Zijdeveld, Trend Report 10–12. For a discussion of laughter and comedy in Anglophone postcolonial literatures and cultures cf. Reichl and Stein. 2

18 laughter, and media has, at least partly, been observed by Manfred Pfister in his History of English Laughter, where he argues that one “of the main incentives or targets of laughter has, indeed, been the sexual sphere, and, in particular, female sexuality”, and that “gender roles, relations and hierarchies – and, in particular, their transgressions! – have proved the common laughing stock of cultures otherwise far apart from each other” (Pfister vi). Analysing the possible subversion or affirmation of gender identities through humour, the comic, and laughter becomes even more relevant if we consider Sigmund Freud’s line of argument that we “are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke”, so that we “are no longer inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure” (162). From this it follows that to “perceive a situation as humorous causes it to appear less discriminatory, and more acceptable” (Bill and Naus 659). But if sexism “disguised by and delivered through humor” is potentially interpreted “as being harmless and innocent” (646), and thus tends to escape criticism altogether, if “[p]erceiving and labeling an incident as humorous appears to diminish its sexist content” (660), this only increases the necessity for a critical analysis of the “comic mode” (Lodge 170) with special attention to its ability to hide patriarchal, sexist, and even misogynist tendencies in literature, plays, films, and other media. As a matter of fact, a study of the medial creation and representation of laughter should enable us to “reveal the fault lines of the anxieties and the social pressures at work at any given historical moment” (Pfister vii) and in any culture or society we choose to analyse. For such a study, the literary, auditory, theatrical, and televisual, or cinematic representations of laughter have the advantage of revealing these points of contention and debate even more clearly than actual laughter does since they allow us to analyse “the symbolic systems of representations” – that is “culture as first, second and higher order systems of signs”3 – rather than the social reality they represent and to include the diachronic, historical dimension as well as the anticipatory power of art conceived of as a savoir littéraire in the broadest sense (Horlacher, Literatur). Art is thereby considered as a special sign system which, notwithstanding its historical imprint, transcends any narrow notion of mimesis that would reduce it to a mirror or a simple image of reality. Whatever the medium of artistic expression, be it literary texts, radio plays, theatre, film, body art, or other performances, all of these art-forms are a central part of that “larger symbolic 3 Pfister vii. Any ‘history of laughter’ – just as any ‘history of sexuality’ – “can only be the history of social discourses, representations, performances and practices through which cultural processing of laughter is effectuated”. A history of laughter is then the history of the – often conflicting – norms giving social shape to and circumscribing “the anthropological impulse of laughter in a particular society” (Pfister v).

19 order by which a culture imagines its relation to the conditions of its existence” (Matus 5). Notwithstanding their medial form, imaginative ‘texts’ “are able to ‘mobilize fantasies without legislating action,’ and can constitute a space in which shared anxieties and tensions are articulated and symbolically addressed” (ibid. 7). They not only represent the laughter of a particular society but simultaneously give shape to it, analyse and frequently problematize it (cf. Pfister). Moreover, these texts, or works of art, are especially rewarding objects of analysis since they have the ability to articulate impressions, intuitions, mentalities, and pre-scientific forms of knowledge long before – if ever – they reach the status of the collective consciousness (Horlacher, Daniel Martin); they are forms of knowledge which cannot be articulated or even conceived of outside the realm of art because this is exactly the space where – analogous to dreams – the borders of (self-)censorship are potentially lowered and the unthinkable, the liminal, the forbidden, and the experimental, in the sense of Raymond Ruyer’s utopian mode (mode utopique), can be articulated. The different forms of art analysed in this volume all have the potential to create a simultaneity of the unsimultaneous, of the clearly possible and the barely conceivable, of the officially sanctioned and the expressly forbidden. Their unique potential rests in their capacity to render the possible worlds or realities they create ‘real’ in the sense of liveable (that is able to be experienced, tested and criticized), so that they can be understood as a privileged space where the important work on a cultural imaginary takes place (cf. Fluck 7–29).

The Quixotic Interrelatedness of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter While Mikhail Bakhtin argues that “[l]aughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth” that “cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils” (94), Georges Minois contends that “[l]e rire est une affaire trop sérieuse pour être laissée aux comiques” (9) (“[l]aughter is far too serious to be left to comedians”). These contradictory statements raise the question of how far it is possible, or even desirable, to write seriously (not to say dry-as-dust à la Sir Walter Scott) about laughter (cf. Kuschel 11), and how far it is reasonable to expect that “after having thoroughly examined the structure of comic experience” one can with a serious demeanour “declare to the world what it is” (Berger xv). Laughter is evanescent, negates differences, and harbours paradoxical traits. The problems for analysis arising from this are well documented in scholarly literature: “How many jokes”, Peter L. Berger asks, “could survive treatment by philosophers?” (xiv). And if the comic experience is fragile and inherently fleeting, if laughter is volatile, “an ephemeral performance, not a lasting text or monument”, if laughter “vanishes with the situation that occasioned it” (Pfister vii), how can it be taken apart or held up for scrutiny? That there is no simple

20 answer becomes obvious if one takes a look at Minois’s impressive Histoire du rire et de la dérision and his reference to Edmund Bergler’s Laughter and the Sense of Humour, where already in 1956 Bergler listed more than 80 theories of laughter. Although philosophical theories of laughter may explain different and complimentary aspects of laughter, and despite this list having become much longer by now, none of these theories really manages to comprehensively explain the phenomenon of laughter. One of the reasons for this may well reside in the fact that the term “laughter” comprises many different and contradictory realities, that in analogy to Jacques Lacan’s famous “THE woman does not exist” (Il n’y a pas La femme), THE laughter does not exist either: “Le rire n’existe pas” (Minois 484; cf. Pfister v). THE laughter is an illusion since there are always only endlessly proliferating forms of laughter, their only point in common being their physical manifestation; however, a physical manifestation that can stand for a whole variety of feelings, ideas, and intentions (Minois 484), that has a historically and culturally variable and instable significance, and therefore needs interpretation. Moreover, [f]ür das Lachen ist [. . .] keine Wissenschaft zuständig; es entzieht sich jedem bestimmenden Zugriff. Die Vorstellung eines objektiv erkannten Lachens wäre lächerlich; sie verfehlt das Lachen, indem sie es zu einem Gegenstand der Erkenntnis macht. Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Lachen, Philosophie und Wissenschaft scheint unaufhebbar (Kamper and Wulf 9). [there is n]o single academic discipline [. . .] expressly devoted to the study of laughter; it exceeds any attempt at precise definition. The idea of an objectively definable notion of laughter is risible; it misses the point of laughter by making laughter an object of knowledge. The relationship of tension between laughter, philosophy and science appears to be irresolvable.4

More recently, Renate Brosch has also argued that until “today no transhistorical cause for laughter, no transhistorical definition for a joke has been found” (158). If one of the main problems seems to be the ‘nature’ of the object of analysis itself, another problem is that in scholarly literature about humour, the comic, and laughter these terms are either used without clear definitions or the definitions given are contradictory. It seems that what one scholar calls humour, another defines as belonging to the comic. The problems arising from this for the “Gender – Laughter – Media” project as well as for this introduction are obvious: On the one hand, no serious survey of theories of humour, the comic, and laughter can work without defining these concepts or phenomena; on the other hand, it makes no sense to simply impose new definitions and – by 4

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. All emphases in citations are according to the original. I would like to thank Dr. Sigrun Meinig, Claudia Lainka MA, and Peter Stear MA for their editorial help and for the stimulating and rewarding discussions.

21 doing so – to create, in all likelihood, yet more artificial categories that cut across the multiplicity of notions and concepts already available to literary theorists, social scientists, and philosophers. For this reason I shall not endeavour to (re-)structure or (re-)categorize the relevant theories of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Anton C. Zijderveld only to then ascertain that there is a mutual incompatibility between these theories since each of them works with slightly different internal differentiations between the terms in question so that sometimes the terms humour, the comic, and laughter even appear interchangeable (cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 2; Titze et al. 201). I shall instead adhere to a primarily but not exclusively descriptive approach, in other words, a tour d’horizon of a selection of the most relevant studies on humour, the comic, and laughter as well as of the multifarious definitions – and problems – they advance.5 Mahadev L. Apte ascribes in his book on Humor and Laughter the following three attributes to humour: “1) sources that act as potential stimuli; 2) the cognitive and intellectual activity responsible for the perception and evaluation of these sources leading to humor experience; and 3) behavioral responses that are expressed as smiling or laughter or both” (13f). Apte has to concede, however, that the term ‘humor’ and other expressions derived from it have been used to refer to all three phases or to any one of them. [. . .] Similarly, meanings of ‘humor’ include the behavioral responses of smiling or laughter. For many scholars the term ‘laughter’ is synonymous with the term ‘humor’ [. . .], and the phrase ‘theories of laughter’ often means theories of humor (14).

Bernhard Greiner argues along similar lines when he states that “[s]ystematischer Aufarbeitung hat sich die Komödie bisher verschlossen. Hierzu bedürfte es eines integrierenden Blickpunktes, an dem es offenbar gebricht” (Greiner 3) (“comedy has up to now evaded systematic research because no integrative perspective has yet been found”) and that the situation is even more problematic if one takes a look at theories of humour or of the comic: Auch aus der Komik-Theorie wurde ein übergreifender Blickpunkt nicht gewonnen. Das mag in dem eigenartigen Mißverständnis gründen zwischen hochkomplizierten, zugleich autistischen Entwürfen auf der einen Seite, die frühere oder gleichzeitige Theoriebildung nur marginal zur Kenntnis nehmen, und einem letztlich doch nur 5

This approach accords with Georges Minois (11) who argues that it is always too early or too late to try to elaborate a synthesis of the major theories of humour, the comic, and laughter. Therefore I can only ask the reader not to take this essay for more than it is, namely a selective and necessarily incomplete introduction and not a rigorous synthesis or re-conceptualization.

22 verbrämten Fortschreiben der schon immer herausgehobenen Dichotomie zweier Grundformen des Komischen, einer Komik der Herabsetzung, des Ver-Lachens, als intellektuelles Phänomen und einer Komik der Heraufsetzung, des Bejahens von Unterdrücktem und Verdrängtem und damit der Anerkennung des Lustprinzips (3). An overarching perspective could not be gleaned from comedy theory either. This may arise from the peculiar misunderstanding between, on the one hand, the highly complicated and at the same time autistic designs that refer to earlier or contemporary theory formations only marginally and, in the final analysis, a scarcely veiled continuation of an always already emphasized dichotomy of two basic forms of the comic: a comedy of denigration and exclusion, of laughing at, as an intellectual phenomenon, and a comedy of valorization and inclusion, of celebrating the oppressed and the repressed, and thereby of accepting the pleasure principle.

The pleasure principle takes us, of course, directly to Freud, who discusses the phenomena in question in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious as well as in a short article published in 1928 in Imago. Freud advances the following definition: We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity (Freud 293).6

Peter L. Berger, to continue our survey, defines humour as “the capacity to perceive something as being funny”. He calls humour universal and argues that “there has been no human culture without it” since humour is “a necessary constituent of humanity” (ibid. x; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 37f.; Titze et al. 201). What we have to be aware of, however, is the fact that “what strikes people as funny and what they do in order to provoke a humorous response differs enormously from age to age, and from society to society” (Berger x). Thus, humour is both an anthropological constant and historically relative. “Yet, beyond or behind all the relativities, there is [. . .] something that humor”, understood as an inherent human trait or ability, “is believed to perceive” (ibid.). This “something” is, if we follow Berger, the phenomenon of the comic. Thus the comic would be “the objective correlate of humor”, and humour would be regarded as a “subjective capacity”. What Berger suggests is a hierarchical structure which consists 1) of the comic which – as he argues – is 6 Cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 39 and 27 for a commentary typical of research on the comic. Among other things, Zijderveld calls Freud’s “distinction among what he called Witz, Humor and Komik [. . .] like most conceptual differentiations concerning humour, quite arbitrary and rather vague”.

23 beyond good and evil, 2) of humour, which can be used for good or evil purposes, and 3) of laughter as the expression of our finding something humorous. For the sociologist Anton C. Zijderveld humour is “something living in something (institutionally) mechanical” (Trend Report 21) and can be considered as “an interaction in which people play with institutionalized meanings within a situation that ought to be defined as being humorous and funny through laughter. In defining the situation as humorous or not, values play a decisive role” (9). Why values are important becomes obvious if we consider that for Zijderveld (Jokes; Trend Report) humour can be defined as playing with the institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated values and norms of a given society. A humorist or a comedian is a homo ludens who engages in cultural juggling: He or she playfully reshuffles the components of the surrounding nomos, turns the established order of opposites such as masculinity and femininity or good and evil around, and inverts traditional hierarchies. By doing so, special attention is paid to the ambiguities and incongruities of the human condition since they form the essence of most verbal and practical jokes. Although the humorist is sometimes a homo homini lupus, stressing the aggressive and derisive dimension of laughter, humorous words, acts, and events normally tend to constitute a mirthful interlude, not a rebellion or revolution that aims at the fundamental change or destruction of the traditional order.7 Another important characteristic of humour for Zijderveld, one that it shares with literature or art in general, is its potential to anticipate knowledge, to create alternative worlds, and to bypass censorship because of its feigned lack of seriousness, because we are not “inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure” (Freud 162). Humour carries an enigmatic quality: it is itself unrealistic and thereby able to demonstrate that reality as we know and live it could well be otherwise; that alternatives, as unreal and absurd as they may seem to be, are not unthinkable. Humour shares this with utopias, and it is up to the audience to decide, by a laughing response, whether a utopia is nothing but a joke (Zijderveld, Trend Report 58).

If humour “is viewed as an emergent property of human interaction”, emerging, as we have seen, “because of the defining work of laughter”, it follows that “[a] situation is defined as humorous by the laughing response that it elicits” (Coser 172). In accordance with this, Zijderveld argues that in a sociological sense laughter is the only appropriate language of humour and is a constitutive component of the humorous situation.8 This emphasis on the importance of laughter, however, leads to our next question, namely: How to define laughter? 7

As Zijderveld argues, destroying the cultural order would for the humorist or homo ludens be equivalent to a child destroying its toys. 8 “[L]aughter is more than a response: it is constitutive of the emerging symbolic interaction” which, if laughter arises, can “be called a humorous incident”. (Zijderveld, Trend Report 34).

24 Throughout history laughter has often been ‘forbidden’ and been regarded as dangerous; laughter is rather unpredictable and the intention to be humorous or funny is neither sufficient to make people laugh nor essential to humour or to the comic.9 Aristotle states in his De Partibus Animalium that man is the “only one of the animals that laughs” (69). In other words, humans are defined by their ability to laugh. Similar opinions are voiced by Rabelais – “Le rire est le propre de l’homme” (cf. Siguret 103) (“laughter is the property of man”) –, Baudelaire – “Laughter is satanic, and, therefore, profoundly human” (117)10 – and Nietzsche: “Das leidendste Tier auf Erden erfand sich – das Lachen” (Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlaß 467) (“The earthly creature that suffered most discovered for itself – laughter”). According to Nietzsche, human beings suffer so intensely that they needed to create laughter in order to survive: “the anxious, crouching creature springs up, greatly expands – man laughs”.11 From this one can conclude that laughter indeed appears to be an anthropological constant and “a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens or, at least, homo risus capax” (Pfister v; Zijderveld, Trend Report 6). Moreover, laughter is certainly more than “a gesture or psychic mechanism. It is [. . .] a human expression, comparable and congenial to crying”, with these two expressions having in common “that they lie on the borderline of the conscious and meaningful on the one hand, and the unconscious and psychical on the other” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 28). For Helmuth Plessner laughter as well as crying reveal “the essence of the conditio humana, which consists in the fact that human beings not only have a body, but at the very same time also are a body” (Plessner; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 28), that they are both physically and psychically determined. This fundamental ‘ambivalence’ is regarded by Plessner as being unique in the cosmos and corroborates his notion of “man’s eccentric position in nature”. In this line of argument, both crying and laughing “are caused by circumstances to which people cannot respond readily and adequately” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 29), such as a sudden event or an unexpected word: We lose our heads, we capitulate as persons, and the body-we-have takes the lead – through laughter, or tears. The body-we-have is now no longer an instrument of mind, language and behaviour. On the contrary, the crying or laughing body has 9

“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear/ Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/ Of him that makes it” (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii. 843–845). On the one hand, there are numerous acts, words and events that are not at all intended to be funny or humorous, and yet are experienced as being so by those who witness it; on the other hand, thinking of stand-up comedians, there are people who – often desperately – try to be funny, yet are perceived not to be so by others. 10 Cf. Siguret 103; Minois 489. 11 Nietzsche, Human, all too Human 89; cf. Minois 474–477; Greiner 106–108.

25 taken command of the mind and expresses what the body-we-are could not express. In this sense, crying and laughing are autonomous expressions, and thus not mere responses to stimuli (ibid.).

As both Bergson and Zijderveld among others have argued, “[l]aughter is always a fait social. This is as true of convivial laughter as of the lonely or even pathological laugh of an alienated individual. Each instance of laughter is inextricably tied up with social and power relations and framed within a social situation” (Pfister, vi) or constellation. Thus there is a triangular relationship between (1) “the ‘laughter-maker’” as the person “who incites laughter by making a joke or drawing attention to some absurdity, (2) the ‘butt of laughter’ as its target or victim, and (3) the ‘laugher(s),’ i.e. the laughing audience” (vi). This social triangle is “constructed along parameters of gender, class, race, age or other crucial differences operative in the respective culture” (Pfister vi; cf. Brosch, 158). Laughter, therefore, functions as an indicator of the tensions and contradictions existing in a given society and enables us to critically analyse social situations and mechanisms. As the bonding effects of laughter, to give but one example, tend to establish rhetorical or discursive communities (Hutcheon; Titze et al. 204), laughter can be seen as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, of valorisation on the one hand and of denigration on the other. Moreover, laughter is often caught up in the distinction between the centre and margin any given society employs to establish and stabilise its identity: in one society, the predominant form of laughter can be that which aims from the site of the ideological or power centre at what is to be marginalised or excluded altogether; in another, the most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins, challenging and subverting the established orthodoxies, authorities and hierarchies (Pfister vi).

However, if many theorists tend to view laughter as a rather one-dimensional phenomenon, namely as a social corrective linked to power, one should mention that there are also other conceptions of laughter such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “full laughter” which is universal, liberating, and revitalizing. For Bakhtin laughter abolishes frontiers, is immune to death, spreads everywhere and covers all aspects of life. It is seen as a dynamic link between our body in the sense of its animal and biological aspects, and our culture in the sense of intellect. Moreover, for Bakhtin laughter entails plurality and ignores interdictions. It is the enemy of censorship and allows mankind to temporarily enter the utopian realm of universality, liberty, equality, and abundance.

Mechanisms of the Comic: Comparison/Exclusion/Denigration – Identification/Inclusion/Valorization – Citationality/Performativity/Parody In attempting to define what makes us laugh, scholars usually refer to Aristotle’s Poetics, where the Greek philosopher states: “For the comic is constituted by a

26 fault and a mark of shame, but lacking in pain or destruction: to take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and misshapen, but does not express pain” (36). Thus, for Aristotle the phenomenon that something makes us laugh is characterized by flaws, distortion, and the absence of pain. This implies a transgression of norms which, however, is only experienced as funny if it does not cause real harm. “[J]e nachdem ob das Komische der Herabsetzung eines heroischen Ideals in eine Gegenbildlichkeit oder ob es der Heraufsetzung des materiell Leiblichen der menschlichen Natur entspringt” (Jauß 104) (“Depending on whether the comedy is intended to denigrate an heroic ideal thereby turning it into its opposite or to celebrate and valorize the bodily of human nature”), Hans Robert Jauß differentiates between two fundamental aspects inherent to the comic; firstly denigration or exclusion (Komik der Herabsetzung und des VerLachens), which works with the help of contrasts and incongruencies (Inkongruenz- und Kontrastkomik); and secondly, valorisation or inclusion (Komik der Heraufsetzung und des Mit-Lachens; cf. Andreas Böhn’s contribution in this volume), which is liberating and has recourse to the grotesque, thereby emphasizing the corporeal and the creaturely. In Greiner’s description: Die Komik der Herabsetzung stellt einen Helden in seiner erwarteten Vollkommenheit, eine Norm in ihrer behaupteten Gültigkeit in Frage. Der komische Held ist dabei nicht an sich selbst komisch, sondern vor einem Horizont bestimmter Erwartungen oder Normen. So ist Komik der Herabsetzung eine der Gegenbildlichkeit, was Vergleichen voraussetzt. [. . .] Die kognitive Funktion der Komik der Gegenbildlichkeit bzw. der Herabsetzung kann so darin erkannt werden, Normen zur Debatte zu stellen, zu verspotten bzw. zu problematisieren, was in destruktiver wie affirmativer Hinsicht geschehen kann. Die Herabsetzung schließt ein, daß der Betrachter, der den komischen Helden an Normen mißt und an diesen als scheiternd erkennt, sich überlegen fühlt. Die Versetzung des Helden in eine komische Situation löst den Bann der admirativen Identifikation und läßt den lachenden Betrachter (als lachenden Dritten gegenüber Subjekt und Objekt der Komik) ein Moment der Überlegenheit und Unbetroffenheit gegenüber dem ihm sonst überlegenen und ihn betroffen machenden Helden genießen (97). The comedy of exclusion or denigration questions the assumed perfection of a hero, the presumed validity of a norm. The comic hero is thus not funny in himself, rather he is so against a horizon of set expectations and norms. The comedy of exclusion or denigration is as such representation by contrast, which presupposes the act of comparison. [. . .] The cognitive function of comedy based on contrastive representation, i.e. denigration, can be ascertained in that it opens up norms to debate, mocks or problematizes them: an act that can be destructive or affirmative. Denigration includes the fact that the viewer, who judges the comic hero against norms and views him to have failed with regard to these, feels himself superior. By placing the hero in a comic situation, the spell of identification through admiration is broken and allows the laughing viewer (as the laughing third party in contrast to the subject and the object of comedy) to enjoy a moment of superiority and detachedness towards the otherwise superior and empathy-inducing hero.

27 As a matter of fact, most modern theories of laughter “revived the instrumental view of the Aristotle-, Hobbes-, Shaftesbury-tradition of laughing at” (Brosch 157). This tradition defines “laughter as an essentially malicious instinct” and justifies it “not only for its subjective and social functions but also through the ridiculous properties of the laughable object itself ” (ibid.). Thus the blame for laughter is laid on its object, while the laugher is conceived of as “a discerning individual who exposes the defects of someone to justified and corrective ridicule” (ibid.). What has to be noted, however, is that the ‘laughing-atposition’ implies a ‘laughing-with-position’ insofar as laughing at someone who transgresses a norm always requires the implicit acceptance of and identification with the norm. Thus either we laugh at someone and therefore with the norm or, if the norm is felt to be absurd or obsolete, we laugh at the norm and with the transgressor. From this it follows that either the transgressor or the transgressed norm is being denigrated and consequently – at least as long as the notion of the comic referred to is based on comparison (which presupposes a contrastive image or a kind of disorder that creates a cognitive and moral dissonance) – that the widespread but simplistic differentiation between a ‘laughing-at-position’ and a ‘laughing-with-position’ is not a particularly pertinent one but much more one of perspective and hierarchy. A slightly different notion of the comic is advanced by Emil Staiger in his Basic Concepts of Poetics, in which he argues that the comic “falls out of the framework of a world and exists naturally and unproblematically outside of this framework. [. . .] But the phallus and belly in Aristophanes, the huge red nose or ear that stands out like a spoon: these fall out of the framework, too. The framework is made up here of the network of relationships within an organic whole of the type we have in mind when we look at a human body” (170). The key elements that for Staiger define the comic situation are a transgression of or a deviation from norms, the absence of suffering (cf. Aristotle, Poetics), and what he calls Fraglosigkeit or unquestionability. By this term he means a happy ignorance of the system of norms held up by the social frame. Thus he implicitly reduces the importance of norms and of the faculty of comparison and comes close to Jauß’s notion of a Komik der Heraufsetzung und des Mit-Lachens. In accordance with this position, many critics have argued that in direct contrast to the position of ‘laughing-at’ and the thereby implied position of ‘laughing-with’ offered by the comedy of denigration, an inclusive comedy of valorisation that exalts life offers a ‘laughing-with-position’ (Mit-Lachen) of a quite different quality. It is open to debate whether, as Greiner and others have reasoned, this notion of the comic really works entirely without an intellectual moment of comparison and differentiation. Also questionable is whether phenomena such as the proliferating body or the grotesque are really beyond norms or whether the norms are still there but simply less relevant since this form of the comic privileges identification over comparison and differentiation. One

28 could even ask whether the grotesque, just as with the aesthetics of deviation, has not in itself become a norm. What we can say, however, is that [d]ie Komik der Heraufsetzung [. . .] den Abstand zwischen Rezipienten und Helden in einem lachenden Einvernehmen verschwinden [läßt], sei dies ein Einvernehmen über die Befreiung des Sinnlichen, über das Sich-Durchsetzen des Lustprinzips oder des Triumphes über die Gewalten der normativen Welt (Greiner 98). [t]his inclusive, valorising and elevating notion of the comic [. . .] allows the distance between recipient and hero to dissolve into harmonious laughter, whether this is a harmony about the liberation of the senses, the acceptance of the pleasure principle or a triumph over the authorities in the normative world.

Jauß has called this notion of the comic, which will be discussed in more detail below, grotesque comedy (groteske Komik), denn das Groteske kennzeichnet, was den Reiz dieser Art Komik ausmacht: das Aufheben aller Grenzen, das Mischen, Durcheinandergehen, unbekümmert um Gebote der ‘Sitte’ und Normen, damit auch eine verschmelzende, den einzelnen in seiner Besonderheit zum Verschwinden bringende Partizipation, das Entstehen und ordnungslose Sich-Ausbreiten von Lachgemeinden aus dem Einvernehmen im Freisetzen von Affekten. Daher hat die ‘groteske Komik’ einen elementar unbewußten Charakter, manifestiert sie sich wesentlich körperlich, an dem in Sitte nicht gebändigten Körper (Greiner 98). because the grotesque typifies what constitutes the appeal of this form of comedy: the transcendence of all boundaries, an intermingling and muddling up with scant regard to the demands of morality and norms, concomitantly a dissolving of the individual’s singularity through participation, the creation and unstructured spreading of communities of laughter due to the harmonious freeing up of emotions. That is why ‘grotesque comedy’ has such a fundamentally unconscious character, manifests itself essentially through the bodily, through a body that is not subject to the norms of morality.

Another form of the comic which depends on the body and escapes the dichotomy of denigration versus valorisation is epitomized by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity. For Butler, performativity effectively links sexual identity, and foremost gender, via citationality to parody, subversion, and the comic.12 In analogy to Susan Sontag’s concept of “camp” – “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre” (Sontag 280) – which allows for an interpretation of “camp” as a set of techniques of resignification in 12

Since this nexus has already been alluded to in the introductory essay by Gaby Pailer, I will restrict myself to some additional remarks pertaining to notions of performativity, to the role of the body and to parody. For a more extended discussion of parody and camp cf. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody; Meyer and Meyer.

29 which irony, the burlesque, pastiche, and parody all converge (cf. Preciado), Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal call Butler’s concept of gender “a kind of improvisional theatre” and stress “the possibilities opened up in Gender Trouble of being able to use transgressive performances such as drag to help decentre or destabilise gender categories”. However, it should be kept in mind that based on Foucault, Lacan, and on Derrida’s rewriting of Austin,13 Butler clearly transcends the notion of camp when she 1) argues that gender can be considered as “a corporeal style, an ‘act’ [. . .] which is both intentional and peformative” (Gender Trouble 139), 2) identifies a “desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body”, 3) locates the possibility for subversion of patriarchal power in subversive performances of gender, and 4) states that there “is no gender behind the expressions of gender”, i.e. that gender identity “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (ibid. 25). If performativity thus becomes “the vehicle through which ontological effects are established”, and if to perform gender means that “acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means”, it should be noted that this ultimately stresses the importance of the body. Bodies do matter since 1) cultural expressions such as discourse, speech, and language are determined by their embodiment (Butler, Excitable Speech 10f. and 141f.), 2) speech “is literally enacted because the body acts and is active when we speak” (Meinig 71), and 3) the relation between speech and the body can be regarded as scandalous (Butler, Excitable Speech 10) and ultimately takes the form of a chiasmus: “Speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions; and speech remains irreducible to the bodily means of its enunciation” (155f.).14 13

Cf. Butler, Excitable Speech 148–151; Lloyd 197: “Butler’s theory of gender performativity echoes both Austin and Derrida in proposing that the performative ‘enacts or produces that which it names’ [. . .]. She differs from Austin, however, in rejecting the idea that there is an autonomous agent that authors performative utterances. Instead, she takes from Derrida the idea that intentionality is always limited by the iterability of the sign. Repetition is central to performativity. This means that performative utterances are not singular events but, rather, the effects of ‘citational doubling’ [. . .]. Performativity [. . .] thus operates through the ‘reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ [. . .]. It is not in a single act of constitution or invention that the subject is brought into being, but through re-citation and repetition. This [. . .] has an important bearing on the capacity of parodic recitation to produce certain transgressive effects”. 14 “The body doubles what we say when we use expressions which are saturated with social and historical meaning and thus opens up a realm beyond those already established expressions. Thus, new meaning and also self-determination become possible. It is this inherent opportunity for enactment and even self-conscious theatricality which Butler refers to as performativity” (Meinig 71; cf. Krämer 253–255).

30 If, as Meinig argues, “the embodied view of performativity alerts us to the agency and the opportunity for subversive acts that result from our embodied speaking”, it is (especially in Butler’s earlier work) above all drag which by “disclosing that there is no original to imitate” fulfils a denaturalizing function, “divulging the culturally fabricated nature of gender”, and revealing “all gender as only ever parody” and therefore as inherently subversive. However, if the fact that “the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Butler, Gender Trouble 136), this entails in Butler’s reading a ‘radicalization’ of the notion of parody since gender parody can then of course not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original [. . .], so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect – that is, in its effect – postures as an imitation. This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself (138).

Referring to Fredric Jameson’s article Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Butler concedes that “the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is characteristic of pastiche rather than parody” (ibid.; cf. Lloyd), that whereas pastiche is a “neutral practice of mimicry”, parody is characterized by having an ulterior motive, a satirical impulse, is geared towards laughter and haunted by “that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic” (Jameson 114). Nevertheless, already the “loss of the sense of ‘the normal’ [. . .] can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler, Gender Trouble 138f.). Moreover, there is another point where the comic and laughter interpolate into Butler’s argument: Drawing on Lacan’s article The Signification of the Phallus and on the notion of masquerade, Butler argues that the supposedly original heterosexual – as well as any other – sexual position is intrinsically and fundamentally comic (46f.; Lacan 289) and becomes a constant parody of itself: It’s not just the norm of heterosexuality that is tenuous. It’s all sexual norms. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. If you say “I can only desire X” , what you’ve immediately done, in rendering desire exclusively, is created a whole set of positions which are unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I

31 take it that one of the essential aspects of comedy emerges when you end up actually occupying a position that you have just announced to be unthinkable. That is funny. There’s a terrible self-subversion in it (Butler qtd. in Osborne and Segal).

Sociological and Psychoanalytical Dimensions to Laughter: Henri Bergson, Anton C. Zijderveld, Sigmund Freud While humour can be regarded as the subjective capacity to experience something as being comic or funny, a sociological perspective allows us to define humour as a matter of social interaction and communication. Indeed, humour and laughter are social “by nature”, and laughter is always a group phenomenon.15 For Henri Bergson, whose notion of humour derives from his philosophical concept of vitalism, laughter creates a kind of complicity among people since it is linked to the popular imagination. Life is a continuous stream of consciousness, of time-awareness, of durée which is characterized by a souplesse intérieure, a certain plasticity and elasticity. Deficiencies in these qualities lead to a mechanization of the individual, to illness, stiffness, and inadequacy. Comedy, then, arises from a mechanical repetition across time – from la mécanisation de la vie – in something living and vibrant, and can be considered as a process whereby a human being is turned into a thing, an object, a machine, a robot. “Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity” (Bergson 73). If an individual as part of an organically conceived society lacks elasticity, which Bergson considers characteristic of any evolving community, and if he or she threatens to transgress social norms, society uses laughter to re-socialize and to reintegrate him or her. And since laughter arises because the mechanical is unexpected, because le mécanique plaqué sur du vivant takes us by surprise, Bergson’s theory is another example for a theory of the comic based on contrast and incongruency. In a positive sense laughter serves to revitalize and to de-mechanize the individual. It is less a sign of superiority on the part of those doing the laughing than it is a reaching out, an attempt to save the individual and to reconnect him or her to life. Pierre Siguret has called Bergson’s definition of laughter particulier en ce qu’il rend le mal pour le mal, mais en vue du bien. Il souligne l’insensibilité du spectateur indifférent, et il a pour fonction d’intimider en humiliant, car il possède un fond de malice et même de méchanceté. Par son biais, les excentricités sont réprimées, ce qui conduit à une amélioration, voire une perfection générale (Siguret 108; cf. Minois 481). 15

“Our laughter is always the laughter of a group” (Bergson 64).

32 special in so far as it fights evil with evil but with the intention towards good. It stresses the insensitivity of the indifferent onlooker, and its function is to intimidate by humiliating because it contains malice and even maliciousness. Thereby, eccentricities are censured, which leads to amelioration and even to general perfection.

The counter-position to Bergson is represented by Zijderveld. According to him, the systems of values, norms, and meanings which structure the lives of individuals in any given society possess three basic characteristics: They are institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated. Values and norms constitute a meaningful moral order or nomos intended to enable individuals to live meaningful, coherent lives and to interact accordingly. In order to participate in the moral order of one’s society, it is necessary to connect to the chain of tradition and to its synchronic dimension, i.e. to the values prevalent at a given point in time. Institutionalization is paired with enculturation, and since human life is subject to institutions, patterns and structures, it can – at least from a sociological point of view – be called mechanical. Not Bergson’s durée, not his vitalist individualism, but habitualization, routinization, and role-behaviour are the sociological characteristics of human life. Only because of this are, as many sociologists argue, our actions, thoughts and feelings predictable, understandable and accountable. Through humour, this sociological order is temporarily (until the laughter has ended) disrupted: Contingencies, surprises, and defamiliarizations occur during humorous interaction so that humour can be defined as a social game in which human beings play with the values, norms, and meanings of their society. From this it follows that, in contrast to Bergson’s view, for Zijderveld humour or comedy cannot be interpreted as a mechanization of life, but rather as a vitalization of what happens to be socioculturally mechanical. There is moreover an added dimension to Zijderveld’s argument when he points out that in most cultures this humorous play with institutionalized values, norms, and meanings is itself organized and institutionalized, so that even a putative de-mechanization of life is subjugated to mechanical control.16 In a brief analysis of Freud’s book on jokes, Tobias Döring argues that with the exception of Sarah Kofman’s Pourquoi rit-on? Freud et le mot d’esprit, “most other recent studies in the field of humour research [. . .] rarely refer to Freud, let alone engage with his laughter theory in any sustained or even critical manner” (123). If, for obvious reasons, this introduction does not intend to offer the critical analysis asked for by Döring, it can at least attempt to counteract the

16

Even if, as the “societies of fools”, court jesters, and feasts such as carnival prove, the play with traditional and sacred values seems to be an inherent human need, it is nevertheless viewed as threatening by those in power and is kept under control by means of institutionalization and organization.

33 neglect of Freudian thought in this area. In his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud states that in laughter the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge. And since laughter – not all laughter, it is true, but certainly laughter at a joke – is an indication of pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present. If we see that the hearer of a joke laughs but that its creator cannot laugh, this may amount to telling us that in the hearer a cathectic expenditure has been lifted and discharged, while in the construction of the joke there have been obstacles either to the lifting or to the possibility of discharge. The psychical process in the hearer, the joke’s third person, can scarcely be more aptly described than by stressing the fact that he has bought the pleasure of the joke with very small expenditure on his own part. He might be said to have been presented with it (181f.).

Döring correctly argues that if “a joke only works for those who hear it and who, like a present, receive it free, their laughter signifies the working of a rather ambiguous relation between the joke-creator and the joke-hearer” (127). As has already been shown, this connection needs three agents to function properly, so that Freud’s theory of laughter is based on a “triangular construction that cuts across the fundamental” and simplistic distinction of ‘laughing at‘ versus ‘laughing with’. For Freud these two versions coincide since they are socially linked and functionally dependent, thus bearing some semblance to what has been described above as a comedy of denigration in the sense that by laughing at someone or something one always, and be it only implicitly, also laughs with someone or something. Döring summarizes the functioning of a tendentious joke as follows: In his triangle of relations, Number One bribes Number Three into complicity to laugh with him at Number Two. In this way we can see how the social relationship established by joking emerges as an economy of exchanging substitutes, with laughter operating as the currency of payment. Number One tells the tendentious joke instead of satisfying his desire for Number Two directly; Number Three receives the satisfying joke for free instead of having to approach Number Two himself; so Number Three now has surplus pleasure which he pays off by laughing; his laughter, in turn, serves Number One, who is satisfied to receive at least this much pleasure instead of his own laughter (128).

From this we can conclude that laughter results from a process not monitored by conscious knowledge. The mechanisms of its pleasure in the discharge of psychical energy largely operate in the unconscious and must effectively remain there to operate below the level of control. This is why Freud concludes that the symptom of laughter always hides as much as it reveals: it shields the whole economy of secret pleasures from

34 the censoring power of our consciousness and, instead, reveals them only in the substitute form of compressions or omission – as they become manifest in the linguistic form of jokes (128).17

What remains to be explained, however, are the “mechanisms” which “operate in the unconscious” and which “must effectively remain there” on the level of psychological or psychoanalytical deep structures: in other words, how are we to fathom 1) what laughter hides and 2) why, when laughing, we re-enter “the mood of our childhood” (Freud)? Joachim Ritter has suggested that laughter is able to reconcile the ruling order with its excluded other. According to him, “[w]as das Komische ausmacht, ist dies, dass immer mittelbar und unmittelbar in den einen Bedeutungsbereich, der sich harmlos und einwandfrei zulässig gibt, der andere hineingespielt wird, der in jenem gerade ausgeschlossen und als nicht dazugehörig beiseite gebracht ist” (Ritter 73f.) (“[t]he comic can be defined by the fact that it indirectly as well as directly introduces into a seemingly harmless and acceptable semantic field a second semantic field that significantly was excluded from the first because it was viewed as being inappropriate”). Although the first semantic field excludes the second, evoking Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, it can never do without the other and is therefore linked to, interspersed or intertwined with it. Das Wesentliche ist immer die Bewegung, in der eine an sich nicht gemeinte und ferner in der anständigen Rede auch nicht zugelassene Sphäre in diese anständige Rede selbst derart eingewoben wird, dass sie selbst diese kundtun und aussprechen muss (Ritter 74). What is essential is the tendency whereby what was unintended and as a sphere not even permitted in respectable speech becomes itself so interwoven into the fabric of respectable speech that the latter must reveal and express the former.

Thus the comic compels the excluding power, i.e. the realm of the morally acceptable, the symbolic order etc., to verbalize what it intends to exclude: the chaotic, the unreasonable, the outrageous, the semiotic (cf. Kristeva). Another important feature of the comic as envisaged here is that it consists of a triple movement, namely 1) a transcendence of the existing symbolic order, 2) a reaching out for the realm of the excluded, and 3) a manifestation of what has 17

For Freud’s topic model and its relation to humour cf. Pietzcker; cf. also Titze et al. 216f.; Döring 128: “While humour [. . .] offers a way to avoid or alleviate suffering, Freud’s account of its psychical working does not abandon the triangular construction established in his analysis of jokes. In the case of humour, though, the triangle appears internalized and seems to correspond to his topic model of id, ego and super-ego. Thus, humour functions within the individual and lies entirely in internal psychical dynamics, whereas jokes operate in a social setting and typically involve three people”.

35 hitherto been excluded in and through the symbolic itself, or, in other words, the manifestation of the excluded area in and by means of the excluding area itself (cf. Greiner 117). Similarly to Ritter’s line of reasoning, namely that seriousness excludes wishes and desires which nevertheless are an integral part of life, the symbolic order excludes – or at least endeavours to exclude – drives and semiotic interferences. But since the fact that these interferences are excluded does not mean that they no longer exist, one can assume that that which is negated is the product of the very system which negates it and that instead of being destroyed it is implicitly validated. Thus, in analogy to Michel Foucault’s work on power, repression ‘produces’ the repressed and simultaneously verifies and attests to its belonging to the repressive system itself. Laughter, then, 1) demonstrates that the ostracized is and has always been a part of the very order that excludes it and 2) proves that there is an implicit and secret identity between the power of exclusion and that which is excluded. From this perspective laughter is simultaneously criticism and affirmation. It criticizes the ‘serious’ world and its order and is an expression of happiness and plenitude, accepting or even celebrating the right of the excluded. However, if the comic implies the presence of something excluded, i.e. the instinctual drives of the id, as part of the excluding power, that is the super-ego, this also recalls Freud’s work on dreams. During sleep a lowered censorship allows our dreams to manifest our desires, albeit coded and transformed, among other things by condensation and displacement, by metaphor and metonymy. A joke, Freud argues, works analogously and partially reverses the work of repression imposed on us by culture.18 For obvious reasons, cracking a joke can be read as a re-entry into the Oedipal constellation. Given that the early Oedipal relationship characterizes the human ego by a basic structural negation – “Thou shall not!” – and that old fears are reawakened whenever the ego is confronted with an analogous constellation, it is possible to say that the person who laughs represents the excluding and censoring order. He is a negating listener who – just for the duration of the joke – takes a bribe and allows forbidden desire and pleasure while the object desired becomes the target of aggression and derision. Instead of attacking Lacan’s “Name-of-the-Father”/”No-of-the-Father” (nom/non du père), i.e. the forbidding father and the castrating symbolic order he symbolizes, instead of attacking the super-ego and its representative(s), i.e. the listener(s), these ‘authorities’ are turned into allies against the original object of desire. Why this 18

Whereas we constantly have to invest psychic energy into inhibitions in order to keep up the barriers which a repressive culture erects in our minds, the “pleasure in jokes [. . .] arise[s] from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition” (Freud 293), so that we laugh because we have saved the energy needed to repress the repressed (cf. Minois 483f.; Brosch 158).

36 object is attacked becomes clear if one takes into consideration that what is desired in the Oedipal constellation is the mother, that this desire can never be granted and that this non-fulfilment entails aggression. A successful joke momentarily deprives the Oedipal structure of its power to intervene, and the listener, representing the symbolic order or the super-ego, conserves psychic energy and is free to laugh and to accept chaos. This only works, however, because even in a joke the incestuous desire to possess the mother is never fulfilled, because aggression takes the place of desire and because the person who laughs does not run the risk of being lost in a chaotic universe since they are always backed by the narrator of the joke, who does not laugh, and therefore remains solidly rooted in the symbolic order. While the audience is freed from its self-censorship and internalized structure of self-repression, it is never bereft of the support of the symbolic order so that although the power that excludes gives a voice to the excluded, it never loses control. In contrast, for example, to a ‘radical’ reading of Bakhtin (see below), Freud considers the culture of laughter as a part of the symbolic order which firmly stays in control (cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 9). From this it follows that his conception of the comic and of humour is rather conciliatory, integrating the repressed and thus disarming it (cf. Louis Ratisbonne qtd. in Minois 478).

Charles Baudelaire, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Liberating Potential of “Full Laughter” Not to lose control is, as Baudelaire writes in his essay “The Essence of Laughter”, a sign of the “Wise Man” who “does not laugh, does not abandon himself to laughter, without an accompanying tremor. The Wise Man trembles because he has laughed [. . .] [and he] pulls himself up on the brink of laughter as on the brink of temptation” (112). For Baudelaire mankind is torn between good and bad. Laughter is fuelled by these two elements and characterized by its double nature, showing our unconscious pride as well as our fear of damnation: “It seems certain, if we adopt the orthodox view, that human laughter is intimately connected with the accident of an original fall, of a degradation both of the body and the mind” (ibid.). The angelic and the diabolic work together and are both present in a laughter which is essentially as human as it is contradictory, being proof of “infinite grandeur and of infinite wretchedness: of infinite wretchedness by comparison with the absolute Being who exists as an idea in Man’s mind; of an infinite grandeur by comparison with the animals. It is from the perpetual shock produced by these two infinities that laughter proceeds” (117; cf. Siguret 104). Principally, Baudelaire distinguishes between (at least) two different kinds of laughter: The first form of laughter which he calls the “significantly comic” (comique significatif ) is a comedy of superiority since it is characterized by

37 satanic aspects – “laughter is man’s way of biting” (113) – and since those who laugh mainly enjoy the fact that they are superior to those they laugh about, Satanic laughter is inexhaustible and completely free of compassion or pity, the only exception possible being the laughter of children, which Baudelaire links to the concept of joy.19 But even the laughter of children “is not wholly devoid of ambition” given that children are but “Satans in the bud” (120). Thus, in the last consequence, laughter really becomes diabolic; it serves as proof of the human feeling of superiority, of the desire to make other people suffer, and it is linked to madness. Laughter, they say, comes of superiority. [. . .] A satanic idea if ever there was one! Pride and aberration! Now it is a notorious fact that patients in a madhouse are all of them suffering from the idea, developed beyond the normal, of their own superiority. [. . .] It should be noted that laughter is one of the most frequent symptoms of madness. [. . .] Indeed, what more obvious sign of debility can there be than the nervous convulsion, the involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze, provoked by somebody else’s misfortune? (115f.).

But Baudelaire’s theory is neither free of contradictions (cf. Greiner 105f.) nor limited to the “significantly comic”. As he argues, laughter out of superiority contains a moment of ridiculousness which can be regarded as a self-reflexive element: “It would not surprise me to find that [. . .] the physiologist himself bursts out laughing as he thinks of his own superiority” (cf. Baudelaire 115). Laughing-at, therefore, is always already undermined by its own ridiculousness. Moreover, Baudelaire introduces the notion of the “absolutely comic” as a kind of laughter in league with nature, as a laughter that casts a spell over people, causes frenzy or dizziness, and breaks down frontiers. The absolutely comic, “[l]aughter provoked by the grotesque”, is characterized by “something profound, axiomatic and primitive, which more closely relates it to innocence and to absolute joy than does the laughter occasioned by the comedy of manners” (121). Whereas the significantly comic “is an imitation, [. . .] the grotesque is a creation” (ibid.). It is “much closer to nature”, “has a unity which must be grasped by intuition” (122), and consists of “fabulous creations whose raison d’être, whose excuse, has nothing to do with common sense and arouses in us a wild and excessive hilarity translated into interminable fits of rending and uncontrollable mirth” (121). Nevertheless, “laughter caused by the grotesque still expresses the idea of superiority, not this time of man over man, but of man over nature” (ibid.). It is in this sense that Baudelaire gives due warning that when he uses “the words ‘absolutely comic’ [. . .] we must be very much upon our guard. From the point of view of the definitely absolute, there 19

“Joy is a unity, whereas laughter is the revelation of a double, not to say a selfcontradictory, sentiment” (Baudelaire 120).

38 is joy and nothing else. The comic can be treated as absolute only in relation to fallen humanity” (122). For Konrad Lorenz laughter is a mechanism preventing human beings from turning against their own species. It functions as a kind of sublimation of aggressive and/or sexual drives (cf. Minois 570f.). The fact that laughter is a good way to release pent-up aggression harbours the risk of it being conservative, as for example when laughter is sponsored and used by the ruling classes. In this case it functions as a kind of catharsis and as a prophylaxis for revolution, an often cited example being carnival: “Most politically thoughtful commentators wonder [. . .] whether the ‘licensed release’ of carnival is not simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes” (Stallybrass and White 13). Yet such a spatially and temporally delimited envisaging of carnival, which is less a subversion of the ruling order than part and parcel of the conservative framework it ultimately reaffirms,20 is indeed a very domesticated and pacified form of Bakhtin’s original notion of the carnivalesque. It is no surprise, therefore, that there is also another, more radical interpretation that links the carnivalesque to the positive elements attributed to the grotesque by Baudelaire and that views Bakhtin’s conception of laughter as part of the carnivalesque and of an aesthetics of the grotesque (also in the sense of “Renaissance realism”), which Wolfgang Kayser has interpreted as “a form expressing the id” (Kayser qtd. in Bakhtin 49). If one emphasizes the revolutionary potential of Bakhtin’s theory one can argue that for the Russian cultural theorist carnival possesses not only a regenerative and transfigurative impulse but is also linked to the principle of transformation and to the future (Bakhtin 24f.). The carnivalesque is characterized by a positive, life-embracing, and elevating concept of the comic, which does not laugh with someone at something but supposedly functions without comparison, exclusion, or denigration.21 Instead of being marked by distance or difference, Bakhtinian laughter is characterized by a close identification between the spectator/reader and the actor/protagonist, whereby both are in a full agreement about the setting free of sensuality, bodily needs, and the pleasure principle. Bakhtinian carnival, just like “full laughter”, unites contrasts and 20

Cf. Eagleton 148: “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art”. Cf. Björk 89–92; Hutcheon, Modern Parody and Bakhtin 99. 21 As argued above, the following issues need consideration: 1) whether the grotesque has not already long ago become an aesthetics and a norm in itself and 2) whether even within this exaltative and inclusive model of the comic, which puts a premium on identification instead of differentiation, norms are still there but simply less relevant and less visible than within a model of the comic based on denigration.

39 oppositions, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the insignificant (cf. Siguret 106). It calls for change and precipitates crises so that destruction and creation go hand in hand. Moreover, Bakhtinian laughter is ambivalent and linked to the body, especially to those functions which are officially tabooed and not allowed to manifest themselves: The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes. [. . .] To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body [. . .]. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one (Bakhtin 20f.).

From a carnivalesque perspective, the realm of the body is valorised and the body itself is conceived of as decentred, grotesque, uncontrollable, and as metonymically coinciding with the people. Bakhtin’s body is not a closed system subjugated and domesticated by culture, rather it is an open, living, proliferating, incorporating, and excorporating organism which interacts with other bodies and ignores fixed borders. Hence carnivalesque laughter is not intellectual or exterior to the body but springs from within: “Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning” (94). Refusing any fixed identity, super-ego or censor, Bakhtin characterizes the carnivalesque body by profanation, multiplication, and the denial of death. This constant mutability and non-identity of the body is not considered to be menacing but liberating and hilarious. It coincides with and causes laughter as a kind of fusion of death and resurrection, change and renewal. What Bakhtin is calling for is a full laughter, strong enough to attack official ideology and to valorise popular culture; what he insists on is the social and even chorus-like dimension of laughter; of a laughter that aspires to community and universality and is in strict opposition to everything official, serious, and monosemic (cf. Siguret 108f.). For the theological mainstream, this all-embracing, exaltative and life-affirming form of the comic, which works without comparison and negates hierarchies, has long been considered as the opposite of “God’s gift of grace to mankind” and as “a result of its fall from grace – together with labour, disease and death one of the evil consequences of the Original Sin and the Fall from innocence into knowledge” (Pfister 181). If, as has been shown, Baudelaire links laughter to Satan and to madness, it is indeed no surprise that “the history of laughter is first and foremost a history of the attempts at disciplining it and bringing it to heel” (ibid.). A reference to Umberto Eco’s blind Spaniard Jorge of Burgos for whom laughter

40 dehumanizes and even questions our humanity should suffice to make this point clear: “Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey” (Eco 131). In other words: He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating. [. . .] [T]ruth and good are not to be laughed at. This is why Christ did not laugh. Laughter foments doubt. [. . .] Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know [. . .]. With his laughter the fool says in his heart, ‘Deus non est.’ (131f.).

Although Berger (x) argues that the “experience of the comic is [. . .] a promise of redemption” and that “[r]eligious faith is the intuition (some lucky people would say the conviction) that the promise will be kept”, a brief consideration of the discourses on laughter from classical antiquity and the Fathers of the Church to the present demonstrates that its critics easily outnumber its advocates, that laughter has often been regarded as a symptom of stupidity and heresy,22 and furthermore, that during the Renaissance and the Middle Ages “theologians and clergymen were the most vociferous critics of laughter” (Pfister 181). What fuels this kind of vituperative ‘theory’ is the fear that the transformation of values, the changes in society, the deceptions and playful games ensuing from laughter could make it impossible to distinguish good from bad or true from false. In the final analysis, the prevailing fear is that in and through laughter God and the Devil will coincide, that religion will disintegrate, that human beings will gain their freedom – and ultimately take responsibility for themselves. If the art of laughing is the highest human fulfilment, if by and through laughing human beings gain control of their destiny, lose their fear and break all kinds of hierarchies, then death and damnation can no longer function as the final sanction and anchoring point (point de caption) from which religion erects the vast edifice of its power. Where laughter equals revolution, where there is no longer any need for redemption, and where psychological liberation goes hand in hand with political liberation, theologians are wont to consider these developments as leading to the abolition of any binding truth(s), thereby unleashing chaos and anarchy.23 In Bakhtin’s view it is no accident that the frontiers between what causes fear and what causes laughter are erased in popular culture, that fear can be vanquished by laughter, and that laughter leads to justice. The reason for this is that laughter comes from within and is equated 22

For an extended discussion, cf. Loewenstein. Cf. Kuschel; cf. Sarrazin 19, who argues that there exists a believing kind of laughter (“un rire croyant”) and two religious logics, one that pretends to impose (one) sense, truth, dogma and lacks humour and another which is open to the incredible, to paradoxa, to nonsense and which embraces laughter. 23

41 with ‘truth’. Not, however, a theological, logocentric or even phallogocentric truth but a kind of truth which is inherent in all laughter and which cannot be transformed into seriousness or into the symbolic without suffering loss. It is a kind of truth which is liberating with regard to internal as well as external censorship, such as the fear of the sacred and other deeply rooted human fears. But if laughter enables mankind to leave behind the world of everyday compromises and mediocrity without having to cling to ‘one’ truth or to a metaphysical signified, this is exactly the reason why, in the public sphere at least, it has effectively been circumscribed and even forbidden. The demise of carnival since the 17th century provides just one example for the fact that die Statthalter der Wahrheit auf Erden das Lachen nicht [lieben], denn es gefährdet ihre Ordnung, die früher die Ordnung Gottes war, über den zu lachen ein Sakrileg darstellte. Mit der Durchsetzung des Ideals einer nicht lachenden Öffentlichkeit in der Neuzeit wurde das Lachen ins Private vertrieben. [. . .] Dieser Ausschluss des Lachens aus der Öffentlichkeit ist Teil der neuzeitlichen Disziplinierung der körperlichen Expressivität, die durch zahllose kleine Verbote im Lebensalltag durchgesetzt worden ist (Kamper and Wulf 9). the earthly powers that be who administer truth are not at all well predisposed towards laughter, the reason being is that it endangers their order; an order that was previously divine and about which it was considered a sacrilege to laugh. Once the ideal of a non-laughing public sphere was established in modernity, laughter was banished into the private sphere. [. . .] This exclusion of laughter from the public sphere is part of the modern disciplining of bodily expressivity and has been pushed through in everyday life by means of innumerable rules and regulations.

Let us conclude this introduction to theories of humour, the comic, and laughter by suggesting a further dimension to laughter that pursues and even perpetuates Bakhtin’s notion of “full laughter” and that similarly stresses the role of the body. As Kamper and Wulf argue, laughter is a bodily reaction directed as much against abstraction as against the intellect. Full laughter implies that the body takes over, that it expresses itself and counteracts the instrumentalization and subjugation it suffers in daily life: Im lebenden Körper zeigt sich eine lange, verlorene, vielleicht nie wirklich gegebene Einheit. In seinen konvulsivischen Bewegungen schwinden die Sinne, die die Verbindung zur Außenwelt halten, mit ihnen der Sinn. Der Lachende braucht keinen Sinn, weder im Lachen noch anderswo (7). The living body displays a long-lost, perhaps never really existing, unity. Amid its convulsive movements, the senses connecting the body to the outside world are diminished and any sense of meaning is lost. To those that laugh meaning is irrelevant, whether in the act of laughing or otherwise.

Moreover, laughter can have a self-reflexive quality. If self-reflexivity initially seems to presuppose distance and, with Baudelaire, a dedoublement of the

42 human subject, a psychoanalytic perspective reveals that this doubling is not necessary since human beings are always already not only double but multiple, fragmented, and decentred. The old humanist unified subject is not only for Lacanian psychoanalysis largely a fiction or ongoing narration (cf. Rusch 374; Moi 8): If for Freud laughter arises because for a short moment in time we do not have to suppress our desires or drives and can conserve this energy while we remain securely integrated in our culture, i.e. the symbolic order, one should also ask whether the liberating, elevating and redemptive effect of laughter can not be regarded as the result of the fact that human beings are for a short moment allowed to discard the cultural edifice and fiction of the unified and rational Cartesian self. Maybe the Rabelaisian and Bakhtinian notion of full laughter stems, among other things, from the fact that by retrieving and having recourse to the corporeal human beings are ‘freed from themselves’ since they do not have to uphold the construction of a single and unified self: “Im Lachen wird das Ich vom Ich befreit. Der rationale Mensch weicht dem lachenden; er zeigt sich von etwas überwältigt, das er, um als autonome Persönlichkeit zu gelten, kontrollieren muß” (Kamper and Wulf 8) (“During laughter the ego is freed from itself. The rational being gives itself over to laughter; it reveals itself as being overwhelmed by something which, in order to function as an autonomous personality, it must control”). From this perspective, laughter could be understood 1) as a bodily reflex that exceeds sense and can only be converted into meaning a posteriori, and 2) as harbouring the potential to free human beings from their cultural obligations by laying open their decentredness and eccentricity (Plessner) as well as by subverting rationality, objectivity, and distance. Thus the enormous relief which laughter grants us would not only be the result of a conservation of psychical energy but also of the acknowledgment of the never fully knowable or controllable foundation of human existence. It is precisely because laughter can negate the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ that it has the power to attack and to expose the very basis of a culture founded on these presumably natural but ultimately constructed and culturally relative dichotomies. In this sense full laughter can be understood as the return of the body, the repressed, the abject, the semiotic (cf. Kristeva), the supplement, and the Other. Because full laughter is not subject to the principle of difference, it is beyond what founds the sign (cf. Greiner), and possesses the anonymous violence eines [. . .] überwältigenden, die Abwehrstrukturen durchbrechenden Fremden. Einbruch des Anderen, Entmachtung des Vertrauten auf der einen Seite und eine momentane, die Grenzziehung aufhebende Versöhnung, ein Einverständnis mit dem Fremden auf der anderen Seite, beides sind Erfahrungen des Lachens (Kamper and Wulf 8). of an [. . .] overwhelming Other that breaks through all defence mechanisms. On the one hand, there is the breaking in of the Other, the disempowerment of all that is

43 familiar, on the other hand, a reconciliation that momentarily suspends the boundary, a mutual agreement with the Other beyond, both being experiences of laughter.

In the final analysis full laughter implies the possible loss of balance, tears of laughter, the merging of laughing and crying, of pleasure and pain, and distantly evokes Lacan’s notion of jouissance. But if laughing is a privileged means to make the horror of existence bearable (cf. Nietzsche), this does not signify that laughter loses its ambivalence or that in laughing human beings can abolish once and for all their sense or premonition of the ultimate precariousness of their existence. The traces of memory, be it of the fragmented body (corps morcélé), of an original lack (manque) or of “a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord” (Lacan, The mirror stage 4), will always continue to haunt us on a sub- or unconscious level. What is remarkable, however, is that if in a paradoxical turn it is exactly this ‘other realm’ which makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is still our best means to deal with it: If our intrinsic otherness founds laughter, laughter is also its best remedy. Or, to close with Kamper and Wulf:24 Es gibt einen Taumel am Rande des Katastrophischen. Solange wir lachen, sind wir nicht in der Katastrophe, wir vermeiden es, besänftigen das drohende Schicksal. Die Erschütterung des Lachens birgt den Triumph über das Entkommen. Wenn nichts mehr geht, bietet das Lachen noch immer einen Ausweg, den man sich jedoch nicht suchen kann, der sich vielmehr von selbst ergibt oder verschließt (8). There is a feeling of giddiness at the edge of the catastrophe. As long as we laugh, we are not in the catastrophe, we avoid it, have put off the inevitable. The shock of laughter contains a sense of triumph at escaping. When nothing else seems possible, laughter offers a way out, which cannot however be sought but either occurs of itself or not at all.

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Andreas Böhn

Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic? The paper raises the question whether subversion of gender identities through laughter and the comic is possible and how subversive and affirmative laughter could be discerned with respect to gender matters. The difficulties in interpreting forms of the comic are compared to the interpretation of other forms of indirect communication such as parody or irony, and the relation of the comic to social norms is analysed in the light of this comparison. The discussion of three movies as examples of different comic treatments of gender roles and social norms reveals that it is more the type of normativity than the structure of the comic that explains the difference between ‘subversive’ and ‘affirmative’ laughter.

Research on laughter and the comic is a very serious thing. Although it is doubtful whether many jokes could survive scientific analysis, this theoretical and methodological reflection will start with a joke (Berger xiv). Some years ago I attended a conference which concluded a research program that had been ongoing for several years, all the time funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). The title of the research program was: “Theatre as Paradigm of Modernity”. The title of the concluding conference was “Theatre as Paradigm of Modernity?” (Balme et al.). I found this curious question mark to be a perfect symbol of the discrepancy between research in the humanities and its practical results. From that time on I have been looking for an opportunity to reproduce this joke. My aim is not to explain that joke, but to use it to explain the title of my contribution. In truth, it might not be the worst outcome of a scholarly effort if one can put a question mark to an assumption one has been dwelling on before, as long as one has sufficient reason to do so. And it might even appear as an advantage – not only to the admirers of Occam’s razor – if, by doing so, one can get rid of a terminological dilemma which has puzzled oneself and others before. In this case, the dilemma is the dichotomy of affirmative versus subversive laughter which still plays a major role in theories of the comic, and, significantly, in the context of exploring the way the comic works in relation to gender roles and gender identities. Other notions that often come up in this context are parody and travesty. In a cross-dressing comedy, for instance, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, gender roles are treated very much in the same way that literary texts or other works of art are treated in parodies or travesties of these works: they are imitated to a certain extent, but with minor differences, and one central element is completely

50 opposite, which results in our laughter. But what exactly is laughed at in crossdressing comedies? Is it the traditional gender roles, as the analogy to parody and travesty would suggest, because parodies and travesties usually make fun of their pre-texts? Or is it the protagonists who try to take on the gender role of the opposite sex but cannot fulfil this task properly? Or, conversely, is it their deceived victims? Or, is the object of ridicule the very existence of distinct gender roles and the boundaries that define them? That these and similar questions arise when we examine comical treatments of gender might result from a certain quality the comic shares with parody, travesty, and other literary and artistic, but also everyday modes of expression like irony. These modes do not convey normal, direct communication in which signs are used to designate conventional meanings, but rather indirect communication in which signs seemingly violate the convention on which their use is based (cf. Böhn, Thesen). If someone does not like at all what I have done and says to me: “You’ve done a good job!”, it seems that what he or she is saying is simply wrong, and that I can interpret his or her linguistic behaviour in two ways: I can deem this person insane, or I can look for an assumption, a specific frame, for the behaviour of that person which allows me to make sense of it. In this case, the frame would be irony; he or she speaks ironically, when saying the opposite of what he or she wants to express. Irony as a possible communicative mode is one we do not, and cannot, use all the time, since this would really subvert the conventions of communication. Therefore, the detection of irony and other forms of indirect communication always calls for a special interpretation, a re-framing of communication, and that is why ironic statements are often easily understood in different ways, and why they always raise questions of the kind that emerge in the context of cross-dressing comedies (Harras). Let us therefore take a closer look at the relation of the comic and indirect communication. The comic is based on incongruity (Palmer; Haider-Pregler), for example, the real behaviour of a person and the observer’s mental representation of normal, expected behaviour. Indirect communication is also based on incongruity; the element communicated in indirect communication is incongruent with the intended meaning. Irony, as in the previous example, has been characterized as ‘saying the opposite of what is meant’. If we are quoting someone, we ourselves do not necessarily agree with what was said, we merely state what someone else has said. Quotation would thus be another example of indirect communication, but some theorists even claim that all indirect communication can be reduced to the quotation of an actual or presupposed/ assumed communication. According to Sperber and Wilson’s study Relevance, irony would be the quotation of the actual or presupposed/assumed statement of another person, which is the opposite of one’s own statement. In any case, what makes clear that I am communicating indirectly is the incongruity of my actual communication and my expected communication in the given situation.

51 Indirect communication is based on two types of incongruity: a) incongruity of actual and expected communication; b) incongruity of what is said and what is meant. The first type of incongruity in indirect communication has the same basic structure as the incongruity in the comic. The second type of incongruity can also appear in specific modes of the comic. Indirect communication therefore can have comical effects (very often in the case of irony), but it does not necessarily need to (rather seldom in the case of metaphors). The voluntarily produced comical effect has developed certain modes which incorporate the two types of incongruity in indirect communication, namely parody and travesty. Parody reproduces a form and combines it with an unexpected content, thus creating incongruity of the first type; the form itself is not meant, but only quoted to state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type). Travesty reproduces a content and combines it with an unexpected form, thus creating incongruity of the first type; the content itself is not meant, but only quoted to state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type). In both cases the comic effect usually is produced by disparaging something highly valorised, or at least by making it more familiar. Parody seems to be less dependent on historical conditions than travesty, although parody’s status has undergone important changes. Travesty has been mainly used in historical periods that were characterized by a strict correspondence of form and content, in the field of art as well as in social interaction, in which one’s apparel, behaviour and actions were essentially related to a specific social background. Baroque poetics, for example, is founded precisely on such a strong connection between social status and adequate modes of representation, and thus incongruence of both can be easily produced. In our times, there is no such clear relation of status and appearance, which causes problems for travesty. Parody and travesty can use gender role models as form or content, thus producing cross-dressing or change of gender roles. The comical use of gender role models relies on certain conditions: a) a general assumption that sex can be discerned with certainty, independent of the actual behaviour of the person; b) a general assumption that to each sex there is related a corresponding appearance and habit (congruity of sex and gender); c) sex and gender are combined in a way that is not in accord with their usual or accepted correspondence (incongruity), which can happen in two different manners: A person of sex A exhibits an appearance in accord with sex B such that this person can be taken for a person of sex B by others, and behaves according to the conventions of sex B, the result being incongruity of two different assumptions about the sex of the person (cross-dressing). Or, alternatively, a person of sex A behaves according to the conventions of gender B, with respect to at least one element of the common role model of gender B, without necessarily exhibiting an appearance in accord with gender B; the result is incongruity between the assumption about

52 the sex and the assumption about the gender of the person, possibly also intragender incongruity of appearance and behaviour (change of gender roles). The same conditions apply to any stereotypical cultural difference. Gender role models are one instance of such differences, others being differences between national cultures or classes. Quotation can thus serve as the most general concept for an indirect statement of stereotypical cultural differences (Böhn, Das Formzitat 33–44, 100–105). The integration of the quotation in the surrounding communication and in the actual situation brings about incongruity of the first and of the second type and can also create comical effects, as in the case of irony, and usually does so in the case of generic comical modes like parody and travesty. In all these cases, incongruity can only be produced or occur if we expect congruity, which means that we have to have concepts of the normal or expectable, be it the conventional relation of signs and meaning in general which rules direct communication, or the more specific relation of sex and gender which forms the background of parodies and travesties founded upon that relation, cross-dressing and change of gender roles included. That leads us back to the distinction between affirmative and subversive laughter. On the one hand, these comical representations of gender rely on general assumptions of normality and conventionality which, in turn, these representations seem to affirm; on the other hand, these comical representations of gender produce incongruity between the expected and what is actually given and therefore seem to subvert the normal and the conventional. Now, what has the theory of the comic to say about this puzzling contradiction? Theories of the comic are numerous and heterogeneous, as Stefan Horlacher demonstrates in his theoretical overview in this volume. Such diversity is not an unusual phenomenon in the humanities, which often have been ascribed pluralism of methods and theories as one of their key characteristics. But theories of the comic are not only different from one another with respect to their subject, the aspect they emphasize, or the goal they are pursuing. They also differ in quite basic characterizations and explanations of their subject. Surveys of theories of the comic therefore have tried to categorize them according to their divergent views of the comic, distinguishing, namely, ‘laughing-at-theories’, which emphasize the aspects of comparison, exclusion, and denigration, from ‘laughing-with-theories’, which underline the possibility of exaltation, inclusion, and identification through the comic (Greiner 97–114). Theorists like Hobbes, Kant, Bergson, and Hegel are named as examples for the laughing-atposition, or the comic of denigration, whereas Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Bakhtin are nominated for the laughing-with-position, or the comic of exaltation. While Horlacher explores in more detail the historical ramifications of this distinction, I concentrate on its systematic and methodological aspects. As can already be seen by looking at the cited names of the theorists, the laughing-at-position is the older one. It seems to have always been quite clear that

53 laughing can be aggressive and used as a sanction for breaking social rules. Typically, a group laughs at someone who by this act is temporarily excluded from the group. The members of the group consider themselves as being in conformity with a certain norm which is accepted by the group, whereas the laughed-at person is considered as having violated this norm, being unable to meet its requirements. Being laughed at causes shame, a typical reaction to a loss of social acceptance. The shamed individual can seclude him- or herself from the group or can endeavour to modify his or her behaviour to regain acceptance. In both cases, the group successfully defends the norm at stake by less rigid means than, for example, direct violence or institutional disciplinary measures. The laughing-with-position is closely connected to modernism, although Bakhtin tries to trace it back to at least the Middle Ages and to the concept of the grotesque (4–27). The point of convergence between laughing-with and the grotesque occurs when they have an analogous relation to a norm. The grotesque violates an aesthetic norm, causing its rejection in classical aesthetics and poetics from Horace to Hegel. But in concordance with the general turn towards an aesthetics of deviation since the late eighteenth century, with its preference for the immoral, the deformed, the morbid, the uncanny, etc., the grotesque has also been revalorized as a positive term. Consequently, the norm it violates is questioned, or possibly even laughed at and, by this act, rejected. Seen from the standpoint of the laughing-at-position, the grotesque itself should be laughed at because it does not fulfil the requirements of the norm. Theorists like Bakhtin were able to argue that, on the contrary, we laugh with the grotesque character at the norm which we no longer accept. In fact, Bakhtin himself does not stress this point of laughing at a norm, which would be connected to comparison and exclusion. He conceives of the grotesque as something that transcends such boundaries set by norms, and that instead leads to inclusion and identification with the person who induces laughter (12, 26, 62, 92). The liberating force of such a comic emphasis on the corporeal and the creaturely added greatly to the attractiveness of Bakhtin’s concept and stimulated its reception in the context of post-structuralism and deconstruction, where it was often reduced to a means of subverting social norms such as, for instance, gender norms. The laughing-with-position in the form of a comic of subversion of norms would seem to form part of a modernist aesthetics with its key-concepts of the avant-garde, transgression and negation. These key-concepts are mainly negative and temporal; they conceive of modernism as something standing against another position. This opponent position is situated in the past, and modernism is moving away from it with the progress of time. Therefore it is not surprising that the laughing-with-position shares an inherent paradox of modernism. If modernism prevails, how can it continue if its essence is the negation and overcoming of a former position? What do we do and where do we go if there are

54 no more traditional boundaries to transgress? Like the concept of progress in the field of politics, modernism belongs to the ideology of an open and permissive society that encounters problems when standards are fully achieved. New or modified norms have to be constructed to justify the continuous struggle for modernity. (‘We have to go further still; that was only a first step, a false compromise, etc.’). The comic is possible only in situations in which the viewer does not experience physical danger or threat in any other way (Morreall 110). But would it not be a threat if one of my crucial norms were to be challenged? If laughing with A means laughing at the norm N, which is violated by A, then we can only laugh with A if we are willing to dismiss N. But if we are willing to do so, and therefore N is no longer really a norm for us, why do we still laugh? Possibly we do so because N is supported by a majority of the population or by a powerful elite which impose that norm on us. But if this is not the case, and nearly everyone laughs, and we conceive of this laughing as laughing with A at N, why do we laugh at all? To avoid this paradox, Bakhtin combines the laughing-at-theory with the social dimension of hegemony and suppression, be it the aristocracy and clergy suppressing the lower classes, the soviet hierarchy suppressing its citizens, or simply the mind suppressing the body. Yet, already Heinrich Heine formulated a comparable conception of a social and cultural superstratum suppressing a substratum that lashed back with laughter (cf. Goetschel; Böhn, Der fremde Mythos). The vast reception of Bakhtin’s work in the West, beginning in the 1960s, necessitated looking for other pairings of suppressor and suppressed and found them, even in the relation of modernism and postmodernism, explaining the latter’s mockery of the first. Eventually, the concept was taken up in gender studies generating the idea of a subversion of gender identities and relations through the comic (Butler, Gender Trouble 138f.), although the possibility of an affirmation of gender conceptions through laughter has also been taken into account (cf. Benedek and Binder 190f.; Lehnert 110). It has often been queried with whom and at whom we laugh as the viewers of cross-dressing comedies, what norm is affected thereby, and in what way it is affected (Garber; Benedek and Binder 218–232). This discussion will be taken up on a more general level with respect to the distinction between affirmative and subversive laughter (Jenkins). How can we decide which form of the comic we have at hand in a specific case, and what makes the difference on the structural level or on the level of concrete design of, for instance, a crossdressing comedy? Are we able to elaborate on a set of rules which allow us to explain why we regard one example as affirmative and another one as subversive? Most theorists of the comic have problems defining such rules: the general impression is that answers to these questions can only be found through analysis of each particular case, while such an approach would be unsatisfactory on the theoretical level.

55 My proposition is to examine things from a different perspective and to skip the affirmative-subversive distinction. Let us for heuristic purposes claim that everything comic is affirmative of an accepted norm, and its effect is laughing at someone who does not fulfil the requirements of this norm. Let us further claim that the differences we notice are not to be explained on the level of the comic and its structure and internal functioning, but on the level of the norms that are concerned. As I outlined above, the distinctions between different kinds of the comic have emerged since the late eighteenth century. In this period (Western) societies have changed considerably through a process which is usually summarized by the term ‘modernization’. To its main effects belong an increase in social differentiation and a shift from stratified differentiation through static social hierarchies to functional differentiation according to changing social contexts that the individual encounters (Luhmann). In a society differentiated by strata, norms of behaviour depend on the individual’s more or less fixed position in society; therefore, the norms are substantial. They can be formulated in ‘if. . ., then. . .’ clauses with a restricted set of variables because the types of situations that bind an individual are limited. In a functionally differentiated society, substantial norms can be given only for a specific functional area, and, given the ongoing differentiation and rising rate of social change, it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain a general orientation for behaviour from substantial norms. General guidelines have to be more structural and relational, putting emphasis on the ability to adjust substantial norms to changing circumstances or to infer rules for new situations from given ones which were formulated according to other conditions, instead of strictly applying a manual of behaviour in an inflexible manner. Actually, flexibility can be regarded as the super-norm of such societies. To be unable to fulfil the requirements of this norm (flexibility) can therefore consist, for example, of clinging too strongly to a substantial norm which appears to be at least partially inadequate to the given situation. This kind of rigid, inelastic behaviour is exactly what, according to Bergson, causes laughter. Bergson is one of the last theorists of the laughing-at-position, and not by chance does he defend it in a way that preserves the traditional concept of laughter as social punishment for violation of a norm, seemingly diminishing the norm to the somewhat vague idea of avoiding to weaken the élan vital. In my opinion, his theoretical position is the ‘missing link’ between the older tradition of the laughing-at-position that was connected to a system of substantial norms and the theoretical framework I would like to propose. Laughing-at implies laughing-with, and it affirms a norm which does not need to have any substantial content other than a specification of the imperative of flexibility. Revisiting the example of cross-dressing, we can discern several examples of laughing-at that illustrate certain aspects of this theoretical framework. The cross-dresser can be laughed at (and the spectators can laugh with characters in

56 the play laughing at the cross-dresser) because he or she does not behave according to substantial norms of gender-specific behaviour. Furthermore, the victims of the cross-dresser’s mimicry and disguise can be laughed at (and the spectators can laugh with the cross-dresser at them) because they take these norms for granted and are not able to adapt themselves to divergent standards of behaviour. We can explain both cases on the basis of the laughing-at-theory as affirmative of an accepted norm and do not need to use the affirmative/subversive distinction. In the following analysis of examples, I try to show that these theoretical tools are sufficient to fully explain seemingly subversive comical elements in the context of cross-dressing. My first example, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), is a US-American mainstream comedy directed by Beeban Kidron, with Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo in leading roles. They portray three drag queens on their way to Hollywood who get stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere, whose inhabitants seem quite provincial and not at all up-to-date as far as political correctness in gender matters is concerned. The town males are attracted to the three protagonists, but become hostile when they do not receive the reaction they had in mind. The women are impressed by their combination of extreme ‘femininity’ and toughness. In a way, the drag queens are the better women (comparable to Tootsie), who then give the real women in town a lesson in feminism, or simply how to fight their dull men. The trio’s most ardent enemy is sheriff Dollard, who is clearly homophobic and the most ridiculed character in the movie. In the end, the spectators are told in a very moralist way that one’s sex does not really matter, but one’s intrinsic values do. First, we laugh at the drag queens, which are played by actors who are known as attractive, athletic, tough males, possessing a certain macho allure: thus the difference between their popular image and their appearance in the movie is substantial. We can deduce from their representation the supposition that to produce laughter about men impersonating women we need to have very ‘male’, i.e. stereotypically male actors behaving in an exaggerated, stereotypically ‘female manner’. Then we laugh at the deceived males of the town who behave badly, get punished by the drag queens, and feel even more humiliated because they are dominated by women. But mostly we laugh at the sheriff, who is the only one to defend a norm the three protagonists could be said to violate. This norm of sex-gender-congruity is presented in the movie as obsolete and is supplanted by an ‘anything goes’ attitude that finds its ideological legitimization in the moral evident at the end of the film. The sheriff does not comply with this new norm, but sticks to the old one, drawing the laughter of others. The one who should be the embodiment of the norm is actually the only one who is not at all willing to accept the norm and is therefore excluded from the community – an aspect of the traditional comedy motif of a world turned topsy-turvy.

57 My second example, Tacones lejanos (High Heels), released in 1991, is a typical movie by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began as an underground artist in the Franco era and became a symbol of the cultural boom in the young Spanish democracy because of being eccentric, post-modern, and erotically overt. Like its filmic predecessor and model, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), it is a movie about a mother (Marisa Paredes), who is a famous artist, and her daughter (Victoria Abril), who feels neglected by her. In a sense, it is a sequel to Imitation of Life because the daughter is now grown up and married to a former lover of her mother’s. One of the new elements of the film is the character of Judge Dominguez (Miguel Bosé), who first appears as an impersonator of the mother, Becky del Páramo, rendering in drag an only slightly exaggerated portrayal of her already quite sophisticated and mannered behaviour. The daughter, Rebeca, is very attracted to the person who so successfully assumes the public role of Becky even though she always felt overwhelmed by the original. Dominguez himself has a very close relationship with his mother, who is a fan of Becky. As we learn later on, the real reason for Dominguez’s behaviour is that he is conducting an investigation under cover. When Rebeca’s husband is murdered, she meets Dominguez again in his role of judge without knowing that he is the same person who impersonates her mother. He appears to be disguised either way, both as a woman and as a man. Nevertheless, the only characteristic he can surely be identified by and through which the ‘anagnorisis’ can be fulfilled is a mark exactly on his penis. Although his male sex is never questioned, he appears as a virtuoso in gender matters. He is able to act as the iconic female Becky, as a vigorous and virile lover, and as the austere and distanced judge. In the role of the latter he represents social and juridical norms, and accordingly he shows a specific male gendered behaviour and appearance: formal suit, body language that signals distance, self-control, power, and elaborate and impersonal verbal expression. But despite all this, he breaks the rules when it seems necessary to him to pursue his goals, be it an altruistic fight for justice or for very personal interests. He is neither ridiculed as a person nor could we say that any of his different roles would be heavily derided. Although there are many comical scenes in the movie and nearly every character at some point causes laughter, no one is laughed at because she or he does not conform to a certain norm. The overall impression one draws from the film is that nothing really follows an expectable rule, although we are familiar with elements likewise found in other films, or, more generally, from our cultural traditions. Sirk’s Imitation of Life is a serious reflection upon changing gender role models and the individual’s problems with coming to terms with them, whereas Almodóvar’s Tacones lejanos depicts gender role models running wild, with characters changing from one stereotype to another, and praises the individual’s sovereignty in playing with these models and norms. If someone

58 lacks that sovereignty, because he or she is too much attached to a given norm, the result is tragic, not comic. Rebeca always feels incapable of attaining the oversized gender role model presented by her mother, and therefore the combination of homage and mockery in Dominguez’s impersonation of Becky is exactly what attracts her. So at whom or at what do we laugh at all? I would say we laugh at different characters, but primarily at Rebeca, during moments when the character cannot oversee the situation, is bound to an expectation that disappoints, is guided by a rule that does not fit, etc., and we can laugh at ourselves when we feel that we are in the same situation. Thus Almodóvar’s post-modern comedy with its exalted mix of genres, quotations, and stereotypes, revives an element of comedy that is quite old and can be found in older comedies that rely mainly on laughing at violations of given substantial norms. This element of laughing at a lack of both flexibility and power of judgement gains more and more dominance, for example in the popular theatre of the 19th century. Johann Nestroy, for instance, begins with plays showcasing moral correction and shifts more and more away from their clear structure of defined values. Especially the roles Nestroy wrote for himself as an actor in his own plays form a cultural model of this comical praise of flexibility. The protagonists played by Nestroy are diabolical in a very literal sense of the word: the Greek word diabolein means to mix up, to make a mess, to destroy existing structures. In pursuing their own selfish goals, his characters initiate the comical action and proceed to very successfully play bad tricks on other people, show a cynical attitude towards commonly accepted values, and often get in trouble towards the end of the play which results in a resolution that brings a new stability and an all-inclusive harmony. Nestroy’s later comedies are, however, very unusual, full of artistry and formal elegance, and lacking any realism and probability. The strange thing is that, although it is known that Nestroy had rather conservative personal opinions, the position of his comedies regarding the values at stake is in most cases not decidable if we analyse them carefully. This quality is something he shares with another great comedian of Austrian origin, Billy Wilder. A comparison between Nestroy’s 19th century plays and Billy Wilder’s 20th century movies makes clear that even comedies which at first glance seem quite conservative may appear subversive if we take a second look. But it would be better to say that they are affirmative of the norm of flexibility, which could be the genuine contribution of the comical to the process of modernization. Having said that, one example of such a comedy deserves more thorough analysis. Released in 1961, Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, is a comedy about the clashing of political systems, economies, cultures, classes, and gender roles. It thus serves as a good example demonstrating that what was said about gender identity applies also to social and cultural identity in general. The setting is Berlin after the Second World War. McNamara (James Cagney), the

59 US-American CEO of the local branch of Coca-Cola, endeavours to conduct business and to prepare the next step in his career. He must cope with employees who struggle to leave behind the militaristic habits from the Nazi era and present themselves as good democratic citizens, but nevertheless treat their American boss like a new Führer. That is exactly the address his wife constantly applies to him, revealing that in fact he is quite at ease with this behaviour. While the democratic West-Germans are former Nazis, the US-American CEO is a dictator whom his wife calls “mein Führer”. McNamara finds himself in serious trouble soon after his boss instructs him to mind his daughter who is coming to Berlin. The young girl, however, falls in love with an ardent supporter of communism from East-Berlin, Ludwig Otto Piffel (Horst Buchholz), and marries him. But love between a rich and naïve American girl and an equally naive young communist does not at all mean mutual understanding. He truly believes that she will give up all her wealth and her way of life in order to live with him in post-war socialist East German society, deprived of all luxury. She romanticizes their presumably very humble life as a couple into an intimate love-nest and dons her new role without hesitation, as if it were a new fancy dress. Even poverty can be fashionable if one only has to experience it infrequently, but in this comedy people seem to be able to take on a new personality by simply changing their clothes. The young communist must be transformed into an acceptable son-in-law, and this is quickly achieved by the right costume combined with a rushed adoption by an impoverished count. With this motif, One, Two, Three follows an old tradition in comedy. It is the clothes that make the man (or the woman). It is the manifestation of cultural difference on the surface that generates the ‘deep structure’ of personal identity, and not the other way round, as one might think. The same applies to gender, as Billy Wilder has shown more thoroughly in Some Like it Hot. Cross-dressing, however, also plays an important role in One, Two, Three. McNamara’s first strategy before giving Piffel a make-over is to get rid of him by letting him appear as a saboteur or even an American spy to the East-German police. This is a successful strategy, but McNamara soon learns that the daughter of his boss is pregnant. Now that he needs to extract Piffel from jail, he uses his contact with three corrupt Soviet officials eager to woo his good-looking secretary, an incarnation of the German Fräuleinwunder (Lieselotte Pulver). McNamara feigns consent to the arrangement, but forces his male employee Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar) to put on his secretary’s dress and assume her role. The Soviet officials get the fake American spy Piffel out of jail and exchange him for the fake secretary Schlemmer in a scene reminiscent of cold war espionage thrillers. Some comical episodes in One, Two, Three seem to simply follow the wellknown principle according to which comedies show the world turned topsy-turvy,

60 as, for example, when the fanatic young communist crosses the border at the Brandenburg gate and is taken for a saboteur because he unintentionally carries the slogan “Ami go home” and a cuckoo-clock with Uncle Sam as the cuckoo. We get the impression that the world in fact is topsy-turvy in relation to our expectations. Everyone is not, or not only, what he or she seems to be at first glance, but also the opposite; people transform from someone on one end of the cultural spectrum into someone on the other end in the shortest time by changing clothes and assuming a different habitus, like an actor on the stage. Cultural diversity is not represented by different characters inhabiting their respective positions, but rather seems to be inherent in the character, contained as a whole in each character and manifesting itself in various ways, depending on the situation and the circumstances. Everything is subject to dealing and is exchangeable for money. The only character who stubbornly opposes this principle is Piffel, and he is also the one who is changed in the most extreme and thorough manner. While the film’s anarchic and cynical undertones may have been the cause for its rejection and neglect by critics at the time of its first release, its popularity later, at least in Germany, is surely based on the fact that the confrontation between East and West and the actual situation in Berlin had lost a lot of its threatening potential in comparison to the early sixties. In its time, the movie was seemingly regarded by many viewers as by far too ambiguous and too disorientating in relation to central values that were at stake precisely at that moment. It gave the impression that the West-Germans had turned from Nazism to democracy as if they had changed from a brown shirt into a white one, that the one and only goal of Western (American) democracy was to sell Coke to everyone in the world, and that any communist could be turned into an aristocrat if you gave him a rich girl to marry and the right clothes. That was not to everyone’s taste in 1961. We are thus incited to re-examine our bearings because of the instability of things, of personal identities, and of relations. The signs which usually represent cultural differences are no longer reliable. We have to decide whether they are meant the way they normally are meant or if they are used in an indirect way to symbolize a specific way of seeing things or of representing the world. This applies to the mise-en-scène as well. The examination of Piffel by the police, for example, is as much a parody as a travesty of such interrogations seen in other movies, and so are the exchange of Piffel for the fake secretary and the car chase through East-Berlin. According to Judith Butler, laughter is able to weaken traditional, normative views of things and personal identities (Gender Trouble 138f.). In One, Two, Three, however, laughter seems to be the effect of such weakening of normative positions, while the cause appears to be something different: the struggle to earn one’s living or, when possible, to acquire wealth and power. The latter is

61 condensed in one motif: money. Money makes things and people change. While on the one hand money surely stabilizes social hierarchies, here it is the general source of instability. Money also plays a comparable role in other famous movies that Billy Wilder directed before and after One, Two, Three. In Some Like It Hot (1959) it is the main motif of the female protagonist, as it is of the male protagonists in the German movie Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love) from 1951 of which Some Like It Hot is a remake. Seemingly Wilder felt obliged to create a stronger motivation for the male protagonists to dress up as women for the American audience. In The Apartment (1960) the protagonist (Jack Lemmon) lets his boss use his apartment for his amorous adventures, which causes ongoing misunderstandings and a mixing-up of personal identities. Irma la Douce (1963) is a movie about a prostitute whose admirer tries to prevent her from selling her body to someone else by paying her himself with money earned by taking on another identity. In Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) a would-be songwriter is so desperate to succeed that he is willing to offer his wife to a popular singer in exchange for his help breaking into show business. In The Fortune Cookie (1966) Jack Lemmon portrays a man who pretends to be disabled in order to extort money from his insurance company. In all these movies laughter is not the cause of a weakening of the normal and expectable, but the effect of such a weakening, its cause being money. In these cases, money makes the world go round, but in topsy-turvy fashion. In One, Two, Three the protagonist embodying this principle of constant change is McNamara. He is not in the least a good guy. In fact, he is cynical, selfish, unscrupulous, and he surely is no liberal intellectual who wants to overcome binary oppositions and ideological boundaries. Actually, he is a conservative, if not a downright reactionary, who pursues with frankness his own personal goals against other people’s interests. In doing so he causes laughter, but in most cases not intentionally, and the laughter usually is not directed at him but at other people (which changes slightly towards the end). We probably would not like him in real life, but we can develop a tendency to like him in an ambivalent way during the comedy, as an effect of the laughter he causes. The position of the movie regarding the values at stake is, if we analyse it carefully, for the most part undecidable. For example: Piffel’s idealism is satirized as naive and ideological throughout One, Two, Three until a pivotal conversation takes place with McNamara and Peripetchikoff, a former Soviet official trying to become a business man in the West. After the ensuing controversy about Piffel’s and McNamara’s convictions, Piffel is devastated, becomes deeply melancholic, and expresses his hope that at least his children will be able to build a better world. At that moment McNamara tells him that he has just quoted Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the oath of the American army.

62 At this point, we might well ask what this comic moment could mean in relation to the aforementioned values. Should we regard the values as ridiculous, because it was formerly suggested to us that Piffel’s idealism is ridiculous? Or does this scene demonstrate that Piffel’s ideals are best represented by American democracy? But wouldn’t that mean that the values of democracy and communism are essentially the same? And is McNamara, the winner in this controversy about ethics, a good representative of these values? Analogous questions could be posed regarding the use of the cuckoo-clock as a leitmotif, which in a very condensed way constantly reminds us that One, Two, Three is a film about the American way of life and its values. The answers that individual spectators might give to these questions rely heavily on personal dispositions. If the spectators are able to elevate themselves above the situation they can regard the incongruity as comical and laugh; if not, they might either experience the incongruity as simply irritating and disorienting without causing laughter, or they might understand the intention to create a comic situation but deny their consent, and therefore not laugh. In the complex case of One, Two, Three viewers might even laugh at one person, group, or habitus that is ridiculed without laughing at another that is also ridiculed because the latter depends on structures so deeply internalized by the viewer that the incongruity does not cause a comical effect. I have tried to show that the comic in general and the comical display of cultural diversity in particular does not necessarily tend to overcome traditional oppositions and ideological boundaries, as theorists like Butler suggest, although it mixes up the normal and expectable state of things to a considerable extent. Comical effects are not necessarily the result of weakened normative structures, but can be produced by, for example, the representation of the role of money in capitalist society, which, on another level, surely creates and stabilizes normative structures. The comic is not the ultimate locus from which one can embark on revolutionizing the world: for scholars specializing in the field of humour, a topic long neglected by cultural studies, this conclusion could be a little bit disappointing. I leave it to the reader to decide whether he or she will accept McNamara’s concluding statement as a relief (also an effect often attributed to the comic): “Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad”, and laugh with him and me, or not.

Works Consulted Almodóvar, Pedro (Dir.): Tacones lejanos. Spain/France 1991. Bakhtin, Mikhail: Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984.

63 Balme, Christopher, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel (Eds.): Theater als Paradigma der Moderne? Positionen zwischen historischer Avantgarde und Medienzeitalter. Tübingen – Basel: Francke 2003. Benedek, Susanne, and Adolphe Binder: Von tanzenden Kleidern und sprechenden Leibern. Crossdressing als Auflösung der Geschlechterpolarität? Dortmund: Ebersbach 1996. Berger, Peter L.: Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997. Bergson, Henri: Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. by Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola (NY): Dover 2005. Böhn, Andreas: Das Formzitat. Bestimmung einer Textstrategie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Intertextualitätsforschung und Gattungstheorie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2001. —. Der fremde Mythos und die Mythisierung des Fremden. Heines politischliterarische Mythologie in ‘Vitzliputzli’. In: Aufklärung und Skepsis. Internationaler Heine-Kongreß 1997 zum 200. Geburtstag. Ed. by Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte, and Karin Füllner. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 1998. Pp. 367–378. —. Thesen zum Verhältnis von Indirektheit und Komik. In: Von Intentionalität zur Bedeutung konventionalisierter Zeichen. Festschrift für Gisela Harras zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by Kristel Proost and Edeltraud Winkler. Tübingen: Narr 2006. Pp. 219–225. Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London – New York: Routledge 1993. —. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London – New York: Routledge 1990. Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge 1992. Goetschel, Willi: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. In: The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 March 2007. ⬍http://www.litencyc.com⬎. Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992. Haider-Pregler, Hilde (Ed.): Komik. Ästhetik, Theorien, Strategien. Wien: Böhlau 2006. Harras, Gisela: Auf dem Weg zu einer einheitlichen Theorie der Indirektheit des Sprechens. In: Rhetorik – Figuration und Performanz. DFG-Symposion 2002. Ed. by Jürgen Fohrmann. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 2004. Pp. 219–245. Hoffmann, Kurt (Dir.): Fanfaren der Liebe. Germany 1951. Jenkins, Ron: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: The Free Press 1994. Kidron, Beeban (Dir.): To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. USA 1995. Lehnert, Gertrude: Wenn Frauen Männerkleider tragen. Geschlecht und Maskerade in Literatur und Geschichte. München: dtv 1997.

64 Luhmann, Niklas: The Differentiation of Society. Trans. by Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore. New York – Guildford: Columbia University Press 1982. Nestroy, Johann: Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Jürgen Hein, Johann Hüttner, Walter Obermaier and W. Edgar Yates. Wiem: Deuticke 1977ff. Morreall, John: Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York 1983. Palmer, Jerry: Taking Humour Seriously. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Sirk, Douglas (Dir.): Imitation of Life. USA 1959. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson: Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell 1986. Wilder, Billy (Dir.): Irma la Douce. USA 1963. —. Kiss Me, Stupid. USA 1964. —. One, Two, Three. USA 1961. —. Some Like it Hot. USA 1959. —. The Apartment. USA 1960. —. The Fortune Cookie. USA 1966.

II. Gender B(l)ending: The Comic Impact of Cross-Dressing and Body Alteration

Jessica Hamann

“Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”: Laughter, Blush, and Gender Roles in Gottfried Keller’s Novella Cycle A Formula for Love. The Epigram (1881) This contribution analyses the role of body language, laughter and blush, in Gottfried Keller’s novella cycle. The interpretation highlights the employment and subversion of the usual understanding of body language as natural, involuntarily produced and therefore a reliable sign of inherent characteristics of the person, namely gender. The male protagonist fails to find the ideal congruity between appearance and essence for which he is looking, but – or better therefore – achieves mutual acknowledgement and understanding.

The comic is probably one of the most frequently investigated topics when it comes to Gottfried Keller’s works. Although humour and the comic are central aspects of research on Keller (Preisendanz 190), analyses have tended to focus on irony and humour as a peculiarity of his narrative style. The following analysis of the text, however, reveals a broader functioning of comic strategies, which are entwined with gender roles and play an important role on different levels of Keller’s Das Sinngedicht (A Formula for Love),1 such as in the frame narrative, in the embedded narratives, and in Lucie’s commentaries on the novellas. Furthermore, the phenomenon of blushing is linked with laughter as both are at the centre of the Logau-epigram, which forms the starting point of the protagonist’s journey. The epigram: “Wie willst du weiße Lilien zu roten Rosen machen?/ Küß eine weiße Galathee: sie wird errötend lachen” (8) (“How do you want to turn white lilies into red roses?/ Kiss a white Galathea, she will laugh and blush”), has often been read as dealing with the balanced relationship of sensuality and morality; one example being Ermatinger, who reads the blush as the limitation of manners felt by the subject, and the laughter as the joie de vivre of the intellectually free human being (527). The plot thus enacts the protagonist’s search for a woman matching these conditions, a woman who blushes and laughs when she is kissed. In my paper I want to take a closer look at how laughter and blush function in the text in comparison to what the Logau-epigram – when read as a recipe – suggests. Viewing the blush, like laughter, as a phenomenon that is both 1

The English version of the main title and chapter titles are borrowed from the translation by Washington whose new edition of Keller’s novella cycle was not available at the time of completion of this paper. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

68 physical and linguistic, it can be read as a sign of sensuality and the pleasure principle. Therefore, it can be claimed that A Formula for Love, on the one hand, foregrounds an apprehension of laughter and blushing as limitations of the subject, but, on the other hand, illuminates the liberating tendencies of these phenomena.

Blushing as Writing of the Body Scholarly work on the blush suggests that it renders body and character legible and can supplement language with an ephemeral materiality (O’Farrell 3–7). Furthermore, O’Farrell detects a shift in the nineteenth-century management of the blush from manners to self-consciousness. While in the Logau-epigram blushing seems to be a stable indicator of character, the novellas enact it as a product of circumstance. Apart from shame, often regarded as the only cause of blushing, a reddened complexion can be read in many different ways, for instance as a response to delight, alcohol consumption, anger, as self-expression of a truth, which can even contradict the spoken word. A scientist’s crisis of identity forms the beginning of the novella cycle. Reinhart has almost forgotten what ordinary human life consists of, including laughter, and he only engages in laughter when watching the “Komödien” (Das Sinngedicht 7) (“comedies”) of the chemical substances with which he is preoccupied. His laughter lacks any social function for he spends his life in total isolation in his Faustian laboratory. When examining light under his microscope, a sudden pain in his eyes causes him to reflect on his life and the meaning of the research he is doing. Unhappy that he lives in isolation, he begins to long for human company and discovers a dusty volume of Lachmann’s Lessing edition containing the Logau-epigram. But what does Reinhart intend to do with the epigram? He reads it as a guideline for social interaction and social conventions because the Lessing edition is found among books dealing with “halbvergessenen menschlichen Dingen” (8) (“half-forgotten human affairs”). Reinhart begins a quest, as it were, for the ‘Lost Laughter’, and especially for a woman’s laughter, which according to Logau’s epigram is supposed to occur in combination with blushing. This epigram, however, promotes patriarchal notions of femininity, distinguished by manners, virtue, and chastity. Furthermore, as Neumann points out, the Logau-epigram and the embedded narratives can be read as a reiteration of the Pygmalion myth (556). In the latter context laughter and blushing function as signs of revival. The single elements of white, red, and blush respectively, are to be found in each of the novellas. The epigram suggests that it is up to the man to bring the woman to life, who is then to laugh as a sign of her pleasure and enjoyment in his kiss and yet to blush, signifying her virtue and good manners. The Logau-epigram illustrates an asymmetric relationship between men and women by emphasizing the active role of men.

69 On the lookout for a woman who matches the conditions of the epigram, Reinhart leaves his laboratory and enters a series of situations designed to test his hypothesis. The ensuing encounters with women, however, make him realize that his project is not as easy as he thought. The first test subject Reinhart meets is a female customs officer who likes to spend her time laughing at her former lover, a master builder, who chose, instead of her, to marry an ugly woman in order to receive her father’s permission to build a bridge. Now the unhappy husband chooses to cross his own bridge as often as possible to see the customs officer he loves but at whom he dares not look. When Reinhart crosses the bridge and asks her for a kiss, she gives it laughingly, yet she does not blush, “obgleich auf ihrem weißen Gesicht der bequemste und anmutigste Platz dazu vorhanden war” (Das Sinngedicht 12) (“although on her pale face there was the easiest and most delightful space for it”). It is she kissing him, although the epigram explicitly employs the imperative “Küß” (8) (“Kiss”) from the male perspective. She laughs at Reinhart in the same way she laughs about her former lover; even when Reinhart is riding away she does not stop laughing. He has to experience that there are different forms of laughter and that the optical effect of laughing is not an unambiguous sign of love or pleasure. The customs officer treats Reinhart like her former lover, making him feel ridiculous and making a joke out of the kiss. Reinhart’s next encounter with a woman constitutes the second test of the Logau-epigram. Reinhart meets the daughter of a priest he is acquainted with, who often blushes without any visible reason. However, when Reinhart kisses her, she blushes over and over but does not laugh at all. Here, blush is a site of absolute moral obligation and leaves no space for pleasure. Everytime the priest’s daughter blushes, she runs away and thus flees from her complexion reflecting a readable self. She apparently feels discomfort in the company of men but is even more afraid of being held up to ridicule, which becomes clear when she feeds Reinhart’s horse by putting some bread in a knitting basket and some water in a watering can. The horse turns this situation into a comic scene by becoming entangled with the watering can and the knitting basket, and is unable to free itself from these bothersome items. Reinhart laughs about the whole scene and the priest’s daughter asks him to keep it secret so as to avoid controversy and ridicule. Eventually she gives him a letter for a friend who lives nearby and thus uses Reinhart as letter-carrier who is unable to read what he is carrying. He becomes the bearer of signifiers and transmitter of wishes (Prasse 121) of which he knows nothing. Later the reader learns that it is the small matter of a request for radish seeds. Keller’s staging of the blush in the case of the priest’s daughter illustrates the problem of a world that requires the individual to allow the external world to coerce and control his/her inner reality. The priest’s daughter appears to be the victim of the involuntary blush. It becomes clear that she has internalized the moral code to an extent that all passion and unfulfilled

70 desires can be naught but suppressed. The contrast between this episode and the story of the customs officer makes clear that the Logau-epigram fails to assert the degree of moral obligation and pleasure it demands. In the next chapter, Reinhart’s project becomes even more problematic. Reinhart encounters his prospective next test subject, the daughter of an innkeeper. He tries to get to the point of kissing through small talk but fails badly. The innkeeper’s daughter interrupts him: Da ich einmal die einsame Wirtstochter hier vorstelle, so wollen wir die wundervollen Dinge nicht verschweigen, welche man sich unter solchen Umständen sagt, und der Welt den Lauf lassen! Fangen sie an, Herr! Und seien sie witzig und vorlaut, und ich werde mich zieren und spröde tun! (Das Sinngedicht 18f.). For although I here represent the lonely daughter of an innkeeper, we should not try to conceal all the wonderful things to be said to each other under such circumstances and let the world take its course! Do start, sir! And be amusing and forward and I will be coy and prudish!

Reinhart is perfectly flabbergasted and does not know what to say. She then asks him if he would be willing to invert roles so that she might court him and tell him pleasant things while he would play coy. Without hesitation she puts it into practise and talks of her great liking for him, but in such a facetious and ironic way that he can only exclaim: “Sie sind ja der Teufel im Mieder! Ein starker Geist mit langen Haaren?” (20) (“You’re the devil in a girdle! A strong ghost with long hair?”). When Reinhart asks her for a kiss, she again adopts the active role and tells him “zum Dank für die angenehme Unterhaltung mit dem Schimpf davon [zu] reiten, geküßt worden zu sein wie ein kleines Mädchen” (ibid.) (“as a ‘thank you’ for the pleasant conversation, to ride off in disgrace for having been kissed like a small girl”). He agrees, but when she approaches him his face inadvertently adopts an expression of coldness and she withdraws. Although he has initially agreed to accepting her kiss, his contenance comes to tell a story that contradicts his words. While the blush as the language of colour performs a somatic act of confession, the coldness of Reinhart’s expression is obfuscating and even threatening: “In diesem Augenblick wallte aber ein kalter Schatten über sein Gesicht, die Augen funkelten unsicher zwischen Lust und Zorn, um den Mund zuckte ein halb spöttisches Lächeln” (21) (“But in this moment, a cold shadow swirled over his face, the eyes blazed diffidently both in lust and anger, the face twitched with half a mocking smile”). The narrator elaborates that Reinhart decides to kiss her but then refuses to do so because he is afraid that she will only laugh but not blush; being a conscientious scientist, he does not want to repeat this experience. In contrast to the priest’s daughter, the innkeeper’s daughter seems to lack a concept of moral obligation. Instead, she lives according to the pleasure principle, and all her pleasure is devoted to despising men and to playing with them, as Lucie later

71 on remarks when she tells Reinhart the background story of Salome, the innkeeper’s daughter. Salome’s conduct and especially the comedy inherent to the scene breaches convention, challenges assumptions of propriety, and reveals the performative aspect of gender roles. These first three encounters with women illustrate the problematic dimension of Reinhart’s project. When Reinhart reads the Logau-epigram as a guideline he seems to misinterpret it. According to Selbmann this kind of literature becomes only accessible through life (161) and since Reinhart’s isolation separates him from life, he is not able to understand it. Although Reinhart is not experienced concerning literature, the vision of femininity presented accords with his ideas about and ideals of women, which he tries to defend against Lucie’s criticism in their narrative duel. But before discussing this point in more detail, I first want to take a closer look at the embedded narrative Die Berlocken (The Charms) for it adds another dimension to the function of laughter and blushing in Keller’s A Formula for Love. In The Charms the blush is depicted as a misleading sign, and the European perspective on the savage as an idealized image of true nature and free humanity turns out to be a projection. Thibaut, who wears the charms as a sign of his masculinity, is subjected to misreadings in different ways: First, concerning the jewellery hearts that he obtained by devious means; second, when later giving these hearts to Quoneshi, the American-Indian woman he intends to marry. But the first misreading is already based on a previous one: Thibaut receives from Marie Antoinette a golden watch with the hint that he has to earn the charms for it himself. He is uncertain what she wants him to do and therefore asks his friends for advice. They tell him that he is supposed to collect the charms from small souvenirs of the ladies whose hearts he has broken. Consequently, Thibaut simulates love attachments to several women in order to gain small souvenirs for his watch. While the stories concerning the first three souvenirs are narrated in more detail, the following souvenirs are only briefly mentioned. In fact, what takes place is substitution: women are replaced by jewellery; the trophy takes the place of love. Ultimately, Thibaut no longer knows, “ob er das kleine Schmuckherz oder das liebende Menschenherz verlangte” (Das Sinngedicht 264) (“if he desired the small jewellery heart or the loving human heart”). As Brandstetter points out, the charms become a fetish (313). Thibaut desires the signs themselves, which initially represent women, but which eventually are not representations anymore because they only refer to themselves. But soon Thibaut’s deception is turned against him in a comic way. When he sets off for the New World, he meets the American-Indian girl Quoneshi and falls in love with her. He plans to marry her and bring her back to France. When they meet, they do not really understand each other, but even the inability to communicate does not make Thibaut think about what she really might want and after all, this is not a point he is interested in. When she points at his charms, she makes clear that she

72 wants to have them. At first, Thibaut is scared “über die Deutlichkeit des Verlangens” (269) (“of the explicitness of her desire”) and surprised “von der ungeheuerlichen Keckheit des Begehrens” (ibid.) (“by the impertinence of her wish”). He interprets the signs in his favour and tries to explain her behaviour by assuming that she does not have an idea of the worth and meaning of the charms. Bischoff points out that in respect to the cultural meaning of the charms this might be true (380). He mistakenly thinks that she wants to marry him. Believing he has the prospect of bringing her home as a living symbol of his masculinity, and attracted by her charms, exotic appearance, and naturalness, he gives her the charms. Quoneshi’s blush fulfils the first condition of the Logau-epigram but parodies it at the same time. Her blush is a reaction to receiving the charms from Thibaut; she is now delighted by possessing the object of her desire. Thibaut is duped by Quoneshi although he is still entirely convinced that she intends to marry him. Thibaut is only concerned with satisfying his vanity. He wants to bring home another trophy that is, in this case, not a piece of jewellery but the exotic woman herself. This time, it is not only a symbol of victory over a woman that is supposed to add another trophy to his watch, Quoneshi is also to be the symbol of his victory over the foreign world. Eventually, the joke he imagines when he thinks about the effect of bringing Quoneshi to his own culture is reversed. The story’s conclusion offers an unexpected turn of events. The next day, Thibaut has to look at his charms as they dangle from the nose of a dancing American-Indian warrior, who is endowed with all the attributes of male beauty, power, and threat by the narrator Lucie. He learns that this is Quoneshi’s fiancé whom she is going to marry the same day. The scene reveals to Thibaut his ethnological misreading of the other. The charms, the signs of his pathetic victories over women, become the signifiers of his arrogance. Their cultural significance is removed or rather shifts to being a signifier of a true love attachment (between Quoneshi and ThunderBear). Both Thibaut and the exaggerated European view of ‘primitive’ people become objects of ridicule. Thibaut’s misreading does not only refer to the impossibility of communication, but to the functioning of the blush, too. Thibaut fails to interpret Quoneshi’s blush for he assumes that it is directed towards him and reads it as a sign of agreement. The text emphasizes the illegibility of the blush when it makes the “zarte Rothaut des Urwalds [. . .] noch röter” (Das Sinngedicht 270) (“red skin of the jungle [. . .] even more red”). When a reddening complexion renders the body legible, how is it applicable in the case of the ‘red people’? Finally, the face of the dancing warrior ThunderBear turns out to be the ultimate parody of the discipline of reading complexions: “Ganz starr vor Erstaunen blickte Thibaut nach dem Tänzer hin, dessen schreckliches Gesicht in allen Farben zu blitzen schien, so daß er es nicht deutlich zu sehen vermochte in seiner Verwirrung” (272f.) (“Paralysed with

73 astonishment, Thibaut looked at the dancer whose terrifying face seemed to flash in all colours so that in confusion he could not see clearly anymore”). The Charms is the last story of the narrative duel between Lucie and Reinhart. While the previous stories were somehow more serious, Lucie turns her story into a farce which shows that she is tired of the narrative duel and perhaps even dissatisfied with the direction the stories are taking.

The Narrative Duel between Lucie and Reinhart A Formula for Love is a text which works with multiple points of view. The complex interconnection of frame narrative and embedded narratives results in the impossibility of identifying a single narrator who could guarantee unambiguously a stated view. This game with the dualism of two perspectives characterizes, according to Preisendanz, Keller’s narrative principle and can be defined as humour that manifests itself in the complexity, multidimensionality, and ambivalence of the narration (213). Keller changes the form of the frame narrative insofar as the meeting of Reinhart and Lucie is at the core of the plot structure and, moreover, the negotiation of their different points of view is thematically linked with the embedded narratives. Thus the relationship between Reinhart and Lucie becomes part of the embedded stories. This technique breaks open the traditional form of novella cycles such as Boccaccio’s Decamerone or Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Émigrés). While Boccaccio’s embedded narratives were interchangeable, in A Formula for Love each of them fulfils a certain purpose concerning the dynamics of the frame narrative. Reinhart’s first meeting with Lucie is a good example of the misreading of laughter and blushing as indicators of a traditional vision of femininity. When he first sees her, dressed in white, washing roses in a fountain, her image evokes Galathea of the Logau-epigram. Initially, Reinhart is unable to move and when he wants to hand over the letter he received from the priest’s daughter, he mistakenly gives Lucie the note with the Logau-epigram he kept in his pocket. As a result, this kind of Freudian slip makes Reinhart blush and Lucie laugh about the comic effect of the situation. Undeterred by the beginning of his encounter with Lucie, Reinhart plans to test the Logau-epigram one more time. When first they meet, Lucie almost asks him to leave her house because she senses in his behaviour his lack of self-awareness and desire for her to be his next test subject. Although he is fascinated by her, Lucie does not meet Reinhart’s expectations of how a woman should behave. Upon discovering that she owns a huge library, he inconsiderately asks her why she goes in for such things, referring to her interest in books. She does not answer his question but blushes and Reinhart is so embarrassed that he blushes, too. Reinhart’s blush reflects his

74 awareness of gender roles and shows that he feels uncomfortable in respect to his own critique of her education. In the sequel, the mutual telling of novellas presents different models of identity and alterity which serve as controversial role models in the narrative duel between Lucie and Reinhart. Both first must go through a process of maturing before being able to accept each other as equal partners. Eventually, they come together but their way of getting to know each other is linked to the mutual narration of stories. It is Lucie’s uncle who dubs this a narrative duel, which is itself an interesting formulation in view of the duel being an enactment of masculinity (Frevert 214–232). Each prepares a strategy: Reinhart tries through his stories to create a defence for his position; Lucie sends out rhetorical arrows in order to undermine Reinhart’s point of view. While Reinhart defends himself, Lucie becomes the attacker. Thus, a symbolical reversal of gender roles can be identified. Rhetorical and comic strategies play a leading role in this management of gender roles. In respect to the narrative duel, Lucie’s comments on Reinhart’s stories in particular subvert the readings of these stories and suggest a re-reading. In the beginning, both protagonists have extremely fixed and normative ideas of happiness and love. Lucie’s commentary on her story Von einer törichten Jungfrau (About a Foolish Maiden) makes clear that she is critical of Salome, who appears to be quite the opposite of an educated woman. Reinhart’s point of view is defined by considering it advantageous if the man occupies a socio-culturally higher position than the woman and adopts the role of her educator. Furthermore, getting pleasure from the face of the other is an important criterion for Reinhart when it comes to love. He is convinced that the basis of a relationship should be taking great personal pleasure in the face of the other: “Findet dies Phänomen statt, so kann man Berge versetzen, und jedes Verhältnis wird dadurch möglich gemacht” (Das Sinngedicht 47) (“If this phenomenon takes place, one is able to move mountains and every relationship becomes possible”). Reinhart trusts the legibility of the body and consequently is convinced that the face is able to articulate and reveal the truth of one’s character and morality. For him, the face is the index of a person’s mind and body. Lucie addresses Reinhart’s statement with a pointed analogy: “[D]as gefallene Gesicht wird zum Merkmal des Käufers, der auf den Sklavenmarkt geht und die Veredelungsfähigkeit der Ware prüft” (49) (“[T]he likeable face becomes a feature of the buyer who goes to the slave market to check the potential for improvement”). Reinhart reproaches Lucie for interpreting his point maliciously. His first story Regine is intended to be an argument in defence of his perspective, but it misses the point. It is a story of misinterpretations. When Erwin Altenhammer recognizes Regine’s blush as she talks to a horseman, he immediately interprets her reddened complexion as a sign of her love attachment to this man. Subsequently, it becomes known that the horseman was her

75 brother. But this is only the beginning of a whole series of misreadings which finally leads to Regine’s death. Kaiser emphasizes that Regine again and again sends out wrong signs and that her life finally becomes a terrible story of speechlessness (523). But it is also a story of identity. In Regine (as well as in Don Correa), women who are not equal and emancipated have to adjust to a man’s vision of femininity. Specifically Regine has problems to adopting her new (class) identity, an identity which was imposed on her by her husband. When she commits suicide in the end, she again dons the apparel of a maidservant and so symbolically returns to her former identity. Even Lucie, when she was a girl, had once been willing to give up her (religious) identity for her love of a man and to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. In the end, she recognizes that she was a fool. It is this last confession of Lucie that illustrates that Reinhart has changed in the course of the narrative duel. He says: “Beschämt ermesse ich an diesem Beispiele des Guten, wie teilnahmslos mein Leben verlaufen ist, wie inhaltslos, und auf wie leichtsinnige Weise ich sogar vor ihr Angesicht geraten bin!” (Das Sinngedicht 302) (“Ashamed I have to realize how indifferent my life has been, how empty and even how carelessly I came into your sight!”). Eventually, Reinhart’s idea of an ideal female identity becomes questionable to him. He changes his vision of femininity and at the same time redefines his male role. But this development occurs in several stages. After his failure with Regine, the story Die arme Baronin (The Poor Baroness), as part of Reinhart’s new argumentative strategy, is supposed to demonstrate that a woman cannot survive on her own, that she is dependent on a man’s support. Lucie criticizes Reinhart’s story for not granting the baroness a modicum of free will. She rejects his argument by mocking Brandolf as a noble selector of women, examines the story critically, and tries to reinterpret the motivations of the baroness. A heated discussion unfolds between Reinhart and Lucie which does not follow objective criteria, but rather consists of mutual ironic attacks: “Ei, mein ungnädiges Fräulein, warum denn so gereizt? Ich wehre mich ja lediglich für eine Frauengestalt, die durch ihre Hilflosigkeit nur gewinnt und dem Geschlecht zur Zierde gereicht!” (162f.) (“Well, my bad-tempered young lady, why are you so irritable? I only fight for a female character who profits from her helplessness and is a credit for all women!”). Lucie answers laughingly: “Ei natürlich, ja! So versteh ich es ja auch! [. . .] ein sanftes Wollschäfchen mehr auf dem Markte!” (ibid.) (“Well, of course, yes! That’s the way I see it, too! [. . .] another gentle little wool sheep on the market!”). To diffuse the discussion, Lucie’s uncle intervenes in the narrative duel with an autobiographical story. Die Geisterseher (The Ghost Seers) supports Lucie’s position to a certain extent and contradicts Reinhart’s image of women, for a woman’s choice of partner is narrated, which relativizes male “Wahlfreiheit und -herrlichkeit” (162) (“freedom of choice and magnificence”). The uncle’s

76 narration proves to be beneficial to the discussion because it provokes reactions in Lucie and Reinhart. Reinhart reflects on the experiment of his mother and experiences himself as the victim of female arbitrarity. Furthermore, he is confused by the increasingly powerful impression Lucie is making on him and tries to resist his inner stirrings. Reinhart’s third narration, Don Correa, is his strongest argument in the narrative duel. Among all the male characters of the embedded narratives, Don Correa corresponds most clearly to ascribed male role behaviour for he combines the attributes of a warrior, conqueror, and educator. The confrontations of Don Correa with Donna Ferniza and Zambo-Maria refer to a splitting in the vision of femininity that exposes the wishful and fearful notions projected on femininity by the male narrator. This critical dimension becomes clearer in Lucie’s reaction to Reinhart’s story. She mocks him with an allusion to the Bible: “ ‘Das haben sie gut gemacht!’ sagte Lucie; ‘wir andern wollen uns merken, wie nützlich die Demut ist und wie erhöht wird, wer sich erniedrigt hat!’” (256) (“ ‘Well done!’ Lucie said; ‘we others will try to remember how useful humility is and how he that shall humble himself shall be exalted!’ ”).2 Lucie then tells the story The Charms as a caricature of and counter to Don Correa, a point which has already been discussed in more detail above. After finishing her last story, Lucie leaves immediately, and Reinhart, slightly annoyed, asks her uncle: “Was hat ihre prächtige Nichte [. . .] nur für einen Zorn auf meine armen Schützlinge, daß sie so satirische Pfeile auf mich abschießt? Das geht ja fast über das Ziel hinaus!” “Je nun”, erwiderte der Oberst lachend, “sie wehrt sich doch eigentlich nur ihrer Haut, die übrigens ein feines Fell ist! Und merken sie denn nicht, daß es weniger schmeichelhaft für Sie wäre, wenn sich die Lux [Lucie] gleichgültig dafür zeigte, daß Sie für allerhand unwissende und arme Kreaturen schwärmen, zu denen sie einmal nicht zu zählen das Glück oder Verdienst hat?” (274). “Why is your splendid niece [. . .] so furious with my poor protégés that she shoots such satirical arrows at me? That almost goes over the top!” “Well,” the Colonel replied laughingly, “she is only standing up for herself [. . .]! And haven’t you recognized that it would be less flattering for you if Lux [Lucie] was indifferent towards you being keen on all sorts of ignorant and poor creatures to which she is not lucky enough or has not the merit to belong to?”.

The uncle’s revelations seem to surprise Reinhart because he has not thought about the issue, yet. As a result of the inner warmth the words of Lucie’s uncle provoke in him, he blushes and merely remarks: “So geht es [. . .] wenn man immer in Bildern und Gleichnissen spricht, so versteht man die Wirklichkeit 2

Referring to Lucas 14,11: “Denn jeder, der sich selbst erhöht, wird erniedrigt werden, und wer sich selbst erniedrigt, wird erhöht werden” (“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted”).

77 zuletzt nicht mehr” (274) (“That’s the way it goes [. . .] when one always speaks in images and allegories, in the end one does not understand reality anymore”). But Reinhart goes astray; it is rather the other way round: The reality of Lucie and Reinhart is in need of telling stories and the models they create put them into the position to understand and deal with it. In the course of the narrative duel, Lucie and Reinhart have come closer, though admittedly, not on the level of the narratives but on the level of thought and feelings. The important function of the narratives consists in their getting to know each other and their perspectives better, thereby allowing them to reflect their own positions. The text exposes Reinhart’s ideas of marriage and femininity as constructs and male wishful thinking. Especially Lucie’s stories, but even more her commentaries on his stories, undermine his project and reveal its problematic dimensions. Her analogies of marriage market and slave market (the customer tests the capacity for the improvement of goods) and of marriage market and cattle market (wife as a gentle little wool sheep) can be read as a criticism of the ways marriages were arranged in the 19th century, when women often were nothing more than objects to be exchanged like goods among men.

Conclusion Collectively, the novellas and Lucie’s commentaries attack the social pressures placed on women to conform to a certain vision of femininity as constructed by the Logau-epigram. Although A Formula for Love reads as enacting asymmetrical gender roles, the behaviour and performance of the characters oppose this perception. The Logau-epigram marks a certain vision of femininity that proves to be unattainable and is, in the end, revealed to be a (literary) construction. Quite the reverse is the case with Goethe’s poem Mit einem gemalten Band (With a Painted Ribbon) which is quoted at the end of the frame narrative and can be realized because of its true-to-life context. While in the beginning of the frame narrative, Reinhart is not able to read the Logau-epigram other than as a formula, in the end, the context of the Goethe poem illustrates that it is shifted into a concrete life situation. While the Logau-epigram offers a vision of femininity which underscores the passive role of women and suggests that their character features become revealed by the blush as a signifier of their virtue and manners, and their laughter as approval of their gender roles, Reinhart’s encounters with women, as well as many of the novellas of the narrative duel, disrupt the rigidity of gender roles. Keller’s staging of the gesture of the blush emphasizes its function as a response to and product of circumstance, as an act of self-consciousness, rather than being a reliable index of character and virtue. Laughter, like blushing, turns out to be an ambiguous sign. Both phenomena do not seem to be reliable

78 indicators of virtue, manners, and chastity and reveal their constructedness. As bodily signs they counteract a vision of femininity that promotes gender as something ‘natural’ and are, therefore, signs which are not natural, as Reinhart believes, but cultural constructs. Laughter and blushing appear to be products of circumstance and not limited to expressing an unambiguous attitude. This might be at least one reason for the comic quality of Keller’s A Formula for Love. The readers take part in Reinhart’s unsophisticated approach to women, are confronted with women who repeatedly do not act in a way that is expected of them, and finally they see how the protagonist gives up on his narrow outlook. This ambiguity becomes especially clear in the first encounter between Lucie and Reinhart. At first Lucie clearly seems to represent the Galathea of the Logau-epigram because she apparently conforms to its premises: she wears a white dress and washes roses in a fountain. But the reader’s expectation, that now the time has come the Logau-epigram will be fulfilled, is quickly disappointed. It is not Lucie, but Reinhart who blushes, and the phenomenon of laughter which is supposed to accompany the blush in this situation turns out to be highly ambiguous. There is a twist to Lucie’s face which does not clearly indicate if she is mad at Reinhart’s Freudian slip or is instead amused by the situation. The two phenomena, laughter and blushing, that constitute the Logauepigram somehow seem to be displaced and this play with the demands of the ‘recipe’ causes a comic effect. This structure is reiterated throughout A Formula for Love as was demonstrated in the case of The Charms or Regine. Reading the Logau-epigram, according to Neumann, as the bringing back to life of a woman through the kiss of a man, seems at least problematical. Ultimately, it seems to be the other way round: Lucie brings Reinhart back to life. Although the male characters in the embedded narratives of Reinhart can be associated with Pygmalion, this does not necessarily apply to Reinhart himself because the text does not satisfactorily demonstrate that Reinhart identifies with his male characters. So it appears that A Formula for Love is less concerned with the balanced relationship of sensuality and morality but rather is a text about the form of intersubjective relationships, about the understanding of another human being away from the way she or he presents her- or himself to the other. This becomes clear in the words of Donna Ferniza and Don Correa: “Was bist du für ein Weib? Was bist du für ein Mann?” (217) (“What kind of woman are you? What kind of man are you?”).

Works Consulted Amrein, Ursula: Augenkur und Brautschau. Zur diskursiven Logik der Geschlechterdifferenz in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. Bern – Berlin – Frankfurt/M.: Lang 1994.

79 Bischoff, Doerte: Eroberungen und Verwicklungen. Fremdes Begehren in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. In: Fremdes Begehren. Transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien. Ed. by Eva Lezzi and Monika Ehlers. Köln – Weimar – Wien: Böhlau 2003. Brandstetter, Gabriele: Fremde Zeichen. Zu Gottfried Kellers Novelle “Die Berlocken”. Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturpoetik. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 43 (1999). Pp. 305–312. Die Bibel. Altes Testament und Neues Testament. Einheitsübersetzung. Freiburg – Basel – Wien: Herder 1980. Ermatinger, Emil: Gottfried Keller. Eine Biographie. Zürich: Diogenes 1990. Frevert, Ute: Ehrenmänner. Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. München: Beck 1991. Kaiser, Gerhard: Gottfried Keller. Das gedichtete Leben. Frankfurt/M.: Insel-Verlag 1981. Keller, Gottfried: A Formula for Love. The Epigram, a translation of “Das Sinngedicht” by Gottfried Keller. Trans. by Lawrence M. Washington. Weybridge (VT): Cherry Tree Books 2006. —. Das Sinngedicht. Stuttgart: Reclam 2002. Neumann, Bernd: Gottfried Keller. Eine Einführung in sein Werk. Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum 1982. Neumann, Gerhard: Der Körper des Menschen und die belebte Statue. Zu einer Grundformel in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’. In: Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. by Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach 1997. Pp. 555–591. O’Farrell, Mary Ann: Telling Complexions. The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush. Durham – London: Durham University Press 1997. Prasse, Jutta: Der Sinn der Gattung in Gottfried Kellers ‘Sinngedicht’ oder: Wie findet ein Wissenschaftler eine Frau. In: Sprache und Fremdsprache. Psychoanalytische Aufsätze. Ed. by Claus-Dieter Rath. Bielefeld: Transcript 2004. Pp. 111–138. Preisendanz, Wolfgang: Humor als dichterische Einbildungskraft. Studien zur Erzählkunst des bürgerlichen Realismus. München: Fink 1976. Selbmann, Rolf: Gottfried Keller. Romane und Erzählungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2001. The Holy Bible. Containing the Old and New Testaments. Revised Standard Version. London – Edinburgh – Paris: Thomas Nelson and Sons 1957.

Beth Pentney

“A comic turn, turned serious”: Humour, Body Modification, and the Natural in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983) produces humour which has been argued to subvert gender norms through sarcasm and irony; although, it may be that the text re-inscribes gender norms in the process of interrogating such feminine tropes as beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm. The parallels between transformation of the body and the environment are examined as reflective of struggles over power. In identifying the humour in this novel as “ressentiment humor” (Streip), possibilities emerge for an interpretation that may shed new light on the tensions between feminism, women, the natural, and the comic.

Feminists are routinely charged with lacking a sense of humour in relation to women, social and systemic inequality, and sexuality (notably illustrated in the familiar joke: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “That’s not funny!”). In fact, feminist writers have often utilized elements of the comic in an attempt to subvert gender norms, or to trouble normative modes of thought among women and men. If we consider just a few female authors who either identify as feminist or are commonly associated with feminist aims, such as Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Hélène Cixous, Dorothy Parker, and Angela Carter, it becomes difficult to locate the exact place where feminist humour lies. However, Katharine Streip suggests that women should make “ideal comics” because, like comics, they “participate in a double logic related to that of the scapegoat, who both unsettles and reassures the community” (136). Employing Streip’s model of “ressentiment humor” developed in her study of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, I intend to examine the popular British novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil to determine whether and how Fay Weldon’s feminist humour subverts gender norms, or rather re-inscribes them in the process of disrupting such feminine tropes as beauty, body modification, and female competition within a heterosexual social paradigm. British author Fay Weldon has built a prolific body of work tinged with wry humour that illuminates the conflict-ridden and contradictory positions of women’s lives. Often mixing the mundane with the fantastic, Weldon’s novels, essays, plays, and television series have circulated through British and North American popular culture since the 1960s; her work has remained culturally salient and, some might argue, prophetic in its representation of ‘women’s issues’. While Weldon has been charged with political fluctuation and ambiguity

82 throughout her career by interviewers and feminists alike, she has also been celebrated for this tendency by postmodernists who would argue that nothing is stable or complete, least of all one’s political leanings. On Fay Weldon’s feminism, Lana Faulks writes: “Weldon’s feminist perspective evades categories, though her viewpoint appears more pragmatic than ideological. Her fiction scrutinizes the actual social condition of women, their economic well-being, for example, rather than offering homilies about female liberation” (8). Put another way, Weldon’s work “‘freaks out’ feminism” (Peterson 293). Her fiction overlaps genres, evades narrative consistency, and is characterized by short, punchy prose. This regularly creates a tone of universal mockery that is sometimes confusing, often hilarious, and always ripe with multiple meanings. The Life and Loves of a She Devil, published in 1983, is Weldon’s most widely known novel; it has been produced as a BBC miniseries (1986) of the same name, and as a Hollywood film, entitled She Devil (1989), staring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep. In the novel, Weldon employs satire and irony to explore the parallels between violence inflicted upon the environment and violence inflicted upon women’s bodies, through environmental alteration and cosmetic surgery. She also challenges both the narrative conventions of the romance novel and those who would critique traditional ‘women’s genres’ (such as soap opera, ‘the chick flick’, and the romance novel). In doing so, Weldon reframes heterosexual concepts of romance, marriage, and child-rearing as something other than the natural course for women. While The Life and Loves of a She Devil may be read as subversive for its literary sneer at gender conventions, by the end of the text it is clear that a challenge to the status quo does not necessarily lead to revolution, but rather to reinforcement of normative structures, a product of the comic that Andreas Böhn identifies in his analysis of gender subversion through the comic in this volume. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ressentiment is “a term introduced by Nietzsche to describe an attitude which arises, often unconsciously, from aggressive feelings frustrated by the sensed inferiority of one’s situation or personality and frequently results in some form of self-abasement” (OED online). It has been developed by the disciplines of psychology and Existentialist philosophy, but for our purposes, it works well with a consideration of women’s humour as outlined by Katharine Streip. Streip’s identification of ressentiment humour in her analysis of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight provides a useful model for interpreting the subtle and contradictory comedic elements at work in Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil. Streip observes: In ressentiment humor, where the object of the joke is to bring about a narcissistic triumph for the joker, an initial sense of injury and rage becomes transformed into comedy through self-laceration. The joker claims, “you can’t hurt me more than I can hurt myself – watch me take pleasure in this pain and compel you to share my

83 pleasure.” Anger remains the inexpressible source of this comedy that is both revenge and “just a joke which is all about me.” (118).

She continues by suggesting that ressentiment humour implicates the reader in the discomfort engendered in the text, and most importantly, “ressentiment humor aims for discomfort without catharsis” (128). This is not to suggest that the ‘joker’ is, or remains, an inevitable victim, but that the joke is inexplicably linked with the pain of self-deprecation and, simultaneously, the pleasure of revenge by the joker. Weldon’s novel fits into the model proposed by Streip, by creating a narrative that confounds essentializing feminist claims, particularly those that imply women are inherently moral beings, less inclined to violence or revenge. Weldon’s protagonist Ruth Patchett is a disgruntled, middle-aged housewife who serves as the anti-archetypal, twentieth-century middle-class wife and mother. Her husband Bobbo is an attractive, successful, adulterous man and her children are lazy and disappointing. Her role as wife and mother is pre-fabricated, and, as a result, is much too constricting for Ruth’s 6⬘ 2⬙ dark and lumbering frame. She is bitter that a woman’s social currency is determined by her beauty and sexual desirability, and feels slighted by ideologies that would scorn women cast from a different mould. Ruth’s existence in the idyllic suburb Eden Grove is shaped by artifice, and she recognizes that her neighbours, while singling her out as deviant because of her ugliness and stature, are similarly disappointed with their own lives, but they mask their pain with habitual consumerism and colourfully-themed dinner parties (Weldon 12). The Patchetts embody the post-script of the romance novel; that place we never get to in the narrative, the place after the passionate love affair and marriage proposal. In fact, Ruth repeatedly accuses romance novelist Mary Fisher of “telling lies to herself, and to the world” (7) because the romance novel ideal is an unattainable fiction, and one that disappoints so many who experience love and loss through adultery. When Ruth is left by her husband for Mary Fisher, she decides that she will have her retribution, in effect shifting the roles between herself and Bobbo. Ruth activates this process by methodically burning down their suburban home, abandoning her children to the care of Bobbo and Mary Fisher (disrupting their romantic hideaway by the sea with the trappings of parenthood), and adopting the mythical role of a She Devil: a title Bobbo bestowed upon her before leaving her. Transforming into a She Devil requires purging the woman, according to Ruth. She sheds her womanliness like the skin of a snake and, in the process, amputates her maternal love, her sexual ambivalence, and her desire for reciprocal love. In doing so, she gains power, wilfulness, and an almost god-like omniscience. Ruth’s “initial sense of injury and rage becomes transformed into comedy through self-laceration”, evidence of the ressentiment humour at work

84 in the text (Streip 118). Ruth’s symbolic transformation from wife to She Devil is activated by her intensified recognition that women who lack beauty are undervalued no matter how much they try and compensate through their actions: So. I see. I thought I was a good wife tried temporarily and understandably beyond endurance, but no. He says I am a she devil. I expect he is right. In fact, since he does so well in the world and I do so badly, I really must assume he is right. I am a she devil. But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she devil the mind clears at once. The spirits rise [. . .] There is only, in the end, what you want [. . .] I want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return (Weldon 49).

Ruth’s thoughts are clearly devilish here, and yet the reader is encouraged to maintain allegiance to Ruth despite her vengeful plans. This allegiance is nourished throughout the first fifty pages of the novel using elements of the comic that encompass and stretch beyond sympathetic affiliation with the perceived ‘underdog’. Rather, the knowing sarcasm that Ruth shares with the reader positions her as the wise woman who can decipher the unjustness of so many common, everyday actions and relations. We stick with her because she is undeniably smarter than everyone else in the novel thus far. After burning down her house and leaving her children with their father, Ruth strategically immerses herself in the circles of society that are marginalized or demonized in order to plot her revenge and bide her time: she cares for the elderly, the insane, and the young; she becomes sexually involved with a priest, a sadist judge, an elderly half-wit, and an outcast female nurse. She joins and then abandons a feminist commune in order to lose weight, she frames Bobbo for theft, and she sends Mary Fisher’s incontinent mother to live in the converted lighthouse with Mary Fisher, Bobbo, and the children. She gains financial independence, and she councils numerous others toward their own enlightenment and liberation from cultural constraints by operating an employment agency for women who have been hampered by domestic duties. Ruth’s actions arguably produce positive effects for those around her, but she acts out of self-determination and with calculated manipulation. It becomes more and more difficult to support Ruth’s quest for revenge, and the humour becomes tainted by discomfort for the reader, especially as Mary Fisher begins to suffer the effects of parenthood and creative-loss: “Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower and nearly, nearly prefers death to life [. . .] What shall she do to be saved? [. . .] she cannot escape. She nearly did [. . .] But I stopped her. I, the she devil [. . .] And she needn’t think I’ll stop there. I’ve only just begun” (117). Bobbo’s affair with Mary Fisher connects and simultaneously polarizes Ruth and Mary. Mary embodies everything that Ruth does not: ideal female sexuality,

85 vulnerability, coyness, beauty, and independence. The landscape that divides and defines these women is also polarized – Mary lives in the High Tower on the coast, 108 kilometres from the suburb of Eden Grove. Throughout the novel, one can trace the symbolic attraction, collision, and repulsion of these two women as Ruth circles like the moving foot of the compass around the static geographic location that was once a lighthouse. Through this process Weldon equalizes the binaries Ruth and Mary represent, and also satirizes the heterosexual competition encouraged among women. Ruth is physically transformed into the image of Mary Fisher and, by the end of the text, she takes on Mary’s life by becoming motherless, independent, wealthy, sexualized, and powerful. Mary Fisher, whose life shifts to mirror Ruth’s, becomes mother and wife. By sabotaging Mary Fisher’s fantasy existence with Ruth’s former reality, Mary Fisher is made weak, haggard, jealous, and dependant. Accordingly, Mary Fisher loses her beauty and grace and dies slowly of a mixture of cancer, longing, and financial ruin. Ruth’s status as the underdog, and the bitterness with which she attacks normative gender roles (literally and philosophically), creates allegiance to the character from the beginning. However, this allegiance is troubled since it also has us rooting for a character who wants nothing more than to climb to the top of normative systems of power and dominance. Over a seven-year period Ruth surgically transforms herself into the mirror image of Mary Fisher; in the process, she has her teeth extracted, her jaw wired, her face and body sculpted and re-shaped, and her arms and legs shortened by several inches. Ruth’s goal is to dethrone the woman who has tempted her husband, and reinstate herself into her marriage on her terms. Her decision to refashion her body in the image of her Doppelgänger, Mary Fisher, is constructed as devilish and violent, and yet Ruth succeeds financially, sexually, and personally. In this way, Ruth’s achievements challenge feminist binary thinking, which often characterizes cosmetic surgery patients as either hapless victims or, alternatively, empowered agents. Ruth is neither wholly victim, nor agent, at once. The notion of female empowerment in this framework is ambiguous, to say the least. According to Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Weldon’s novel offers us a heroine who chooses to do violence to her own body in order to empower herself in a world in which gender relations still disadvantage women. The Gothic text’s concern with shifting and unstable subjectivities is here itself exploited in order to offer a more liberating narrative for women readers” (174). Ruth’s internalization of a lifetime of verbal abuse and hegemonic beauty pressures cause her to choose this body work (and subsequent scarring, bruising, and pain), but self-acceptance is recognized as idealistic by Ruth, who explains that she “was unlucky [. . .] in the great Lucky Dip that is woman’s life” (Weldon 11). She claims: “I have tried many ways of fitting myself to my original body, and the world into which I was born, and have failed. I am no revolutionary. Since I cannot change them, I will change myself ” (217).

86 Through allusions to the Little Mermaid fairytale and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ruth is situated among mythical characters that have similarly chosen pain or death rather than suffer ridicule and shame for being different. However, by describing in graphic detail the physical mutilation undertaken in the name of ideal beauty, ideal beauty is defamiliarized, and beauty practices become offensive. As Finuala Dowling suggests: “Ruth’s stylized revenge and her self-transformation are not a call to readers to follow her example [. . .] The enjoyment of fantasy [by the reader], then, is an indictment [. . .] of the society that leaves so much to be desired” (108). Weldon shifts the burden of criticism from the woman who elects cosmetic surgery, to the society that would encourage/demand such action. Ruth’s success through body modification exposes ideologies about love, beauty, and romance that are unhealthy and traumatic, but also impossible to ignore or avoid. Her monstrous and hyperbolic transformation creates humour because it seems ridiculous and evil, but it also leads to her upward mobility, despite Weldon’s implicit critique of the societal systems of power within which Ruth becomes a player. In a world that shuns and mocks ugly women, Ruth believes that she has no choice but to construct artificially that which she was not granted by nature or god. Jean Dubino explains why success in this text is characterized by Ruth’s ability to reinstall herself in her marriage with Bobbo, even though she no longer loves him or seems to need him at all: “patriarchy demands that women find their greatest happiness in marriage, and so Ruth ironically aspires to live the Cinderella plot that she exposes” (110). Since Ruth can physically become Mary through surgery, she is not resigned to a fixed identity imposed upon her from above. Her transformation exposes the superficiality and performativity of femininity, since, for a price, anyone can put it on. Moreover, if we return to Katharine Streip’s consideration of ressentiment humour, in which the source of the comic is the conjunction of pleasure and (self-inflicted) pain as a means of revenge, it becomes clear that the humour in The Life and Loves of a She Devil is motivated by Ruth’s anger, and her body modification is a way to both claim ownership of her pain, and neutralize the power that Bobbo, the plastic surgeons, and her mother have attempted to appropriate from her. Ruth’s “narcissistic triumph”, to use Streip’s term, is in removing the power others have over her in causing pain, such that pain becomes her ally. The bruising and breaking of Ruth’s body by a team of male plastic surgeons and dentists would seem to reveal the extent to which patriarchy violates women’s bodies in a capitalist system. According to Lana Faulks, “physical augmentation in Weldon’s novels is pointedly absurd, based on a desire to please men, an expression of self-hatred in the woman attempting to change herself to create a more socially pleasing image” (50). However, Horner and Zlosnik argue that Weldon “implicitly challenge[s] the tendency of early second

87 wave feminism to construct women as victims” (171), as Ruth is decidedly in control of her process of body modification. Ruth’s plastics surgeons, contrary to conventional patient/doctor relationships, are castrated of their benevolent power by Ruth as she subjugates them by making them mere extensions of the medical tools used in her self-fashioning. She states: “I do not put my trust in fate, nor my faith in God. I will be what I want, not what He ordained. I will mould a new image for myself out of the earth of my creation. I will defy my Maker, and remake myself ” (170). Weldon exposes the paternalism embedded in conventional patient/doctor relationships as Ruth refuses to become a pliable object in the hands of Dr. Ghengis and Dr. Black, the plastic surgeons who simultaneously envision her as their scientific creation and a reflection of their artistic and god-like skills. Instead, she treats her surgeries as business transactions, and denies the doctors their own narcissistic pleasure through her. As Böhn concludes, the comic in general [. . .] does not necessarily tend to overcome traditional oppositions and ideological boundaries, as theorists like Butler suggest, although it mixes up the normal and expectable state of things to a considerable extent. Comical effects are not necessarily the result of weakened normative structures, but can be produced by, for example, the representation of the role of money in capitalist society, which, on another level, surely creates and stabilizes normative structures (Böhn, in this volume).

Böhn’s argument that gender norms are not necessarily subverted through the comic is exemplified in the relations between Ruth and her surgeons. The shift in power roles seems to imply a subversion of gendered power, and yet Ruth’s capitalist manœuvering only reasserts an intrinsically oppressive institution, whereby economic currency leads to cultural currency. The American film adaptation of the novel, She Devil, casts Roseanne Barr as Ruth Patchett, and omits the sarcasm that propels the social commentary in the novel. In the film, Ruth is a dowdy housewife whose bitterness stems from her husband’s affair rather than from the unfair power imbalance Ruth observes between men and women in the novel. Moreover, the humour engendered in the film occurs at Ruth’s expense: we laugh at her failed femininity (she does not meet the standard requirements of feminine beauty, as the casting of Roseanne Barr makes clear), and then at her neurotic behaviour. The humour created in the novel by Ruth’s identification as a She Devil, and her corresponding sense of omniscience which cuts a critical path through the artifice of her surroundings, is altogether neutralized in the film. As a result, any feminist analysis of patriarchal systems of power is minimized and the story is altered to tell one woman’s experience with adultery and retribution, rather than to address larger systems of inequity such as heteronormativity and the institution of marriage which creates financial dependence on men for women; Christianity, which

88 binds women to maternity; the workforce, which punishes women for having children; and the welfare system, which breeds laziness and not ambition (all of which are scrutinized in the novel). Significantly, the American film adaptation She Devil leaves out the cosmetic surgery procedures entirely. Rather than reversing roles with Mary Fisher, physically and economically, Ruth only succeeds at making Mary Fisher more like the housewife and mother that Ruth embodied, who was so repulsive to Bobbo in the beginning of the film. In typical postfeminist fashion the film demonizes the successful, sexually-independent Mary Fisher as a home-wrecker by punishing her with motherhood and domestic responsibility, while at the same time desexualizing Ruth as the housewife and then celebrating her at the end of film, when her maternal role is reinstated and it is implied that Bobbo wants reconciliation. Again, Streip’s discussion of ressentiment humour in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, is useful for comparing the humour of the novel with the humour of the film: “Rhys’s humor does not simply provide distance from a disturbing situation; it defuses unhappiness by compounding it through a ressentiment that implicates the laughers [. . .] in the muck” (Streip 120). Likewise, The Life and Loves of a She Devil implicates the laugher/reader “in the muck” that is dominant Western ideology, whereas the film She Devil evacuates the discomfort produced by implicating the audience, and instead focuses the humour on Ruth as a failed woman, on Bobbo as a bumbling fool, and on Mary Fisher as a melodramatic mistress. Another site in the novel where humour is used to inadvertently implicate the reader ‘in the muck’, is in the treatment of the ‘natural’ world, in terms of landscape and animal life. Throughout the novel the landscape symbolically parallels the transformative and traumatic violence of Ruth’s surgical practices, implicitly critiquing the artificial environment humans have created for themselves. Eden Grove, the suburb where Ruth and her family live before Bobbo leaves and Ruth burns down their home, has an archetypal, universal quality characterized as both nowhere and everywhere. Through it Weldon brings together the mythic and the real, alluding to theological roots of Eden and the ideology of suburban life as a site of manicured, measured nature. However, the ornamentality of the suburb barely conceals the festering human relationships among the square plots of foreign grasses and carefully-arranged flowers. This tension is conveyed through comic glimpses at neurotic housewives and philandering husbands who attack their lawns rather than each other. Similarly, the Hermione Clinic, situated on the outskirts of Los Angeles and home to the plastic surgeons who conduct Ruth’s body work, parallels Ruth’s unnatural transformation. The oasis in the desert is described as a mutated and artificial universe that mimics the inauthentic women who are born from the clinic. It is a place “where herbicides, fertilizers, insecticides and pumped water, stolen from Colorado, had created an oasis of lush and stunning green,

89 where the facelift patients most loved to raise their bruised countenances to the dappled sun” (Weldon 247). This extended metaphor initially seems to suggest that the landscape is just another thing to be contorted and changed, but the Hermione Clinic is also the site of intense electrical storms that threaten human achievement by destroying machinery and cutting off the power supply. These storms coincide with Ruth’s leg-shortening surgery and reveal the power of the traditionally-feminized natural world to retaliate against unnatural human intervention. Thus, Weldon’s use of pathetic fallacy gives a mythical quality to Ruth’s cosmetic-surgery procedures, and emphasizes the clash between the natural and the artificial. Moreover, the comic treatment of the landscape as retaliatory disrupts the passivity often associated with feminine nature, providing subversive potential to undercut the gender dichotomies of feminine nature and masculine technology. Weldon reveals that human attempts to disassociate ourselves from the natural (through technology) are as constructed and artificial as the plastic-surgery patient’s body; Dr. Ghengis claims, “There is no such thing as the essential self [. . .] It is all inessential, and all liable to change and flux, and usually the better for it” (234f.). Accordingly, Ruth’s moles force their way back to the surface after her surgery, an image that suggests that cutting and slicing the body is not a permanent solution to the discordance of nature or the inevitability of death. A caged and drugged polar bear, ironically used as a mascot for a “Save-The-Bear Society” fundraiser, escapes from his cage and terrorizes a suburb before being shot by local police. Mary Fisher’s body “return[s] to disorder [and] misrule”, and is eaten by cancer (226). What occurs in these moments of transgression, mutation, and retaliation is a challenge to those who would assign implicit morality to the natural world. Unlike the Hermione Clinic and the suburb Eden Grove, Mary Fisher’s converted lighthouse, the High Tower, is perched on the edge of the roaring ocean and is potentially treacherous because of its proximity to unbridled nature. Whereas the landscape of the suburb is easily managed, the danger of the cliffs is much greater and seemingly impossible to tame. When Ruth purchases the High Tower after Mary Fisher’s death, she has the cliff-face reinforced by a team of engineers, who “managed marginally to alter the configuration of the entire harbour so that the force of the waves was no longer directed at the tower” (253). Digging, forcing, and building up the grounds of Mary Fisher’s old estate become an extension of Ruth’s sexual and social power at the end of the novel. She states: Life is very pleasant. I sit up in bed in the morning and look out over the landscape. Some people say I’ve ruined it, with artificial copses and granite-fountained fish ponds and the rest, but I like it. Nature gets away with far too much. It needs controlling. I have many friends. I am very hospitable, and charming, and there’s always a nervy excitement at my parties (256).

90 Ruth’s manipulation of the natural landscape emphasizes the power that commodification affords her, to be able to enter the system that previously punished her for deviating from acceptable womanhood. This is directly associated with her social power in the previous quotation, and her ability to charm the very people who have always stigmatized her, once again, encourages the reader to laugh along with Ruth at the shallowness of others; we recognize Ruth’s skills at deception and creation, and we are invited to ally with her. Yet, it is impossible to ignore the fact that her position of power emerges from her adherence and mastery of traditional gender norms; beauty, sexual desirability, and access to finances ensure her success. As ressentiment humour, The Life and Loves of a She Devil “aims for discomfort without catharsis” (Streip 128). Ruth’s success is not cathartic, but hollow. The humour of the text engenders hybridity on multiple levels. Weldon forces the reader to consider the pattern of judgement used to categorize Ruth as immoral, in order to challenge a hegemonic order that labels women ugly/ beautiful, good/evil, and moral/immoral based on physical appearance and traditional norms of femininity: Ruth “put[s] on femininity with a vengeance [. . .] and in so doing, [she] spotlight[s] the performative function of both freaks and females within patriarchy” (Peterson 299). Ruth and Mary Fisher are not simply protagonist and antagonist, beauty and monster, they are Doppelgänger; their associated charactonyms hint at this connection (Marlene Hunter, Ruth’s name at the end of the text, and Mary Fisher; where one looks inland, the other out to sea). The form of the novel replicates this hybridity, as it incorporates continually shifting narrative voices. Ruth’s first person account and an omniscient narrator alternate back and forth, until Ruth becomes omniscient and we are faced with a protagonist that is both accessible and completely foreign. Ruth’s hybridity (both in terms of her evolving physical appearance and her shifting identities) undermines generic expectations of the novel and creates a main character that is difficult to identify with. This textual and narrative hybridity highlights the relative nature of moral judgement on bodily and environmental alteration, such that it becomes misguided to attempt to determine whether the comic aspects of the novel are either subversive or normative. In fact, the comic is both subversive and normative in The Life and Loves of a She Devil, in fitting with the ressentiment humour at work in the text. Sara Martin’s concluding analysis of The Life and Loves of a She Devil is decidedly negative: “Weldon’s Ruth sheds her powerlessness and her freakish body to become not a powerful woman, but a pathetic, grotesque moral monster” (8). Somewhat similarly, Lana Faulks claims: “To maintain her power and control of others, [Ruth] effectively loses her own humanity to gain possession of the tower” (51f.). I would argue that Martin and Faulks are off the mark in defining Ruth in this way because the central conflict of the text addresses the contradictions inherent in pinning down morality. Weldon reminds the reader

91 that beauty and ugliness, power and weakness, are not mutually exclusive terms. Ruth is not an inhuman monster, she is a product of the society of which she is a part; if she is horrific, it is because she magnifies our flawed social codes and the behaviours that we encourage in women every day, which is why the humour of the novel is both liberating and anxiety-ridden for its familiarity. We are not afforded the luxury of the fairytale ending; rather, the ressentiment humour of the text leaves us with discomfort and ambiguity. In the final lines of the novel Ruth identifies herself as “a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious” (256). The She Devil is still the woman, and Marlene Hunter is not Ruth-less. What begins as a humorous examination of the contradictions of contemporary femininity, becomes a serious inquiry into the power relations between men and women, and a commentary on the ineffectual legacy of modern definitions of moral worth.

Works Consulted Dowling, Finuala: Fay Weldon’s Fiction. Mississauga: Associated University Press 1998. Dubino, Jeanne: The Cinderella Complex. Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism. In: Journal of Popular Culture 27.3 (1993). Pp. 103–118. Faulks, Lana: Fay Weldon. Toronto: Prentice-Hall 1998. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik: Agriculture, Body Sculpture, Gothic Culture, Gothic Parody in Gibbons, Atwood and Weldon. In: Gothic Studies 4.2 (2002). Pp. 167–177. Martin, Sara: The Power of Monstrous Women. Fay Weldon’s “The Life and Loves of a She Devil” (1983), Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus” (1984) and Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry” (1989). In: Journal of Gender Studies 8.2 (1999). Pp. 193–211. Peterson, Shirley: Freaking Feminism. “The Life and Loves of a She Devil” and “Nights at the Circus” as Narrative Freak Shows. In: Freakery. Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson New York: New York University Press 1996. Ressentiment. In: Oxford English Dictionary Online. 17 February 2007. ⬍http:// dictionary.oed.com⬎. Seidelman, Susan (Dir.): She Devil. Orion Pictures 1989. Streip, Katharine: “Just a Cérébrale:” Jean Rhys, Women’s Humor, and Ressentiment. In: Representations 45 (1994). Pp. 117–144. Saville, Philip (Dir.): The Life and Loves of a She Devil. BBC 1986. Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a She Devil. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1983.

Raluca Cernahoschi

“From now on, I am Carmen”: Imagining Cross-Dressing as Comic Protest in the Life and Work of Romanian-German Author Franz Hodjak This essay analyses an attempt at comic subversion through cross-dressing as Bizet’s “Carmen” in the life of Romanian-German author Franz Hodjak, which later found its way into Hodjak’s debut novel Grenzsteine (Boundary Stones) (1995). The essay explores how the cross-dressing works as political and gender subversion in both contexts and points out the development of the idea of cross-dressing from real life to novel: what was once a tool for political subversion is re-imagined as a freeing act in and of itself, a suspension of fixed personal identity.

The Carmen Episode The editor, poet, and novelist Franz Hodjak is one of the few RomanianGerman literary personalities to have lived and worked in Romania until the fall of the country’s communist regime. As the German editor at Dacia, one of the four Romanian publishing houses with German-language programme, Hodjak promoted a Romanian-German literature that was a sharp departure from both the bucolic verses of the past and the socialist panegyrics of his day. As a poet, he strove for the same stylistic and thematic innovation, as well as for the creation of a lyric space for free self-assertion.1 Despite the criticism of the communist regime implicit in his poetic enterprise, Hodjak is not counted as a “politischer Schriftsteller im engeren Sinn” (Dauer 2) (“political writer in the narrow sense of the word”),2 yet the pervasive presence of Romanian power politics left a large imprint on his work, as on his life, and was met, at least in one instance, with remarkable resistance. This instance was first recorded in an article in the Siebenbürgische Zeitung on the occasion of Hodjak’s 50th birthday and in anticipation of his first novel, Grenzsteine (Boundary Stones), which appeared a year later, in 1995. The article contains all the usual landmarks of Hodjak’s career, from his stint in the 1

The titles of Hodjak’s early volumes of poetry announce again and again his striving for open self-expression, from Spielräume (Elbow Rooms, 1974) over offene briefe (Open Letters, 1976) to mit Polly Knall spricht man über selbstverständliche dinge als wären sie selbstverständlich (With Polly Knall One Can Speak About Self-Evident Things as if They Were Self-Evident, 1979). 2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original.

94 military, over his literary and editorial debut in 1970, when Romania seemed open to new possibilities, over the gradual darkening of his hopes and poetic voice in the 1980s, to his success on the German market since 1990. Being penned by literary critic Peter Motzan, Hodjak’s long-term friend and collaborator, the article also offers some less-known details about Hodjak’s life. One of these details, referring to the author’s struggles with the authorities who refused him the right to travel outside of Romania until 1988 despite numerous awards and invitations from abroad, is recounted by Motzan thus: Erst als seine [Hodjaks] mehrfach und lauthals verkündete Absicht, im Verlag in Damenkleidung zu erscheinen – auserkoren hatte er sich aus der Garderobe des Klausenburger Musiktheaters, wo seine Frau als Regieassisstentin arbeitete, ein Kostüm der verführerischen Carmen aus Bizets gleichnamiger Oper – eine Audienz beim Chef des Klausenburger Geheimdienstes Securitate herbeizwang, ereignete sich das Reisewunder DDR (Motzan 7). Only when Hodjak’s loudly and repeatedly announced intention of appearing at work in women’s clothes – he had chosen the costume of the seductive Carmen from Bizet’s eponymous opera from the Klausenburg opera house, where his wife worked as an assistant director, for this purpose – forced the chief of the Klausenburg secret service to grant him an audience, was the miracle of a trip to the GDR accomplished.

The first striking thing about this episode, so casually shortened by Motzan to one sentence, is the vision it conjures of the square-jawed and bearded author – who resembles more an Orthodox priest than a seductive gypsy – in Carmen’s flamboyant dress. It is an absurd image, yet one so powerful in its incongruity that anyone familiar with Hodjak’s appearance would have no trouble visualizing it. The questions the image engenders, however, are deeper than the shock of incongruity. First, how could a mere threat of this kind have a political impact, obtaining Hodjak a passport that was previously denied him 19 times? What in the threat was deemed dangerous enough for such swift action? (According to Hodjak, the decisive audience was granted him three days after he first launched his threat, with the passport following within another few days; cf. Personal Interview). Was it the idea of cross-dressing, of a man cross-dressing, of a man of some stature in the community cross-dressing, or of a man cross-dressing as Carmen? Second, why had Hodjak chosen cross-dressing to protest a political decision, and why had he chosen Carmen? Third, was this a subversive act and, if so, from what point of view: politics, gender, or both? Was the threat successful as an instance of political subversion, or did the state apparatus ultimately win by pre-emptively handing the author his passport? And, last but not least, what do this imagined act and the response to it say about gender roles and the possibility of gender subversion under and after Romanian communism? Although, after the fall of communism, Hodjak came to view his earlier attempts at political subversion as an editor and writer as futile (Von der Suche

95 284), the Carmen episode remained a source of pride and inspiration and is featured prominently in Boundary Stones. Set after the fall of communism in Romania, the novel is a satire on post-1989 Romanian society and follows the misadventures of a Romanian-German intellectual, Harald Frank, who is trying to obtain a visa to go abroad. Offering little resistance to the topsy-turvy world around him, Harald Frank becomes embroiled in a secessionist scheme when he is elected president of a ‘free’ tent state, and is subsequently a fugitive from the law. When his first disguise as a soldier brings ever more complications, Harald Frank changes clothes and trades genders by disguising himself as a woman. The switch is marked by his recollection of a previous attempt to cross-dress – as Carmen. The flashback is given ample room in the novel, and the Carmen episode is embellished with details (to be considered below) which shed new light on the gender connotations of Hodjak’s intended performance. Yet the implications of the Carmen episode cannot be understood to their full extent from the novel alone. My considerations will therefore start from Hodjak’s assertions about his intended protest, which I have treated, for the purposes of this analysis, like a text directed towards a specific audience located in Romania in 1988. In this part of the analysis, I will attempt to examine how cross-dressing as Carmen could figure as a protest in its time and place, and whether it was a successful one or not. In the second part of the paper, I then take a closer look at the meaning of gender-bending in the Carmen episode, with the help of the context created by its inclusion in Boundary Stones.

Cross-Dressing as Protest In a personal conversation from November 2006, Hodjak elaborated on the background of the Carmen scheme. The idea, he said, was to find an individual method of protest against a political decision which had cut deeply into his life, for Hodjak was seeking a passport not to travel to the German Democratic Republic, as Motzan had suggested, but to visit his dying mother in Munich, in the Federal Republic of Germany. Having rejected more traditional statements, such as a hunger strike, because they had a political signification already, he chose the cross-dressing idea because it was sufficiently removed from the cause of the protest, but, he believed, instantly recognizable as a protest. The many phone calls Hodjak received in response to his threat seem to confirm his belief: “Sie wussten sofort, weshalb ich das mache, obwohl ich das niemandem gesagt hatte, außer meiner Frau” (Personal Interview) (“They immediately knew why I was doing this, though I had told no-one, except my wife”). Of course, this response necessitated knowledge of Hodjak’s rejection by the authorities, which would have been available to all those in possession of Hodjak’s phone number. But it also necessitated a particular way of reading

96 behaviour, knowledge of a code that would allow Hodjak’s audience to connect these seemingly unrelated actions. This knowledge was in fact wide-spread in the Romania of the 1980s, as it was throughout communist Eastern Europe, where more than just texts needed to be read between the lines in order to make sense of the complex system of signs that mediated between public appearance and private opinion. In The Captive Mind, the Polish writer Czesl⁄ aw Mil⁄ osz describes how this constant encoding and decoding transcended written language to become the main means of communication between people: It is hard to define the type of relationship that prevails between people in the East otherwise than as acting, with the exception that one does not perform on a theater stage but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies (51).

In communist Eastern Europe, smiles, glances, gestures, intonation, and clothing were part of a complicated non-verbal code known to all which indicated either conformity to or non-compliance with the system. While Mi//losz stresses the elaborate act of preserving the appearance of conformity, an equally elaborate staging could signal non-compliance. Clothes, especially, were a first statement of whether one was in or out, for or against the system. In her book Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber argues that clothes have had this function throughout history, often being used as “overt sartorial signs of [. . .] self-designated exclusion” (22) from societal norms. The self-exclusion is nowhere more pronounced than in the act of crossdressing. Garber describes the figure of the cross-dresser as being “overdetermined” (16), possessing an excess of gender markers, whether male or female. This overdetermination causes irritation and leads to the questioning of the neat categories in which we ordinarily divide genders. When the cross-dresser appears outside of a gender context, however, s/he is likely to question categories of a different kind: [T]he apparently spontaneous or unexpected or supplementary presence of the transvestite figure in a text (whether fiction or history, verbal or visual, imagistic or ‘real’) that does not seem, thematically, to be primarily concerned with gender difference or blurred gender indicates a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin (17).

Put in Garber’s terms, the conflict expressed by Hodjak’s cross-dressing is not one between binaries of gender, but between binaries of power. The conflict

97 between male and female signifiers suggests a conflict between the public and the private, between the state and the individual, between all-encompassing power and the seemingly powerless. Hodjak’s choice exemplifies this three times: first, in the very act of cross-dressing, a taboo practice under communism; second, in the crossing over from male to female, which was the weaker sex even in the overtly egalitarian communist East; and third, in the choice of Carmen as his alter ego. As a woman and a gypsy, Carmen is a figure who embodies marginality. Her struggle against every form of control has received positive evaluation in recent scholarship, which has sought to rescue the figure from the superficial interpretation of femme fatale. In a study of the changes in the character from Mérimée to Bizet, for instance, Geoffrey and Ryan Edwards argue that Bizet elevated Carmen to heroic, even mythic, stature as “an individual who refuses to deny her inner self, as a woman who strives to affirm her right to self-definition in the face of both society and death itself ” (54). Carmen’s ascent as a freedom fighter – whether for personal or political liberty – is also emphasized by Mary Blackwood Collier, who surveys the interpretations of the opera in the later part of the 20th century. In addition to “a terrorist and a revolutionary” Carmen, Collier identifies “a primordial Carmen”, and a historical revisionist Carmen, who is “a victim of male domination in a specific society” (30). In fact, Collier argues, the opera’s inexhaustible audience appeal lies in the multiple layers of its main character, which allow for various interpretative visions. Still, there is a common thread in her character, which Collier identifies as Carmen’s “difference from the world around her and in her contempt for its conventions” (ibid.). Whatever her desire is, Carmen is a misfit; whatever her motive, she is a rebel. Her very presence threatens to subvert the existing structures, be they those of matrimony, employment, the law, or the military. Whether Hodjak had this dimension of the character in mind when he chose Carmen as his alter ego is a moot point. Carmen’s connotation as a freedom fighter would have probably been lost on the Romanian bureaucrats, for the figure does not seem to have had any political specificity in 1980s Romania (the opera enjoyed an uninterrupted run on the Romanian stage despite heavy censorship). The power of Hodjak’s intended demonstration lay not in the specific costume and its associations, but in the performance itself. As a nonverbal act of defiance, it could express a discontent which could not have been verbalized without political persecution. Cross-dressing as Carmen was an elaborate counter-performance to the everyday acting described by Mil⁄ osz, designated, however, to remain in the gray zone of political decipherability, despite its challenge to the symbolic system of state authority. In his role as editor with the Dacia publishing house, Hodjak had often seen controversial books through censorship by playing on the censor’s fear of imputing a subversive message to the text lest the intention to subvert be read as the censor’s own. In a way, the

98 Carmen idea was an extension of this practice. Hodjak could have gone to work in his new dress and simply claimed, “Ich bin jetzt ab heute Carmen” (Personal Interview) (“From now on, I am Carmen)”, with the knowledge that his action would be understood as a political protest but without fear that anyone would call it a protest. Indeed, the numerous callers who asked Hodjak to change his mind, once the rumour of his intention spread through the small town of Klausenburg/Cluj, where Hodjak had lived, studied, and worked for close to two decades, only did so under the euphemistic expression “Mach keinen Blödsinn” (ibid.) (“Don’t do anything stupid”). The most important component of Hodjak’s protest was thus the elusiveness of the performance, where the writer’s fear of political fallout was balanced by that of his opponents in the state bureaucracy. It was also the most powerful component. While the performance would have attracted public attention, no one would have been able to control the direction of the attention, since Hodjak’s protest could be neither affirmed nor denied. The fact that the performance could not be contained by political categorization would have made it a dangerous precedent, had it been allowed to take place, which explains why the mere idea of it exerted so much pressure.3

The Question of Gender Hodjak himself does not seem to have thought of the significance of his intended action beyond his own personal grievance. His recollection of his aims in choosing cross-dressing as a form of protest testifies to the centrality of his own circumstances in the planning process: “ich will keinen Affront, ich will es soll ein Gelächter geben, und ich soll unantastbar bleiben” (Personal Interview, my emphasis) (“I don’t want a confrontation; I want it to be a hoot, and I want to remain untouchable”). He did, however, consider very carefully the ways in which his, grievance could be made public. In addition to protecting himself from charges of political subversion, Hodjak aimed at eliciting laughter, at causing what he termed a “scandal”. Of course, laughter was a popular mode of resistance to the all-controlling communist system. As Ron Jenkins has pointed out in his book dedicated to the subversive power of laughter, in repressive societies laughter provides an escape, a temporary relief from 3

Though Hodjak’s threat was singular in the Romanian context, his imagined act of rebellion had several Eastern European counterparts, the most famous of which were initiated by the Orange Alternative in Poland. Some Orange Alternative happenings were similarly carried out in theatrical costume and consisted of nonsense performances that befuddled the authorities and made political repercussion nearly impossible. The strong participation they drew speaks both for the intelligibility of the code by which they functioned and the opportunity for protest they opened. For a detailed account cf. Kinney.

99 everyday oppression (cf. 2). By linking laughter and scandal together, however, Hodjak points to a different understanding of the power of his imagined comic performance. According to Webster’s definition, a “scandal” is “a circumstance or action that offends propriety or established moral conceptions or disgraces those associated with it”, and Hodjak’s intended cross-dressing could be read as such an offence. Propriety and established moral conceptions in 1980s Romania called for the strict adherence of the ordinary citizen not only to the political hierarchy but also to certain gender roles. These roles were a combination of pre-war rural gender conceptions (according to which women are sexually passive, emotionally weaker than men, and intellectually inferior to men) and communist uniformization. Though the latter established nominal equality between men and women, “equality did not imply equal affirmation of, and respect for, different values for men and women, but treating women like men” (Harsanyi 41). This meant that while women were given access to, even forced into the workforce, outside of it, they were still expected to perform all the tasks traditionally in their domain, such as housework and child rearing, but without any credit for doing so. At home as at work, women were expected to be modest and submissive, qualities reflected in their appearance, which was to show as few gender markers as possible and no markers of sexuality whatsoever: The pseudo-puritanical atmosphere was reinforced by a socialist reinterpretation of the peasant tradition of female modesty. Little by little, all signs and images of feminine beauty or desirability disappeared, being proclaimed harmful and indecent. Movies were censored so that not even a kiss or a bare arm could be shown; fashion pictures were similarly censored; women entertainers in TV shows had to wear long skirts and long-sleeved blouses buttoned to the neck, without any jewelry. [. . .] There was no choice between different images of a woman; the ideal woman was depicted as an improbable cross between an ideologically distorted peasant model and a stereotypical Stakhanovite worker – the Bolshevik ideal combined with the traditional peasant one (47f.).

Against this background of asexual modesty, Carmen stands out scandalously as a woman neither bashful of her sensuality nor afraid to use it to gain what she wants. Far from the Stakhanovite worker or the village maiden, Carmen is indolent, impulsive, and, above all, sexually alluring. In fact, the image most often associated with the eponymous heroine of Bizet’s opera is that of the femme fatale. As recently as 2005, the popular Penguin Concise Guide to the Opera characterized Carmen by her “irresistible sexuality” (Holden 62), echoing the pronouncement of the 2002 Rough Guide to the Opera, which reduces the heroine to her “hyperbolic sensuality” and emphasizes Don José’s character development instead (cf. Boyden 312). The popularity of this view is reinforced by Leo van Witsen, who in prefacing his guidelines for the Carmen costumes, sums up the story as that of “a good boy who comes to a bad end at

100 the hands of a femme fatale” (74). Even the otherwise resourceful Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen attributes the opera’s attractiveness (with over 70 screen renditions, it is the most often adapted, as well as one of the most often staged operas in the world) to the public’s enduring interest in the femme fatale: “The story of Carmen has transmuted into a genuine modern myth and has become one of the most popular literary sources for movies. The idea of a strong, sensual woman killed by an ordinary man she has seduced and abandoned seems to have universal resonance” (Wlaschin 110). Visually, Carmen is often rendered appealing in a “mid-nineteenth-century silhouette” with a “Spanish shawl, a Spanish comb, and a scattering of mantillas” (Witsen 75), meant to enhance both the heroine’s foreignness and her flirtatiousness. This would have been the image of Carmen in Hodjak’s Romania and the costume that would have been available at the Klausenburg/Cluj opera house. Hodjak’s consideration of the details of the costume is captured in the corresponding passage of Boundary Stones, in which the protagonist, Harald Frank (who shares Hodjak’s initials in reverse order), is similarly driven to take action when he is denied the opportunity to visit his dying mother in Munich. Despite his feelings of despair, Harald Frank’s vision of his intended performance as Carmen is very precise. When he announces his intention to his girlfriend Sabine, an assistant director at the opera, and elicits her help, he specifically asks for the accessories to the Carmen costume: “Und bitte mit allem Drum und Dran, mit Stöckelschuhen, Perücke, falschen Brüsten, Fächer, und vor allem vergiß den Schminkkasten und die falschen Wimpern nicht” (Grenzsteine 170) (“And with all the bells and whistles please: high heels, wig, fake breasts, fan, and especially don’t forget to bring the make-up kit and the fake eyelashes”). Yet the request suggests that Harald Frank’s (and, by extension, Hodjak’s) interest is not in historical accuracy (even of the operatic kind). The accessories listed by Harald Frank – which form for him the “bells and whistles” of the Carmen costume – are above all gender markers. In fact, they are stereotypically feminine, and, as such, would clash with the protagonist’s own stressed masculinity, marked by a profusion of facial hair (also a characteristic he shares with his author). This incongruity is not only intended, but the very object of Harald Frank’s choice: a sure way of attracting attention without overt political implications. Like his author, Harald Frank is not concerned with the gender implications of his cross-dressing. As Hodjak noted, the incongruity is meant to be funny and cause a “scandal”; Hodjak’s narrator calls it a bit of madness to combat a regime gone mad; Harald Frank “wußte, dem Wahnsinn kann man nur mit Wahnsinn beikommen” (ibid.) (“knew that one can only strike at madness with madness”). But if the insanity of Ceaus¸escu’s Romania, with its increasingly idiosyncratic rules and inscrutable motivations, is undeniable, what is the

101 madness in Harald Frank’s intended cross-dressing? Above I have suggested the rarity and exoticism of the performance, its falling so far out of the norm as one possible interpretation of what made it “mad”. Harald Frank’s/Franz Hodjak’s desperation in resorting to this action can also be read as a form of madness. From the point of view of the bureaucracy, the political inscrutability of the performance also makes it appear mad, while the element of danger, present whenever one stepped out of line, in whatever fashion, qualifies Harald Frank’s intention as madness for those who fear for him (such as his girlfriend, Sabine). In contrast with all these forms of madness, the mixing of gender identities appears as an act of normalization. In the context of Boundary Stones, it becomes clear that this mixing allows the protagonist to suspend the necessity of any kind of identification, a suspension which represents for him the highest form of freedom. A fugitive from the law on account of a misunderstanding for most of the novel, Harald Frank, who only wanted the chance to travel abroad, slips on two disguises in order to reach his goal. When the soldier’s uniform (which stresses his masculinity) he dons first only complicates his problems, he puts on a woman’s dress (in a gesture that is the fulfilment of his intended performance as Carmen, which is told here in a flashback), and it is in this guise that he finally crosses both the physical and the metaphorical border to freedom. Though at the end of the novel Harald Frank’s future is unknown, he is happy to have left behind any kind of identity. His choice is validated by the wise old woman who keeps him company. She describes him as lucky, for “jede Identität ist ein Fluch, der dich bis ans Ende des Lebens verfolgt, da kannst du machen, was du willst, es hilft nichts, der Fluch läßt nicht locker, keinen Augenblick” (199) (“every identity is a curse which follows you to the end of your life; you can do whatever you want, it won’t help: the curse won’t let go of you, not a single moment”). Set after the fall of communism in Romania, Boundary Stones thus extends the critique of rigid identity – gender or otherwise – beyond the watershed year of 1989. What started out as a personal protest in a particular context became an exploration of the possibilities of individual freedom which, I believe, still resonates outside of its time and place. Like the heroine which inspired it, the Carmen episode has changed shape from a form of protest to a parable about identity without losing the ingredients that provide its strength: unabashed sexuality, a dose of comedy, and a whole lot of incongruity.

Works Consulted Boyden, Matthew: The Rough Guide to Opera. London: Rough Guides 2002. Collier, Mary Blackwood: Carmen. Femme Fatale or Modern Myth? Mérimée’s and Bizet’s Image of Rebellion. In: Philological Papers 41 (1995). Pp. 30–37.

102 Dauer, Holger: Franz Hodjak. In: Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. 49th ed. München: Edition Text und Kritik 1995. Pp. 1–6. Edwards, Goeffry, and Ryan Edwards: Carmen’s Transfiguration from Mérimée to Bizet. Beyond the Image of the Femme Fatale. In: Nottingham French Studies 32.2 (1993). Pp. 48–54. Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge 1992. Harsanyi, Doina Pasca: Women in Romania. In: Gender Politics and Post-Communism. Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ed. by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller. New York: Routledge 1993. Pp. 39–52. Hodjak, Franz: Grenzsteine. Roman. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1995. —. Mit Polly Knall spricht man über selbstverständliche Dinge als wären sie selbstverständlich. Gedichte. Bukarest: Kriterion 1979. —. Offene Briefe: Gedichte. Bukarest: Kriterion 1976. —. Personal Interview. 21 November 2005. —. Spielräume. Gedichte und Einfälle. Bukarest: Kriterion 1974. —. Von der Suche nach einem Ort. In: “Dass ich in diesen Raum hineingeboren wurde. . .”. Gespräche mit deutschen Schriftstellern aus Südosteuropa. Ed. by Stefan Sienerth. München: Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk 1997. Pp. 269–286. Holden, Amanda (Ed.): The Penguin Concise Guide to Opera. London: Penguin 2005. Jenkins, Ron: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: The Free Press 1994. Kinney, Padraic: A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe 1989. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002. Milosz, Czeslaw: The Captive Mind. Trans. by Jane Zielonko. New York: Vintage 1959. Motzan, Peter: Weder Repräsentant noch Märtyrer. Der Schriftsteller Franz Hodjak hat ein halbes Jahrhundert durch- und überlebt. In: Siebenbürgische Zeitung. 30 September 1994. P. 7. Scandal. In: Websters’ Third International Dictionary. Springfield (MA): G. & C. Merriam Co. 1971. Witsen, Leo van: Costuming for Opera. Who Wears What and Why. Vol. 1. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press 1994. Wlaschin, Ken: Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen. A Guide to More Than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos, and DVDs. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.

Ulrich Scheck

Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Humour and Gender Crossing in Star Trek’s Voyager and Enterprise This essay investigates gender crossing and the subversive use of irony and sarcasm in the two Star Trek television series Voyager (1995–2001) and Enterprise (2001–2005). The analysis centers around the two female characters Seven of Nine ( Voyager), played by Jeri Ryan, and T’Pol (Enterprise), portrayed by Jolene Blalock. With their skin-tight uniforms and voluptuous bodies, both women seemingly represent a return to the Playboy era that created its own peculiar myth of women’s ideal physical shape. However, in each case the affective quality of this stereotypical body image, i.e., its power to arouse desire, is subverted by the employment of rational, detached discourse taken to the extreme as well as the subtle use of irony and sarcasm. The characters of Seven and T’Pol transcend gender definitions and inject a good dose of humour into the Star Trek universe through their ironic posture combining sarcasm and wit. Gender crossing, albeit in a subtle way, is apparent in both characters when one considers their suppressed and, when they surface, controlled emotions. The fictional characters of Seven and T’Pol can be seen as crossing gender boundaries; and contextualizing their sexuality in humorous scenarios within the framework of an otherwise predominantly serious and dramatic vision of the future at once highlights and subverts gender stereotypes in a very effective manner.

This essay is part of a larger research project on gender relations in science fiction television and movie series from 1980 to the present. The project examines to what extent the paradigm shift that has occurred during the last two decades in popular culture in general and science fiction movies and television productions in particular opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing gender relations. The paradigm shift I am referring to is the more recent and still changing representation of women in visual media. Female characters were only peripheral figures in the science fiction universe of the 60s and early 70s. However, from the first movie of the Alien tetralogy in 1979 to the Star Trek Enterprise series that commenced in September 2001, women have been depicted increasingly as being equal to or surpassing men in traditionally male-dominated roles. Women have become starship captains, mission leaders, warriors, explorers, and scientists, thus invading with a vengeance the typically male domain of hero and saviour of mankind in galaxies near and far. Thus, it is not surprising that gender roles should also become more fluid, less confined to the constraints of binary concepts, and that female/male relationships should take some unexpected turns. I focus in this essay on gender crossing and the subversive use of sarcasm and irony in the two Star Trek television series Voyager (1995–2001) and

104 Enterprise (2001–2005).1 At the centre of my investigation are two female characters: the former Borg drone Seven of Nine (VGR), played by Jeri Ryan, and the Vulcan Sub-Commander T’Pol (ENT), portrayed by Jolene Blalock. With their skin-tight uniforms and voluptuous bodies, both women seemingly represent a return to the Playboy era that created its own peculiar myth of women’s ideal physical shape. However, I will argue that in each case the affective quality of this stereotypical body image, i.e., its power to arouse desire, is subverted by the employment of rational, detached discourse taken to the extreme as well as the subtle use of irony and sarcasm. The contrast between physical appearance that reflects popular beauty standards and communicative performance that does not conform to socially accepted norms or is typically associated with male behaviour constitutes in itself a crossing of gender boundaries, albeit with a humorous twist. Much has been written about the cultural significance of the Trek phenomenon ever since the original series Star Trek hit North American television screens on September 8, 1966. Indeed, the Star Trek universe of syndicated series, feature films, chat groups, scholarly inquiries generated by film and cultural studies, merchandising, and fan fiction shares a key characteristic with television, its predominant medium, which James Monaco described in his seminal work How to Read a Film as follows: “Television is on-going, neverending [. . .]. Moreover, television happens in our space, in our time, it becomes part of our reality. As a consequence, it mediates not only between the viewer and reality but also between reality and fiction” (386). Compare this to Bernardi’s description of the Trek phenomenon: “Star Trek has mushroomed into a conglomerate of texts and intertexts, becoming nothing less than a megatext: a relatively coherent and seemingly unending enterprise of televisual, filmic, auditory, and written texts” (7) and “Trek is flow: potentially endless programming for seemingly endless consumption” (8). And there is, indeed, no end in sight: although ENT, the fifth Star Trek series, was discontinued after its fourth season with the final episode airing on 13 May 2005, reruns of all series are shown in syndication or on select stations.2 A comical documentary entitled Earthlings – Ugly Bags of Mostly Water was produced for the 2004 Cannes Film Market, Trekkers continue to organize conferences, and “Gaylaxians” lobby for the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered characters in Star Trek and other science fiction.3 As Michéle and Duncan Barrett pointed 1 Star Trek: Voyager will be referred to throughout this essay as VGR, Star Trek: Enterprise as ENT. 2 Aside from VGR and ENT, the series are Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9). 3 Cf., for example, the websites of David Sinclair and of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards.

105 out, asking for the inclusion of gay characters in the Star Trek universe was unsuccessful: “Star Trek’s refusal to cast an actual gay character has now become so entrenched that paralysis has set in – it is hard to see how anything could live up to the expectations that now surround the issue” (190). There is also a considerable body of scholarly work that has examined Star Trek from philosophical, psychological, cultural, political, economic, and religious perspectives. Even the ‘hard’ sciences find it useful to risk a glance into the future from within the imaginary world of prime-time television. To give just one example: in The History of Poisoning in the Future. Lessons from “Star Trek”, Peter Chyka and William Banner analyze the logs of the starship Enterprise (TOS) with respect to toxin-related incidents and come to the conclusion that “[m]any of the circumstances encountered in poisonings of the future will likely be similar to contemporary reasons, but the nature of the toxins will differ. Clinical toxicologists should prepare for the future by increasing their study of molecular biology, comparative medicine, physics, and history” (793). My own approach in this essay is to examine the interface between gender issues and humour in VGR and ENT with the aid of traditional philological tools of close reading which, while not always as exciting as postmodern discourse, may still produce some valuable insights. “Scorpion, Part II”, the opening episode of VGR’s fourth season,4 introduces to the starship of the same name a new crew member, who subsequently turns out to be one of the most intriguing characters of the series. Seven, as she is called by her fellow crew members, was originally human but was assimilated by the Borg when she was a little girl. Her official Borg designation “Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One” already hints at the main characteristic of Borg society: it is organized in analogy to a hive complete with drones and a Queen. It is a collective of assimilated humanoid species whose members have been reconstructed as partly organic, partly artificial beings. Each member is linked to the collective Borg consciousness via an implanted bio-chip. There are no individuals in Borg society, only a chorus consisting of thousands of voices combined in the collective consciousness.5 Since Borg are not aware of themselves as individuals but only as part of the collective, they don’t use singular pronouns. Everything except acquisition and consumption of 4

For complete details of all VGR episodes cf. Paul Ruditis: Star Trek Voyager. Companion; comprehensive episode summaries for all Star Trek series can be found at ⬍www.startrek.com⬎. “Scorpion, Part II” first aired on 3 September 1997. 5 Despite the depiction of the Borg as relentlessly aggressive and deadly consumers of technology, they have many fans among Star Trek followers. The British artist Damien Hirst, for example, identifies them as his favourite aliens: “They have a fantastic ship . . . a massive cube . . . like fascist architecture . . . I can imagine the Borg playing Wagner as they loom up over the side of a planet. [. . .] They’re like the Nouveau-Nazis of the Universe. You’ve got to admire the Borg” (Hirst).

106 technology, achieved through aggressive assimilation of other species, is irrelevant to the Borg, including emotion, sex, and gender. The one exception is the Borg Queen who combines individualism and the multitude of voices, thereby bringing order to chaos: she is “the one who is many”.6 The motion picture Star Trek: First Contact brings her to the screen as an assembly of organic and inorganic material – head and shoulders are flesh and bone while the rest of her body consists of artificial, machine-like parts. This visualization of the Borg Queen associates her with long and well-established creative depictions and scholarly treatments exploring such dichotomies as mind/body, man/machine and natural/artificial. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Borg Queen and Seven – the latter never completely succeeds in shedding her artificial implants despite valiant efforts to become fully human – have also received their fair share of attention from cultural studies scholars and feminist critics who, for example, connected theses hybrid characters to the cyborg discussion of the 1980s and 1990s. To situate Borg ‘women’ properly in the complex discourse of cyborg gender transgression initiated by the work of Donna Haraway would require a separate study.7 As mentioned above, rather than trying to develop an appropriate theoretical framework for the discussion of gender issues in Star Trek, I focus on the micro-reading of individual narrative segments of VGR and ENT that view gender relations and gender crossing within a humorous context. Since the Queen is collective consciousness within a mechanical body, both her sex and gender are fluid to the point of being undefinable. Neither drones nor the Queen procreate via sexual relations, and the growth of Borg society is, as mentioned above, accomplished through assimilation of other species. There is, however, a paradox. While the Queen as collective consciousness is supposed to be non-gendered and asexual, she is nevertheless quite an erotic creature in First Contact where she appears as a seductive female trying to lure Captain Picard and the android Data into joining the Borg collective. For the Queen, whose purpose is to lead the Borg species to technological and collective perfection where all are one, Picard represents the fierce and powerful individualist whom she must win for the collective on the basis of his own free will, whereas Data embodies the individualized version of efficiency and precision associated with immaculate artificial intelligence. Using her erotic appeal – even her mechanical body is unquestionably feminine – the Queen clearly employs seductive, sexual manœuvres in her efforts to subjugate both 6

The Borg Queen appears in several episodes of VGR as well as the motion picture Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Although she is killed twice, the fictional logic of the Star Trek universe dictates that she will always survive as the unifying consciousness of Borg society. For brief descriptions of the Borg and as a general introduction and reference work about Star Trek, see The Star Trek Encyclopedia. 7 For Haraway’s cyborg concept cf. A Manifesto for Cyborgs and Modest Witness; for a critical survey of the cyborg discussion cf. McLemee.

107 the ‘organic’ and the artificial male by offering to them what, from her perspective, they desire most: unlimited power for Picard, emotion and sensual experience for Data. Alice Krige, the actor who portrayed the Queen in First Contact, made the following comment about her character’s eroticism: “It just emerged from me, I suppose, out of the costume. The physicality of her. I was obviously fully dressed, but I felt sort of naked. I felt as if I had no clothes on. The physicality of her just emerged as sexual. No-one had asked me to do it. But it was who she was” (Krige). Thus, sex and gender become inextricably linked to politics and philosophical questions regarding the wholeness of experience. The core values in all Star Trek series and motion pictures are individuality and free will that need to be reconfirmed and defended at all cost. More specifically, it is the right of the individual to self-determination which is so deeply entrenched in American liberal politics and culture that is constantly under siege yet time and again proves to be superior to all other value systems encountered in alien societies. In her capacity as voice and leader of a perfectly organized and technologically sophisticated collective, the Borg Queen represents the most dangerous threat to the principle of individual freedom and self-reliance. Thus, in the TNG and VGR series the Borg species is the most formidable foe of Starfleet, the military protector of “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, or, as Barrett and Barrett observe: “Of all Starfleet’s enemies, they [the Borg] are the most deadly, because they reject human individuality: they stand opposed to everything that Starfleet values, and they are relentless in their drive to ‘assimilate’ (and hence destroy) humanity” (111). This conflation of American core values with those of humanity is not surprising given the fact that Star Trek caters primarily to North American viewers while successfully reaching a global audience. More interesting for our purposes is the gender distribution among the protagonists in First Contact: the Borg Queen as seemingly invincible female threatens male power and control, and she does so not only through sheer strength but also by resorting to sexual appeal and erotic seduction. This places the Queen firmly within the age-old literary tradition of women corrupting men via sexual temptation and conquest. Nevertheless, the paradoxical gender assignment, i.e., creating a female leader for a society where even gender transgression is futile because of the non-gendered, asexual status of its members, makes sense if one connects it to the political and philosophical discourse inherent in the power struggle between the Queen and Picard/Data. The principles of individualism and self-determination must be victorious in order to sustain the superiority of human/American values in space, and Starfleet’s masculine military might has to prevail over technologically far advanced societies. In the Star Trek universe, collectivism is the greatest danger to political and philosophical notions of individualism; similarly, gender irrelevance embodied in an all-powerful female presents the ultimate threat to male self-realization, even to

108 the point of extinction. It is only logical that the Borg Queen must be defeated at all cost, and Picard/Data manage just that in First Contact, and in TNG Picard survives even his assimilation into the collective. However, if one takes a closer look at the later series VGR and ENT, it is quite apparent that Star Trek’s gender universe changes throughout the 1990s and continues to be in flux until ENT is cancelled at the end of its fourth season. This brings us back to Seven, the Borg drone who is forced to leave the collective and to live on the starship Voyager under the command of Kathryn Janeway. Seven is not the first female protagonist in Star Trek pushing the gender boundaries. According to Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen, there is a noticable “departure from the gender assumptions of the first series [TOS],” and one would be hardpressed “to find people anywhere in the galaxy who have not discovered the virtues of gender equality” (90). Indeed, TOS, TNG, and DS9 are increasingly less male-dominated, and especially the latter includes several characters exhibiting challenging gender ambiguities; the most notable is Dax, a symbiont consisting of a slug-like being that is implanted in the bodies of humanoid hosts and retains the memories of the males and females it inhabits. Born as the child of space explorers and scientists, Seven changes from female to non-gendered being when the Borg assimilate her as a little girl. Once on Voyager, she is stripped of most of her Borg mechanical implants and becomes Janeway’s ‘humanization’ project, i.e., she is led on a path to rediscovering her original destination of being female. However, throughout most of her journey to becoming a woman, Seven – as Edrie Sobstyl rightly observes – “prefers Borg efficiency, lack of volition and emotion, and blind obedience to the tyranny over the individualistic liberal will” (123). Wagner and Lundeen maintain that the role of Seven crosses gender boundaries by defining her as a female endowed with male characteristics: “While the audience may read the character in a particular way because of her being female, the character is written and played in a manner that would make equally good sense had she been cast as a male; she does not show any of the wiles, paranoia, indirection, or pushiness that were employed in the earlier Star Trek to show that power and ambition were ‘unnatural’ for women” (94f.). The tension between Seven’s existence as a Borg drone and the demands of acting as an autonomous being are apparent in her initial resistence to undergo reverse assimilation. As can be seen in the VGR episode “The Gift”, her transition from non-gendered Borg to gendered human, from being part of a collective consciousness to being an individual, is a painful one. After an unsuccessful attempt to reconnect to the Borg collective, Seven is confined to the ship’s brig where the following exchange between her and Captain Janeway takes place: Seven of Nine: So this is human freedom. Janeway: I’ve decided to keep you in the brig until I’m certain you won’t try to harm us again. If necessary the Doctor can treat you here. I honestly believed you were going to help us.

109 Seven of Nine: You were not deceived, Captain Janeway. It was my intention to help you Janeway: What happened? Seven of Nine: There was a chance to contact the Collective. I took advantage of it. Your attempts to assimilate this drone will fail. You can alter our physiology but you cannot change our nature. We will betray you. We are Borg. Janeway: I’ve met Borg who were freed from the Collective. It wasn’t easy for them to accept their individuality, but in time they did. You’re no different, granted you were assimilated at a very young age, and your transition may be more difficult, it will happen. Seven of Nine: If it does happen, we will become fully human? Janeway: Yes, I hope so. Seven of Nine: We will be autonomous, independent? Janeway: That’s what individuality is all about. Seven of Nine: If at that time we choose to return to the Collective, will you permit it? Janeway: I don’t think you’ll want to do that. Seven of Nine: You would deny us the choice, as you deny us now. You have imprisoned us in the name of humanity, yet you will not grant us your most cherished human right – to choose our own fate. You are hypocritical, manipulative. We do not want to be what you are. Return us to the Collective! Janeway: You lost the capacity to make a rational choice the moment you were assimilated. They took that from you. And until I’m convinced you’ve gotten it back, I’m making the choice for you. You’re staying here. Seven of Nine: Then you are no different than the Borg.8

In the confrontation between Janeway and Seven, the classic Star Trek apotheosis of individualism is played out yet again. What makes this scene different is that the proponents of both liberalism and anti-liberalism are female. Furthermore, Captain Janeway’s rather dictatorial dismissal of Seven’s wish to return to the Collective makes it abundantly clear that Starfleet’s military hierarchy and masculine/macho culture is easily absorbed by women. In fact, it makes no difference whether the captain is male or female, the defence of liberal values always relies on discipline, authority, and obedience, all qualities that do not easily align themselves with the ideal of self-determination. This point is not lost on Seven. Edrie Sobstyl’s reading of this scene is a rather negative one: “As Borg, Seven is part of the powerful but evil scourge of the galaxy. As an outsider in two camps, she possesses some power to destabilize existing structures but is always subject to pressure to conform, to sacrifice her subversive status. As a woman, her power will always be traded off against the empty promise of freedom” (125). Yet not everything in the Star Trek gender universe is gloom and doom. By turning to the employment of humour in the depiction of Seven’s gradual integration into the human micro-society aboard ship, I will attempt to show that her subversive power is not at all diminished when it comes to gender relations. 8

All transcriptions of scenes from VGR and ENT are my own.

110 Seven’s physical transformation from Borg drone to buxom beauty equipped with an hourglass figure may serve as a starting point. According to Brannon Braga, one of the executive producers of VGR, the decision to infuse the show, which up to the end of season three was a rather sterile affair, with a good dose of sexuality led to the idea of combining fan admiration for the Borg with an overtly sexual female character, no doubt a play to keep male viewers tuned into the series: “I had a midnight idea that we should put a Borg on the show as a character. And Rick Berman said, ‘Make it a babe.’ What if it was a striking, amazing looking Borg woman. And thinking back to the popularity of the Borg Queen, we thought, this could be a really cool character” (Braga). Within the show, the reshaping of Seven’s body is engineered by the ship’s Doctor who himself is an Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH), a computer-generated being, and therefore essentially non-gendered. This is a brilliant narrative move since it suggests that Seven’s body, which looks like it could have stepped right out of the pages of a fashion magazine, in essence represents a media-generated vision of beauty. Indeed, one can speculate that the Doctor searched his electronic data base, probably programmed by male engineers, for the physical shape of the “ideal” woman. In any case, the result of the Doctor’s handiwork would be worthy of a spread in Playboy: “Under his ministrations her hair is regrown, blond, and at this stage up in a neat french pleat. Her complexion is peaches and cream, her eyes (one prosthetic) matching blue; the remaining sections of Borg implant are refashioned as ornamental jewellery. Her figure (she wears skintight clothes) heavily accentuates the hourglass” (Barrett and Barrett 113f.). No doubt, ‘sex sells’, and Jeri Ryan, the actor portraying Seven, is quite aware of her character’s iconography, which in the early stages of her inclusion in the show created quite a bit of controversy. Although it took twenty minutes every time she had to put on her skin-hugging costume, and despite the overtly sexual appearance of her character, Ryan felt quite comfortable with the role: The overt sexiness of the costume, I had no problem with. I have no problem with it, because of the way the character was written. If she was written the way everybody thought she was going to be, when they saw pictures of her initially, then, yeah, I would have had a big problem playing that character. That was not something I had any interest in doing. But she was brilliant. She’s a brilliant character, she was strong, she was a wonderful role model for young women, and I have no problem with it. We have intelligent women in every physical form, in real life, so why shouldn’t we see that depicted on television (Ryan).

In essence, Seven remains a gender-crossing character even after her physical transformation into a stereotypical, model-like beauty because she retains her detached, analytical, and cynical Borg self. Throughout her gradual discovery of her human heritage she continues to be somewhat of an outsider, settling into an ironic posture that allows her to take a coldly reflective, unemotional look at gender relations and human behaviour in general. The result is that

111 many of her interpersonal exchanges with fellow crew members turn into humourous commentaries on gender and social norms and provide comic relief in Voyager’s epic struggle to return home. Seven’s dry humour in the form of sarcasm and irony is, I argue, subversive as it exposes the foibles of socially constructed gender and behavioural norms. Although many examples could illustrate this point, I will focus here on the issue of how socially conditioned female/male interaction with respect to initiating sexual relations is underminded by the way Seven communicates with her fellow male crew members, in particular with Harry Kim, a young Ensign struggling to come to terms with the fact that he is physically attracted to her.9 In the B plot of the VGR episode “Revulsion”, Harry’s infatuation with Seven becomes apparent during their work in the Astrometrics lab. Having been ordered by Commander Chakotay to make Seven feel that she is part of the Voyager team, he meets her in the Borg regeneration area in the cargo bay where the following dialogue takes place: Kim: Seven! Seven: I am here. Am I to work with you? Kim: Oh, hi . . . yes, uh . . . I thought we’d start in Jefferies tube 32B, enhance the astrometric sensors if that’s ok with you . . . unless this is a bad time, maybe I can come back later. Seven: Ensign Kim, you seem apprehensive. Kim: No, not at all. Seven: The last time we worked together I struck you at the base of your skull and attempted to contact the Collective. Kim: These things happen, hmm. Seven: I assure you it will not happen again. Kim: That’s good to know. Seven: I’ve designed new navigational sensors. Some of the alphanumerics are Borg. Kim: Uh, no problem . . . I . . . I always wanted to learn Borg. Seven: That is difficult to believe. Kim: I was kidding. It was a joke . . . you know, humour. Seven: I understand the concept of humour. It may not be apparent, but I am often amused by human behaviour.

Throughout this exchange Ensign Kim’s insecurity and uneasiness is visible in his facial expressions and noticeable in his voice and hesitant speech patterns. By contrast, Seven’s demeanor is calm, self-assured, and disciplined. She occasionally signals her ironic posture through raising of the eyebrows and sarcastic comments. This scene already makes clear who is in control, and it is certainly not Kim. His inability to relate to a woman “with a distinctively ‘postfeminist’ edge” whose “patience with the etiquette of heterosexual femininity 9 For other examples of Seven’s observations regarding human behaviour cf. Ruditis 194.

112 is very limited” (Barrett and Barrett 190) becomes abundantly clear in the third part of the B plot, our next example, when Kim asks Seven to join him for a late-night work session in the mess hall. Seven: You wish to see me, Ensign. Kim: I had this midnight inspiration about reconfiguring astrometric projectors. I hope you weren’t . . . regenerating. Seven: I was not. Kim: Uh, this is tricky stuff. It could use your touch . . . your way of looking at things, a fresh perspective. Seven: New data. Kim: Why don’t you sit down? Seven: I prefer to stand. Kim: This could take a while. You’d be more comfortable. Seven: Comfort is irrelevant. We’re here to work. Kim: OK. Seven: This light is insufficient. Kim: But it’s relaxing, don’t you think? After hours, quiet. Voyager isn’t all Jefferies tubes and cargo bays, you know. Tell you what, when we’re done here I’ll take you to the holodeck. We’ll run the Ktarean moonrise simulation, it’s beautiful. Seven: Beauty is irrelevant. Unless you wish to change the nature of our affiliation. Kim: What do you mean? Seven: I may be new to individuality but I am not ignorant of human behaviour. I’ve noticed your attempts to engage me in idle conversation, and I see the way your pupils dilate when you look at my body. Kim: Huh, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Seven: Obviously you’ve suggested a visit to the holodeck in the hopes of creating a romantic mood. Are you in love with me, Ensign? Kim: Well . . . no. Seven: Then you wish to copulate? Kim: No! I mean, I . . . I don’t know what I mean. Seven: All these elaborate rituals of deception. I didn’t realise becoming human again would be such a challenge. Sexuality is particularly complex. As Borg we had no need for seduction, no time for single cell fertilisation. We saw a species we wanted and we assimilated it. Nevertheless, I’m willing to explore my humanity. Take off your clothes. Kim: . . . Seven . . . Seven: Don’t be alarmed. I won’t hurt you. Kim: Look. . .this is a little sudden. I was just . . . trying to . . . part of the team . . . you know . . . maybe we should just quit for now . . . Seven: Alright. Let me know when you wish to resume our work.

Kim fails miserably in this attempt to seduce Seven by framing their midnight encounter as more of a romantic rather than work-related event. With each of Seven’s utterances that demonstrate her efficiency-oriented, non-emotional thinking when it comes to completing a task, be it of a work-related or interpersonal nature, Kim’s insecurity and embarrassment escalate. Seven’s no-nonsense attitude towards sexual intercourse completely rattles him, and he is clearly

113 unable to cope with her directness. The whole scene is a gradual power reversal from Kim being in charge initially to Seven completely dominating the exchange. At the outset, the blocking of the scene – Kim remains seated like a business manager behind his desk while Seven is standing – implies that he will call the shots. However, her standing position becomes increasingly a position of strength which is supported by the camera angles: Seven is shot from slightly below suggesting her superiority; Kim is filmed with a slightly elevated camera which places him in an inferior position. In gender terms, it reverses traditional, socially-constructed female and male roles in pre-intercourse strategic games. Being not only physically attractive but also intelligent and goal-oriented, Seven takes control away from Kim. Since he thinks in static terms of males being pursuers and conquerors of female sexuality, his irritation is considerable and his defeat inevitable. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that he is incapable of accepting Seven’s offer “to copulate” and that he is horrified by her suggestion to take off his clothes. Even several centuries into the future, it seems, males confronted with an empowered female like Seven will not be up to her sexual challenge. As for the present, this scene reflects the changing gender relations of the 1990s and espouses a view of biological sex and gender that ascribes erotic power and stability to the former while interpreting the latter as being complex and fluid. Seven certainly fits the bill on both counts as she continues her journey towards reclaiming suppressed emotions and defining her femininity. It should have become evident by now that I do not share Sobstyl’s rather gloomy view that “Seven’s subversive potential wanes of the course of the series’ run” (130) and that “[n]ot even her cyborg status can protect Seven from being trampled by the weight of her sex” (132). It seems to me that there is great potential in using humour as a subversive strategy in science fiction. The use of humour in popular television series like Star Trek can, I would like to argue, effectively dismantle stereotypical notions of sex and gender, and it is certainly not a disadvantage that laughter can be solicited from a mass audience. The character of the Vulcan Science Officer T’Pol in the series ENT can be seen as an echo of Seven both in physical appearance and behaviour. Her presence on-board allowed the writers of the show to continually weave sexuality and gender issues into the narrative. This final Star Trek series follows the adventures of the starship Enterprise, the initial human mission to explore space. T’Pol is the first Vulcan member of a Starfleet vessel and as such a predecessor to Spock, the famous Vulcan side-kick of Captain Kirk in TOS. Aside from their physical appearance, the similarities between Seven and T’Pol are obvious. Having suffered through many wars during the time when Vulcan society was ruled by passion and violence, Vulcans decided to cleanse themselves of all emotions and to embrace logic. Hence T’Pol is driven by rational thinking and believes in efficiency and logical problem-solving. Because her emotions are suppressed, her behaviour, most noticable in her deadpan facial expression, is quite similar to

114 Seven’s. While Seven is forced to explore her humanity/emotions as a result of having been severed from the Borg Collective, T’Pol does so by choice with the help of a drug that can enhance her sub-conscious passions. The B plot of the episode “Harbinger” echoes the Seven/Kim scenario to a certain degree, but moves the relationship between T’Pol and Commander Tucker further into a sexual one; the first time this happens in the Star Trek universe in such an explicit manner. Sexuality, as Wagner and Lundeen point out, threatens the stability of the life on board: “Eros, in a muted and communal form, does play a role in the human quest for adventure, challenge and growth. But strongly intoxicating and personalized Eros is portrayed in the Trek mythos as an intruder, a temporary state of bewitchment that threatens the integrity of the Trek crew both as individuals and as a collectivity” (110). In the case of T’Pol and Tucker it is interesting to note that similar to the Seven/Kim scenario, sexual contact is again suggested by the female, and that the contrast between her decisiveness and the hesitant stance of the male creates a humorous effect. Humour, of course, also helps to make the whole affair more palatable to the consumers of North American primetime television while retaining its subversive potential. In the following two scenes, we see T’Pol and Tucker immediately before and on the morning after their sexual encounter. As her emotions emerge under the influence of the drug she secretely takes, T’Pol experiences feelings of jealousy caused by Tucker’s interest in another female crew member to whom he has been administering Vulcan neuropressure, a form of massage T’Pol has taught him. During a neuropressure application in T’Pol’s quarters, the following pre-intercourse strategic positioning with a humorous twist ensues: Tucker: Between all this training and the extra shifts in engineering I’ve been looking forward to this all day. T’pol: Sit up. Tucker: You aren’t saying much tonight. Don’t tell me you’re still upset about me and Amanda. T’pol: No, I’m not upset. Tucker: Sure sounds like it. T’pol: You’re mistaken. Tucker: Why would a few neuropressure sessions between me and a MACO be such a big deal . . . unless . . . T’pol: Unless what? Tucker: Unless you’re a little jealous. T’pol: I don’t experience jealousy. Tucker: You’re doing a pretty fair imitation of it. T’pol: I am not in any way jealous of you and Corporal Cole. Tucker: You know, your voice is tensing up . . . it’s a dead giveaway. T’pol: I didn’t know you were an expert in vocal inflections. Tucker: I don’t need to be an expert to read you. Come on, admit it, you’re a little jealous. T’pol: You’re implying that I’m attracted to you? Tucker: That kinda goes along with the assumption, doesn’t it?

115 T’pol: I think you’re mistaken about who’s attracted to whom. Tucker: Are you saying that I’m attracted to you? T’pol: I don’t need to say it, you already have. Tucker: I don’t remember that conversation. T’pol: It wasn’t you, it was your clone. Sim told me.10 Tucker: Sim? T’pol: He said he had feelings for me. Tucker: He told you that? T’pol: Standing right there. Tucker: What the hell was he doing in your room? T’pol: Your voice is tensing up. Tucker: Now you’re the vocal expert. T’pol: I don’t need to be an expert to read you. Tucker: I can’t believe this. I’m . . . I’m jealous of . . . of myself? T’pol: You’re jealous? Tucker: No, absolutely not . . . OK, maybe . . . maybe I am . . . a little. T’pol: Which would mean that you’re attracted to me. It goes with the assumption. Tucker: What just happened here? Did we . . . are we . . . T’pol: [kisses him and takes her robe off] (Star Trek: Enterprise, Harbinger)

In addition to being a take-off on the Seven/Kim scenario, this scene illustrates the fact that Star Trek, with respect to interpersonal communication, is less about imagining future relationships between the sexes and more about mirroring changes in contemporary gender politics. As she experiments with emotions and sexuality, T’Pol is arguably a representative of 21st-century female assertiveness. She controls the level of intimacy by subverting the traditional male role of sexual aggressor. Her emotional restraint and understated, subtle facial expressiveness, reminiscent of Seven’s behaviour, also create the humorous effect in this scene. From the male perspective, the main difference to the Seven/Kim scenario is Tucker’s ability to accept and respond to T’Pol’s assertiveness which is, I would argue, another indication of how Star Trek reflects contemporary gender relations. It may very well be that strong women are no longer alien threats to male self-confidence. The ‘morning after’ scene in the mess hall further emphasizes how much T’Pol is in control: Tucker: Good morning. T’pol: Commander. Tucker: [Facing the coffee maker]. Coffee, strong. [Facing T’POL]. Some night. T’pol: Eventful. Tucker: I don’t know who did more damage to the engine, the alien or Malcolm.11 T’pol: How long before we can get underway? Tucker: Another day, at least. I . . . I guess we should talk about what happened last night. 10

This is a reference to the episode “Similitude” in which Tucker is rescued from a life-threatening injury by a “mimetic simbiot” who is his clone. 11 This is a reference to the A plot of the “Harbinger” episode in which an alien creature attempts to damage the ship’s engine.

116 T’pol: I’ve been briefed on the situation. Tucker: Well, I was referring to . . . what . . . happened between us . . . in your quarters. [Long pause]. I guess, I’ll go first. I . . . actually, why don’t you go first? T’pol: I suppose I should thank you . . . Tucker: No need to thank me. T’pol: . . . for facilitating my exploration of human sexuality. Tucker: I’m not sure I follow. T’pol: It’s one of the many aspects of your species which I’ve been meaning to explore since I left the High Command. Tucker: Uh, sounds like your saying last night was some kind of . . . experiment. T’pol: I wouldn’t use that term. Tucker: But that’s the general idea. T’pol: Are you getting emotional? Tucker: No, I’m not getting emotional, I just don’t like being compared to a lab rat. T’pol: I’m sorry if I offended you. Tucker: Forget it. I’d . . . ah . . . appreciate it if we could keep this between us . . . in fact, we should just forget it ever happened. T’pol: Agreed. Tucker: Doesn’t mean we can’t keep doing the neuropressure, though. T’pol: [Glances at him over the rim of her coffee cup] (Star Trek: Enterprise, Harbinger).

It is quite obvious that the humorous role reversal in this scene undermines old stereotypes with a vengeance. Reverting back to her logical Vulcan self, T’Pol adopts the traditional male position of making no further commitment in the wake of sexual intercourse. Tucker, on the other hand, tries to come to terms with the previous night’s events in a manner often attributed to women. He even has to fend off T’Pol’s rhetorical question whether he is “getting emotional”. T’Pol deliberately misinterprets some of Tucker’s statements and never relinquishes control of the situation. Only through her final glance over the rim of her coffee cup does she acknowledge indirectly that their sexual encounter was pleasurable and that she might consider further “experiments” under the guise of neuropressure sessions. As we have seen, the characters of Seven and T’Pol transcend gender definitions and inject a good dose of humour into the Star Trek universe through their ironic posture combining sarcasm and wit. Gender crossing, albeit in a subtle way, is apparent in both characters when one considers their suppressed and, when they surface, controlled emotions. Current psychological research still points to gender differences with respect to emotions. In their research overview on “Gender, Emotion, and Expression”, Brody and Hall indicate that “especially in American and other individualistic cultures, females are both stereotyped to be and in fact are more intensely expressive of most positive and many negative emotions [. . .] than are men” (344). According to Brody and Hall, evidence also “suggests that women tend to generalize their emotional expressiveness across physiological, facial, and verbal modalities, while men tend to internalize their feelings – that is, to manifest heightened physiological arousal along with no

117 overt facial or verbal emotional expressions” (344). If one accepts these observations, the fictional characters of Seven and T’Pol indeed can be seen as crossing gender boundaries. What is more important, though, is the comical treatment of the Seven/Kim and T’Pol/Tucker scenarios in an otherwise predominantly serious and dramatic vision of the future – humour is, in this context, especially effective in highlighting and subverting gender stereotypes. While it is no longer uncommon to see gay and lesbian characters on North American television, which has become much more inclusive in recent years as far as race, ethnicity and gender are concerned, an immensely popular television series like Star Trek can still push gender boundaries further. For example, where else but in science fiction can one imagine a true genderless society? By that I mean a society as outlined in Ellen Peel’s recent book on feminist utopian fiction: In a genderless society, the number of possible ways a person could combine traits would be huge, while the number of genders would be zero – the term would be drained of meaning. Genderlessness could also alter thought more generally: such a society, though still composed of inhabitants basically belonging to two sexes, could, in comparison to our society, be freed to think more in terms of multiplicity and less in terms of duality (77).

Science fiction and humour, I submit, can assist us in envisioning such a world.

Works Consulted Barrett, Michéle, and Duncan Barrett: Star Trek. The Human Frontier. Cambridge: Polity Press 2001. Bernardi, Daniel Leonard: Star Trek and History. Race-ing Toward a White Future. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1998. Braga, Brannon. [Interview]. BBC Cult. 1 September 2007 ⬍http://www.bbc.co. uk/cult⬎. Brody, Leslie R., and Judith A. Hall: Gender, Emotion, and Expression. In: Handbook of Emotions. Ed by. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford 2004. Pp. 338–349. Chyka, Peter A., and William Banner: The History of Poisoning in the Future. Lessons from “Star Trek”. In: Clinical Toxicology 37 (1999). Pp. 793–799. Earthlings – Ugly Bags of Mostly Water. An Alexandre O. Philippe Picture Show. 2004. SONEW Productions. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.earthlings-movie.com⬎. Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. 1998. Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Foundation. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.spectrumawards.org⬎. Haraway, Donna J.: A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. In: Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. by L. J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge 1990. Pp. 190–233. —. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge 1996.

118 Hirst, Damien: [Comments on the Borg]. In: BBC Cult. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www. bbc.co.uk/cult⬎. Krige, Alice: Alice Krige – First Contact’s Borg Queen. Interview. In: BBC Cult. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult⬎. McLemee, Scott: The Soul of a New Machine. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education. 31 January 2003. P. A14. Monaco, James: How to Read a Film. The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media. New York: Oxford University Press 1977. Okuda, Denise, and Michael: The Star Trek Encyclopedia. A Reference Guide to the Future. Updated and expanded ed. New York: Pocket Books 1999. Peel, Ellen: Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism. A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2002. Ruditis, Paul: Star Trek Voyager Companion. New York: Pocket Books 2003. Ryan, Jeri: [Jeri Ryan – Voyager’s Stunning Ex-Borg Drone. Interview]. In: BBC Cult. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult⬎. Sinclair, David: Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Characters on Star Trek. A 12-year Saga of Deceit, Lies, Excuses and Broken Promises. 9 September 1996. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.webpan.com⬎. Sobstyl, Edrie: We are Borg, Are We Borg? In: Athena’s Daughters. Television’s New Women Warriors. Ed. by Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press 2003. Pp. 119–123. Startrek.com. 2007. Paramount Pictures. 1 September 2007. ⬍http://www.startrek.com⬎. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Executive Producers Ira Steven Behr, Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. Paramount Pictures. 3 January 1993 – 2 June 1999. Star Trek: Enterprise. Executive Producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. Paramount Pictures. 26 September 2001 – 13 May 2005. —. Similitude. Production No. 062. 19 November 2003. —. Harbinger. Production No. 067. 11 February 2004. —. Damage. Production No. 071. 21 April 2004. Star Trek: First Contact. Dir. Jonathan Frakes. Executive Producer Rick Berman. Paramount Pictures 1996. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Executive Producers Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman. Paramount Pictures. 28 September 1987 – 23 May 1994. Star Trek: The Original Series. Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry. Paramount Pictures. 8 September 1966 – 3 June 1969. Star Trek: Voyager. Executive Producers Rick Berman, Kenneth Biller, Brannon Braga, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. Paramount Pictures. 16 January 1995 – 23 May 2001. —. Scorpion, Part II. Production No. 169. 3 September 1997. —. The Gift. Production No. 170. 10 September 1997. —. Revulsion. Production No. 173. 1 October 1997. Wagner, Jon, and Jan Lundeen: Deep Space and Sacred Time. ‘Star Trek’ in the American Mythos. Westport (CT): Praeger 1998.

Markus Hallensleben

“To be educated is to become a Harlequin”: Cross-Skinning as Carnivalesque Hybridity in Michel Serres, Hannah Höch’s Dada, and Orlan’s Body Art By cross-mapping Orlan’s photomontage series Refiguration Self-Hybridizations with Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum theories of hybridity (Bakhtin, Bhabha, Serres) and a post-human body (Haraway, Hayles) are applied to show how cultural images of the body can be questioned and de-territorialized in a very concrete sense. Orlan’s concept of cross-skinning (in variation of the phenomenon of cross-dressing) plays with the norms of race, hybridity, and transculturality. Seen in this context, the figure of Serres’s harlequin, with its embodied analogy inbetween ethnicity and identity, body and costume, tissue and text no longer represents just a carnivalesque tradition, but literally stands for a post-human condition in which flesh has become removable and alterable. Finally, the humorous side of Orlan’s recent performances does not just lie in transgressing the norms of Western beauty; it is an attempt at embodying hybridity as a new form of cross-skinning.

How can words be turned into flesh without performing a religious ritual? How can metaphors be embodied other than representationally? When Paul Ricœur defined the “métaphore vive” as a keystone of semantic imagination, he also laid the foundation for cognitive sciences, which define our cognitive mind maps by conceptual metaphors that are grounded in bodily experience and orientation in space. Since Austin, we not only know ‘how to do things with words’, but also, since Butler, that gender is a performative category. In medical terms, the alterability of the human body has never been easier to achieve than today, and we have long given up on the religious taboo of altering the body. Thus we are going to lose the anthropological and anthropocentric signifier that the body used to be, and Baudrillard, among others, has seen the human body ‘disappear’. Performance artists such as the Australian body artist Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), who extends his body into a cyborg-like media tool, even declared the body ‘obsolete’. So if we do not own our body, if it is constantly in flux, what allows us to still “keep face” and helps us define our cultural identities, as humans, as ethnic groups, as gendered beings? Is the phrase “losing face” still a transcultural strategy of embodiment,1 and if so, can it be 1

“Losing face” is a figure of speech common to most cultures, and it normally translates as being ashamed. Sociolinguists define its occurrence when someone “is embarrassed or humiliated in public”. “Keeping face” therefore helps to “maintain and demonstrate membership in a social group”, as well as stay “individual and independent” (Trask 242).

120 taken literally and become alive in a very material sense? What if one decides to alter one’s face in such a radical way that the colour of one’s skin would not indicate origin and race, but an alterable, posthuman, and hybrid identity? These questions are raised by performances of the French body artist Orlan who, inspired by avant-garde and conceptual art, understands her body as a metamorphic platform and uses reconstructive surgery to defigure and refigure it. While she criticizes the ideal of Western beauty by questioning the cultural ritual of aesthetic surgery in her performances, she now ultimately wants to use skin tissue of different pigmentation to create a multi-ethnic harlequin coat. The first stages of Orlan’s recent project, developed at SymbioticA (University of Western Australia), were shown in Perth, Australia, in September 2007,2 and then presented at the exhibition sk-interfaces in Liverpool 2008 (Orlan, Harlequin 83–89). It is an ongoing experiment: “At each step [of the planned subsequent multimedia installations], newly grown cells of mine will be co-cultured together with cells of other origins” (87). However, since Orlan also cultivated her own cells with “cells from a black woman’s foetus sold on the Internet”, the project is not without controversy, despite Orlan’s intent to thus problematize the history of slavery in France. It is, nevertheless, a logical development of her performance art in so far as it continues the central idea of her work, which is based on an analogy between skin and costume. This analogy, again, is based on the etymological analogy between tissue and text (Lat. texere).3 Here I will draw on another parallel: the tradition of the harlequin figure as a hybrid character, utilized by Michel Serres in his study Le Tiers-Instruit, and adapted as reading and as performative act in Orlan’s surgery performances. Thus the final question must be: is such an act of cross-skinning (in variation to the phenomenon of cross-dressing) something to laugh at, or laugh with, or rather something that even transgresses the norms of (Western) laughter?4 For Serres, the harlequin’s multicoloured robe becomes a fleshy metaphor for multiculturalism and hybridity. Seen in this context, the figure of the harlequin no longer represents just a carnivalesque tradition (of the commedia dell’arte; Orlan, Harlequin 89), but literally stands for a posthuman condition, in 2

As part of the exhibition “Still, Living” curated by Jens Hauser at Bakery Artrage during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP). Cf. figures in Orlan (Harlequin, 85, 86, 88). 3 In a paper given in Vancouver on 28 April 2006, I stressed this particular characteristic of Orlan’s work: “(Dis)Figuring the Body between Tissue and Text: Orlan’s SelfHybridizations”. Bodywork and Health Practices: Historical, Cultural, and Literary Perspectives. Interdisciplinary Workshop, organized by Gertje Boshma and Patricia Vertinski. University of British Columbia Vancouver, Liu Centre, 27–28 April 2006. 4 By introducing the phenomenon of cross-skinning I respond to questions and commentaries on aspects of laughter in Orlan’s performances by Andreas Böhn and other members of the final conference Gender – Laughter – Media.

121 which flesh has become removable and alterable; it represents biological as well as social categories, and it is used as a metaphor to blend both. Again it is important to note that this metaphor is not just a rhetorical figure; it is a figure of thought that will be embodied by the cross-skinner Orlan in her tissue-art performances. Since a figure of speech can be transformed from its narrative use to a performative act, it not only needs to be analysed as a speech act but also as an aesthetic figuration, that is, it needs to be explored not only as metaphor, but also as a cultural image, which can travel through time and space. Neither is Serres’s tale of the harlequin as model of a well-educated global citizen self-invented, nor does Orlan, who uses the concept in her body performances, act outside a Western cultural context. It is in particular the discourses of hybridity and beauty that are merged here, and which have been central to Western arts and philosophy. Both were and are centred on the question of body images and bodily imagination. Hence, the defamilarization of such norms, as we know it from comical and humorous scenes in media, drama, and literature, as well as from the carnivalesque tradition of the grotesque body, here becomes visible in an extreme form. Although I am not going to cover the whole complexity of the question whether cross-skinning can be a form of cross-dressing,5 I will investigate the aesthetic traditions which lie behind this particular aspect of Orlan’s artwork. Furthermore, by cross-mapping6 Orlan’s Refiguration Self-Hybridizations with the photomontage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum 1929/1930) by Hannah Höch,7 theories of hybridity (Bakhtin, Bhabha) and interface organism (Deleuze, Haraway) are applied to show how the human face is the cultural signifier per se, and that by its defacement and refacement, cultural images of the body can be questioned and de-territorialized in a very concrete sense. Orlan has shown in her series of nine surgery performances, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–1993),8 that she understands her face as 5 For a definition of cross-dressing as cultural phenomenon of identity role play rather than solely sex-change oriented gender category cf. Garber 5. 6 For a definition of cross-mapping as a method of analysis cf. Bronfen. 7 Höch’s series that consisted of eighteen to twenty works was also called Die Sammlung (The Collection). It was never published as a whole. Fifteen collages, most of them under the generic title Aus der Sammlung “Aus einem ethnographischen Museum” were exhibited at the photomontage exhibition “Vystava ´ fotomontáz
í Hannah Höch” at Brno, 1934 (Burmeister et al. 2.2: 538f.). For a complete listing of all artwork and related archives see Lavin (160) and Makholm (198). 8 Orlan’s La Réincarnation de sainte Orlan ou Images nouvelles images (The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, or Pic New[s] Pics) is a series of nine plastic surgery operations/performances between 1990 and 1993. The series has never been published and performed as a whole. Only two of the performances, La Réincarnation de sainte Orlan (1990) and Opération-Opéra (1991), the first and the fifth surgery, also under the single titles Opération Réussie n⬚II and III, are available on DVD (Orlan, Opération Réussie X).

122 metaphor. She uses five classic beauties from the art-historical canon – Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Gérard’s Psyche, Botticelli’s Venus, Gustave Moreau’s Europa, and Diana from the Fontainebleau School – to alter her body as an extended human (inter)face. The performance artist understands her body as an ongoing metamorphosis, and the photomontages of her self-portrait series Omniprésence (performances 1993, photomontages 1994; Carnal Art 144f.) exhibit the “artist as a work in progress”.9 As a result, the technique of photomontage, which allows the alienation of the familiar, provides the medial understanding of the body not only as malleable cultural image, but also as communicative interface and sculptured artwork. Thus she demonstrates that a posthuman and post-evolutionary body can neither be viewed in an exclusively essentialist way nor as entirely constructed; rather it is a combination of both. It represents biological as well as social categories, and it is the medium that allows interaction between these two domains. Let me begin with the latter one, the influence of avant-garde aesthetics, and in particular of Hannah Höch’s photomontages on Orlan. As Nicholas Zurbrugg has shown, the “Postmodern Techno-Body” departs from the modernist body of the twentieth-century European avant-garde movements. While he refers to the Australian performance artist Stelarc and his connection to Italian futurism, I see analogies between Orlan’s digitalized body modifications and the hybrid body images in the photomontages of the Dadaist Hannah Höch. First: Dada body images were as technically oriented as those in Italian and Russian Futurism, which cannot only be seen in reference to Tatlin’s aesthetic of the machine man at the “First International Dada Fair” (1920), but also in Raoul Hausmann’s sculpture Mechanischer Kopf [Der Geist unserer Zeit] (c. 1920, Dickerman 130) (Mechanical Head [The Spirit of Our Age]); and George Grosz’s portrait of “Der Sträfling” Monteur John Heartfield nach Franz Jungs Versuch ihn auf die Beine zu stellen (1920, ibid.120) (“The Convict” John Heartfield after Franz Jung’s Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet) illustrates his statement of 1921: “Der Mensch ist nicht mehr individuell, mit feinschürfender Psychologie dargestellt, sondern als kollektivistischer, fast mechanischer Begriff. Das Einzelschicksal ist nicht mehr wichtig” (qtd. in Makholm 127) (“Man is no longer an individual to be examined in subtle psychological terms, but as a collective, almost mechanical concept. Individual destiny no longer matters”).10 The body, and so the modernist notion of individuality and personality since Freud and Lacan, is always in motion; or, as the 9

This phrase is adapted from Asma. Grosz: Zu meinen neuen Bildern. In: Das Kunstblatt. 5.1 (January 1921), 14 (Trans. by Rose-Carol Washton-Long, qtd. in Makholm 127). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original. I gratefully acknowledge Jeremy Redlich’s proofreading. 10

123 Australian performance artist Stelarc, in a 1995 interview, phrased it more contemporarily: “The desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly redefined” (Atzori and Woolford). Second: With Nietzsches Übermensch as philosophical and cultural background of early twentieth-century art and literature, the Dadaists’ fusion of human and machine can be understood as a combination of hubris and hybrid.11 Furthermore, the Dadaists’ interest in hybrid images can be traced back to Nietzsche and his verdict that nineteenth-century society needed history only as “a storage room for costumes”. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche ridicules “[t]he hybrid European”, who “notices that not one [of the costumes] fits him very well; so he keeps changing”: [A]gain and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes” – I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts, and religions – prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style, for the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry, for the transcendental heights of the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world. Perhaps this is where we shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we, too, can still be original, say, as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons – perhaps, even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future (340).

The Dadaists, by literally taking Nietzsche’s philosophy as a play script, then unveiled the “European hybrid” in their performances and ironic manifestoes, such as in Huelsenbeck’s Der neue Mensch (The New Human): Seine Stirn ist hoch und weit und umfasst die menschlichsten Dinge, die Perlenkette der tabetanischen [sic!] Primadonna wie das Dekokt des besoffenen Kurpfuschers, den Harlekin der Strasse wie den Dementen im Winkel der Krankenhäuser. Er kann sich so lächerlich machen, dass er mit jeder Geste seiner Hand an das Zwerchfell der versammelten Zuschauer rührt (Facsimile in Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas 96). His forehead is high and wide and covers the greatest human things, the pearl necklace of a Tabetan [sic!] primadonna as well as the decoct of a drunken charlatan, a harlequin of the street as well as a dement at the corner around hospitals. He can become so ridiculous, that with every gesture of his hand he will touch the diaphragm of the whole audience. 11

Since the seventeenth century “[t]he Latin word hybrida, hibrida or ibrida has been .. assumed to be derived from υβρις (Greek: hubris), an insult or outrage, and a hybrid or mongrel has been supposed to be an outrage on nature, an unnatural product” (Encyclopedia Britannica. [Vol. V14 (1911): 29.] Online Edition. 2006. 14 November 2006. ⬍http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/HOR_I25/HYBRIDISM.html⬎). For a more detailed etymological analysis of hybrida as name for a bastard that includes a reference to its origin in comedy cf. Warren.

124 Hence, Dada’s nonsense art can be seen as a variation of the genre theatrum mundi, as a play form, directed from a somewhat ethnographic viewpoint, in which the European audience plays its role as agent and observed object alike; or as Huelsenbeck recalls Johannes Baader’s words during a Dada performance in 1919: “Dada ist das Cabaret der Welt so gut, wie die Welt das Cabaret Dada ist” (6 ZB [7]) (“Dada is the Cabaret of the world, just as the world is Cabaret Dada”) (Alexis 128). This notion of the world as theatre went hand in hand with the idea of anti-art as art, of nonsense as sense: Wir haben das Recht zu jeder Belustigung, sei es in Worten, in Formen, Farben, Geräuschen; dies alles aber ist ein herrlicher Blödsinn, den wir bewußt lieben und verfertigen, – eine ungeheure Ironie, wie das Leben selbst: die exakte Technik des endgültig eingesehenen Unsinns als Sinn der Welt. (Hausmann, “Der deutsche Spießer ärgert sich”, Facsimile in Bergius Das Lachen Dadas 120). We have the right to any amusement, be it in words, forms, colors, noises; but all this is wonderful nonsense, which we consciously make and cherish, – an immense irony just like life itself: we finally recognize perfect mastery of nonsense as the only sense of the world (Hausmann 272).

That Dada could be described as “blutiger Karneval” and “Harlekinade unter rotem Galgen” (Grosz, qtd. in Bergius Das Lachen Dadas 13) (“bloody carnival” and a “harlequin play under a red guillotine”), thus not only refers to the history of the French Revolution and First World War, but also to the German modernists’ condemnation of the Wilhelmian era and the perception of contemporary politics as a puppet play: Wenn wir mit der alten [Welt, H.B.] gebrochen haben und die neue noch nicht formen können, tritt die Satire, die Groteske, die Karikatur, der Clown, die Puppe auf, und es ist der tiefe Sinn dieser Ausdrucksformen, durch das Aufzeigen der Marionettenhaftigkeit, durch die scheinbare und wirkliche Erstarrung uns ein anderes Leben erraten und fühlen zu lassen (Hausmann, qtd. in Bergius Dada als Buffonade 209). When we will have broken with the old [world, H.B.], and have not yet formed a new one, the satire, the grotesque, the caricature, a clown, a doll will appear; and the deep meaning of these forms of expression, by showing their puppet-like appearance, their staged and real solidification, will make us guess and feel a different life.

Ultimately, it is the Janus-head of the avant-garde that looks forward and backwards at the same time (Rumold), as presented in Benjamin’s allegoric description of Klee’s Angelus Novus (Über den Begriff der Geschichte, thesis IX) or in Grosz’s portraits of the decadent postwar bourgeois society. The double-headed self-portraits of many Dadaists and Surrealists, as well as the photomontages by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch (Zweigesichtig [With Two Faces] 1927–30, Lavin 134) are perhaps the best examples of how each individual artist could not only express his alienation from the bourgeois society, but also how images of primitivism could be combined with modernist attributes (Die

125 Süße [The Sweet {One}] c. 1926, Lavin 178). Consequently, it was the double meaning of hybridity as a combination of hubris and hybrid (cf. note 11) that created Raoul Hausmann’s impression of “floating between two worlds”. As Kristin Makholm in her dissertation on Hannah Höch’s series From an Ethnographic Museum suggests, the creation of the “New Human” of Expressionism, Dadaism, or Futurism was Janus-faced, since the interest in physiognomy and media (one could also add: in Gestalt theory and mass media) concurrently created a double vision (or perception). Looking at Hannah Höch’s hybrid black and white portrait of Die Tragödin (The Tragedienne 1924; Lavin 130) that was triggered by advertisements and photographs in the magazine Die Dame (The Lady; Lavin 118–134), it becomes clear that Western fashion drew its inspiration from the non-Western canon. Here, I will develop this analogy with a further reference to the famous black and white photomontages by László Moholy-Nagy, such as Mother Europe Nursing her Colonies (1926, Passuth no. 88) and Double Portrait of an Old Woman (1923–1926, Passuth no. 101): As soon as the photographic negative allowed viewing the white face as black, body images with coloured skin became of interest for artists who questioned the racial norms of Western societies. The avant-gardists’ interest in hybridity derived from the simple notion that – once the viewer has become part of the image – there is no objective standpoint, and that not only the viewer and the artist can be seen at the same level (as in Benjamin’s The Author as Producer), but also so-called “high” and “lower” civilized cultures, or more concretely: the colonizers and the colonized. This concept mirrors Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, during which the “suspension of all hierarchical precedence [. . .] was of particular significance”, and by which “people’s ambivalent laughter [. . .] expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it” (10, 12). While Dadaist George Grosz labelled WWI an “insane harlequin farce”, Hannah Höch played with Hans Holbein’s jester illustration of the first edition of Erasmus’s Moriæ Encomium (1511)12 to reflect upon her hybrid identity as human, woman, and artist (Bergius Das Lachen Dadas 130f.). According to Richard Sheppard, such a “[s]elf-irony signifies the Dadaist’s awareness that in a world in flux, the subjective point of view and human formulations are relative” (199). As Sheppard points out, even Hannah Höch’s initials that she used in her photomontage Dada Rundschau (1919) as part of the pasted slogan “unlimited freedom for H.H.”, when pronounced “Ha Ha”, stand “for carnivalesque laughter – for everyone” (198). In addition, Hannah Höch, while she was Raoul Hausmann’s partner during her Berlin years, was named “Dadasophin” (Bergius Das Lachen Dadas 12 A high resolution image file of Holbein the Elder’s drawing from the Kupferstichkabinett Basel (1515) is accessible online (5 March 2007. ⬍http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HolbeinErasmusFollymarginalia.jpg⬎).

126 130), which could have been a reference to Erasmus and his self-ironic term foolelosopher (Praise of Folie, Engl. transl. 1549, A3v; 1965, 10). The figure of the fool was as central to the Dadaists as figures of clowns were for Bakhtin, who saw them as “constant, accredited representatives of the carnival spirit in everyday life out of [medieval, M.H.] carnival season” (8). The Dadaists’ play with the harlequin motif was not unintentional. Besides its theatrical roots in the commedia dell’arte, the harlequin was enacted as a double-faced and black-and-white-coloured figure. Furthermore, the harlequin is a hybrid figure, not only by mask and costume, but also by gender. In Arlequin Lingére du Palais (Harlequin the Linen Vendor 1682, Gherardi), he fights him-/herself as female and male character, a scene that combines comedian-like cross-dressing with the myth of the hermaphrodite. Out of all commedia dell’arte figures, the harlequin is, nevertheless, the most constant and symbolic character: “Beyond what was normal and known, harlequin became the symbol of life in its mysterious essence. His plebeian origins and magical power blended to make of him the élan vital that lifts mankind into a sphere of living beyond that of the animals: [. . .] He represents the sublime, the unattainable [. . .] The world had no bounds for him, time no limits” (Niklaus 186). Therefore it becomes easily understandable why Michel Serres, in his TiersInstruit, also chose the figure of the harlequin as allegory for a perfect hybrid. For Serres, the figure reflects different origins, wears multiple cloaks, and his skin is tattooed and consists of multiple pigmentations. By drawing on Arlequin Empereur dans la lune by Nolant de Fatouville (Behn), who himself was influenced by one of the best harlequin improvisators of the seventeenth century, Evaristo Gherardi, Serres retells the harlequin’s story of accidentally becoming emperor of the moon. However, Serres’s plot is not about a servant who claims to be an emissary of the moon so that he can help an astronomer’s daughter to marry her lover; instead Serres portrays the harlequin as a kind of ethnologist who reports from his excursion to the moon that everything over there is just as ordinary as on earth. When asked for proof, he strips off his multicoloured coat. But instead of seeing him naked, the audience discovers that he wears multiple cloaks, and that his flesh is as multi-layered as an onion: [T]he Harlequin is only a Harlequin, multiple and diverse, undulating and plural, when he dresses and gets undressed: thus named and titled because he protects himself, defends himself, and hides, multiply, indefinitely [. . .] Harlequin is a hermaphrodite, a mixed body, male and female [. . .] Monster? A sphinx, beast and girl; centaur, male and horse; unicorn, chimera, composite and mixed body [. . .] But above all, when the skin and flesh appeared, the whole world discovered his mixed origin: mulatto, halfcaste, Eurasian, hybrid in general, and on what grounds? Quadroon, octoroon? And if he was not playing the king, even as comedy, one would have the urge to say bastard or mongrel, crossbreed. Mixed blood, mestizo or mestiza, diluted (xvf.).

Harlequin symbolizes the space in-between cultures and times, and as such embodies nobody and everybody. Thus his patchy robe becomes a metaphor for

127 hybridity, and it serves, just as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra a century ago, as a model of an embodied posthuman world: “Some, doubtless specialists in their fields, had even understood, on their own, that each portion of their knowledge also looks like Harlequin’s coat, because each works at the intersection of the interference of many other disciplines and, sometimes, of almost all of them. In this way, their academy or the encyclopedia formally joined commedia dell’arte” (xvii). Furthermore, Harlequin’s multicoloured coat is skin and flesh, tissue and text, world and mind map at once. For Orlan, this is the birth scene of her surgery performances, where dress and skin are seen synonymously: “The skin she regards as a costume” (O’Bryan 20), and in a reliquary with the inscription “The body is [. . .] but a costume” (1992) she also draws on the etymological analogy of tissue and text by making her own flesh the surface for the script (Orlan, Carnal Art 149). By using an ambiguous, often blasphemous, iconography Orlan intends to re-discover a third space in between stereotypic images. Similarly to Serres, she puts stress on the conjunction “and” between any two poles (Orlan, Virtuel et réel 52). Furthermore, when Orlan is turning her body into a body of art, it can be seen in comparison to the interplay with the alter ego in modern literature and art, as well as a play with the myth of art as female body. On the one hand, it is an attempt to embody Rimbaud’s phrase Je est un autre, and therefore Orlan declares, with Stelarc’s words, the body “obsolete” (Intervention 325); on the other hand, the question of how to bring the muse alive here takes a very concrete, literal turn in that the artist is the muse. Thus, the “I” becomes an Other, and (ethnologically spoken) the Other a hybrid mirror for the white face. In this sense, Orlan’s body alterations can be understood as artificial hybrids in respect to Homi Bhabha’s definition of cultural hybridity as a post-colonial state of a performative third space in between fetishized racial stereotypes (56, 106f., 212). With the assumption that any definition of hybridity is Janus-faced in so far as it etymologically refers to the affect of outrage or hubris, I understand Orlan’s series Refiguration Self-Hybridizations as an example of how breaking the taboo of altering the body also allows the creation of an ethnographic hybrid, intercultural and interfacial organism. I shall call this an interface organism, or IntOrg, since it is related to, but not synonymous with Donna Haraway’s definition of a cyborg in her Cyborg Manifesto.13 On the one hand, Orlan’s multiple faces are interventions/operations14 on the body and its social status. They are part of an identity-game that plays with Christian and Hindu myths of reincarnation and avatar (Intervention 316). On the other hand, they are part of an art-game that plays with the different meanings of “exhibition” 13

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 149). Orlan, however, understands her body as “public debate”, and therefore as a medial and communicative interface rather than as a fabricated hybrid between machine and organism (Intervention 319). 14 “In French, intervention also means operation” (Orlan, Intervention 315).

128

Figure 1. © Hannah Höch. Fremde Schönheit [Strange Beauty]. From the series Aus einem ethnographischem Museum [From an Ethnographic Museum]. 1929. Photomontage with watercolour. 4 7/16 ⫻ 8 in. (11.3 ⫻ 20.3 cm). Collection Jean-Paul Kahn, Paris. (Makela 101). c/o Beeldrecht/Pictoright Amsterdam 2008.

and “performance”. For the artist, the body “is becoming a ‘modified readymade’ ”, and she considers her own body “a site of public debate” (319). Therefore, Orlan uses her hybrid body image as a metaphor to blend the organic body with the constructed body of Western societies, and she makes clear that the female body has always been a field of male gazed performances not only in the sciences and – as Sander Gilman has most recently shown – in aesthetic surgery (328), but also in the arts. In the tradition of Hannah Höch’s photomontage series From an Ethnographic Museum, Orlan also uses stereotypes of the body from non-European cultures to blur definitions of beauty, femininity, and ethnicity. Her intention is quite similar to Hannah Höch’s, who in her work commented on gender, racial, and imperialist boundaries during the Weimar Republic (Lavin 159–182). As Höch questioned contemporary norms of feminine beauty and “revealed the representation of beauty as cultural formula rather than as natural given”, (Strange Beauty, 1929; Lavin 166; cf. fig. 1),15 Orlan creates hybrid body images by mixing different ethnic attributes in her early Masked Nude with Crotch and Hand No. 2 (1965; Carnal Art 18; cf. fig. 2) which can be seen as a prefiguration of newer montages, for instance African Self-Hybridization: Half-White Half-black Mbangu Mask (2002, 176). As the woman’s hairstyle in Höch’s 15 The original title plays with the double meaning of Fremde Schönheit, referring to alienation and foreignness at the same time, thus pointing at the allegorical technique of photomontage, which is bringing out the grotesque by combining the unrelated.

129

Figure 2. © Orlan. Pose nue avec masque, entrejambe et main No. 2 [Masked Nude with Crotch and Hand No. 2]. 1965. Black and white photograph. 3 ⫻ 3 1/3 in., 31 3⁄4 ⫻ 30 in. incl. frame (8 ⫻ 8.5 cm, 81 ⫻ 76 cm). Collection Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris. (Orlan Carnal Art 18). c/o Beeldrecht/Pictoright Amsterdam 2008.

photomontage Indian Dancer (1929; cf. fig. 3) makes the figure recognizable as a modern woman of the twenties (Lavin 163), Orlan uses the same attribute to make her head appear modern despite the pre-Columbian artefacts in Disfiguring-Refiguring: Pre-Columbian Hybridization No.17, 18, and 27 (1999; Carnal Art 169–171; cf. fig. 4). When we follow Maud Lavin’s interpretation of Höch’s photomontages as ironic and humorous with the intent to uncover stereotypes, then Orlan’s images are even more explicit in contrasting different female images and feminine roles, from the housewife, as in Surmas Woman with Lip Plug (181), to the Lolita image, as in African Self-Hybridization: Suku Bird Helmet-Mask (180). Analogous to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony and intertextuality in literature, Höch and Orlan do not show us what beauty is, but “what it does” (Bartelik 7) in art and life, and how it is socially constructed. As Orlan’s photo series lets one assume, beauty is a multi-ethnic category. After having critically asignified the notion of Western beauty in her Omniprésence (1993–94), Orlan’s most recent Harlequin-project (2003–2008; Harlequin 87; cf. fig. 5) intends to re-signify the notion of beauty in a cross-cultural context. By finally performing an act of cross-skinning, she plays with the norms of race, hybridity, and transculturality. Orlan’s Refiguration Self-Hybridizations, as Jill O’Bryan writes, “politically [. . .] reference a performance that crosses cultures, but they are also caricatures of

130

Figure 3. © Hannah Höch. Indische Tänzerin: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum [Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum]. 1930. Photomontage with Collage. 10 1/8 ⫻ 8 7/8 in. (25.7 ⫻ 22.4 cm). Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frances Keech Fund. (Makela 107). c/o Beeldrecht/Pictoright Amsterdam 2008.

other cultures’ signifiers of beauty and frequently appear carnivalesque, somewhat extraterrestrial” (134). Her defacement can be seen within the long tradition of transformations of the face in the arts and art performances, from Arcimboldo to the avant-garde, which play with the physiognomic and pathognomic code of the face: In the portrait, the face offers itself to the sight of the other; the subjectivity of the aspect is perceived socially and is subjected to a composition and a composedness [. . .] An abstract “facifying” machine, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, an inscription surface with fissures imposed on every part of the earth and sky and on the head and body of human beings [. . .] the face format is a political con-formation, a semiotic screen for the network of subjectivity of which the face is the representative (Fabbri 266f.).

However, “Orlan, the body artist, is also creating an asubjectified selfrepresentation” (O’Bryan 114). To follow O’Bryan’s recent study of Orlan’s work within the theoretical framework of Guattari/Deleuze’s ‘B[ody]w[ithout]O[rgans]’ and their prediction that the human face as cultural signifier only then has a future when it is asignified, asubjectified, destroyed and dismantled (235), Orlan

131

Figure 4. © Orlan and Pierre Zoville (Technical Collaborator). Refiguration/SelfHybridation précolombienne n°27. 1998. Cibachrome. 100 ⫻ 150 cm & 60 ⫻ 90 cm, 116 ⫻ 166 cm & 74 ⫻ 104 cm incl. frame. (Orlan Refiguration/Self-Hybridation précolombienne [105]). c/o Beeldrecht/Pictoright Amsterdam 2008.

gives a taste of the era of a trans-cultural, inter-facial, and post-humanist society by crossing the lines between artificial and biological, cultural and ethnic identities. Furthermore, Orlan’s recent photomontages seem to be at the border of being real and virtual, as well as being models for a technologically and naturally enhanced body. In this respect they fit Haraway’s definition of a cyborg. However, Orlan’s digitally produced self-portraits that represent and locate the body somewhere between its organic-biological and technologically enhanced borders are still artistic representations of the body and not alterations of Orlan’s body itself. Although these photomontages are still portraits in the original meaning of the genre,16 they have often been misinterpreted as documents 16

Orlan defines her “Carnal Art” as “self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a ‘modified ready-made’ ” (Carnal Art Manifesto, qtd. in O’Bryan 22).

132

Figure 5. © Orlan. Harlequin Coat. September 2007. Video projection and bioreactor with Orlan’s skin cells, black woman’s cells and marsupial cells at the Still, Living exhibition curated by Jens Hauser, Bakery Artage, Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP). Photo: Tony Nathan. (Orlan Harlequin 88). c/o Beeldrecht/Pictoright Amsterdam 2008.

of Orlan’s surgery performances, for which she used digital images as well. But these portraits do not present a de facto altered, de- and refigurated body. As such they reflect upon notions of beauty, gender, identity, and ethnicity, but they do not (yet!) go beyond current borders of the organic body. As photomontages, they combine different images of intercultural faces, and as such invent cultural interfaces. They depict a posthuman body, but they are not (yet) one: “they are the current and temporary outcome in which once again the hypothesis of a mutant and post-human body is sketched” (Baqué 90).

133

Figure 6. © 18th Century Harlequin Figure. PRA. 8 September 2007. Personnage de la commedia dell’arte. Petite statue en plâtre peint (environ 100 cm) provenant du Théâtre Séraphin installé au Palais-Royal à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et conservée au musée Carnavalet à Paris (série de quatre pieces : Arlequin – Pantalone – Il Dottore – Brighella). 25 November 2008. ⬍http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Arlequin _-_commedia_dell’arte.JPG⬎. c/o ⬍http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/⬎.

Orlan, nevertheless, sees them in the context of her surgery performances, and once she manages to re-create her face as an intercultural, asignified surface, then her skin tissue will have finally become a cultural intertext. Hence, if the virtual images of Refiguration Self-Hybridizations become real in the form of a tissue-engineered harlequin dress, Orlan will have completed her ultimate task of transforming herself from a woman to a woman.17 This now could be read as a transformation from a woman with (white) body/face to a woman without body/face but with a new hybrid identity. It will be the first 17

“I am doing a woman-to-woman transsexualism by way of allusion to transsexuals” (Orlan, Intervention 318).

134 time that the rhetorical phrase “losing face” is no longer merely a figure of speech, but embodied in reality and that an act of cross-dressing would be replaced by an act of cross-skinning.18 Therefore, by looking at Katherine Hayles’s definition of the post-human body (90) where, from a post-evolutionary point of view, the human (and thus the human body) has become part of a technologically driven, auto-communicative system, Orlan’s body art follows exactly the same Janus-headed figure of thought that can now be re-defined as an embodied metaphor for a new cross-skinned, interfacial transculturality that combines hybridity and hubris. By cross-mapping Orlan’s Refiguration Self-Hybridizations with Höch’s photomontage series From an Ethnographic Museum, such an artificial hybridity becomes visible as a carnivalesque strategy, and the figure of the harlequin (cf. fig. 6), with its embodied analogy in-between ethnicity and identity, body and costume, tissue and text, is turned into the perfect allegory of a carnivalesque body that incorporates all cultures. If Serres’s Le Tiers-Instruit tells us that “to be educated is to become a harlequin”,19 then Orlan’s project brings this metaphor of “being educated” as being globally cultured alive: To “become a harlequin” is no longer just a figure of speech, it is a body alteration. Finally, the humorous side of Orlan’s performances does not lie just in transgressing the norms of Western beauty; it is an attempt at embodying hybridity as a new form of cross-skinning. As much as an act of cross-dressing plays with gender norms, Orlan’s artwork plays with racial norms. Where we come from, and how we define cultures is no longer only a question of genetic inheritance, it is one of performing identity. As Orlan reports from her surgery performances (Oriach), it does not matter whether the audience laughs (which has been the case in some instances) or not, it matters that when it laughs, it laughs not at Orlan as a crossskinner, but – as in Serres’s harlequin tale or Dadaist performances – within and concurrently outside its own cultural norms. In other words, by identifying with Orlan and hence “losing face”, the audience is still able to “keep face” by laughing collectively. Thus, cross-skinning can be defined as a – literally – carnivalesque act and therefore grotesque art, as well as probably a new form of transculturalism.

Works Consulted Alexis [Richard Huelsenbeck]: A Visit to the Cabaret Dada. Trans. by Mel Gordon. In: The Drama Review: TDR. 18.2: Rehearsal Procedures Issue and Berlin Dada (1974). Pp. 126–128. 22 November 2007. ⬍http://www.jstor.org⬎. 18

So far, this has been achieved only symbolically by replacing the face of the Harlequin figure in Orlan’s Harlequin multimedia installation with a custom made bioreactor that hosts the living hybrid tissue cells in vitro (Orlan, Harlequin 88). 19 Online book advertisement by the publisher, The University of Michigan Press, 1998. 9 November 2006. ⬍http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=9722⬎.

135 Asma, Stephen T.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Work in Progress. In: Chronicle of Higher Education 47.19 (2001). 12 April 2006. ⬍http://search.ebscohost.com⬎. Atzori, Paolo, and Kirk Woolford: Extended-Body. Interview with Stelarc [Arcadiou, Stelios.]. In: ctheory.net Article No. A029. 6 September 1995. 28 May 2006. ⬍www.ctheory.net⬎. Austin, John L.: How To Do Things with Words. (The William James Lectures 1955). Oxford: Clarendon Press 1962. Baqué, Dominique: Devenirs photographiques de l’Orlan-corps. Body-Orlan Becoming. In: Orlan, refiguration self-hybridations: série précolombienne. Ed. by Dominique Baqué et al. Romainville: Al Dante 2001. Pp. 76–95. Bakhtin, Mikhail: Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984. Bartelik, Marek: Re-présenter la beauté: notes sur Orlan. Re-Figuring Beauty: Notes on Orlan. In: Orlan, refiguration self-hybridations: série précolombienne. Ed. by Dominique Baqué et al. Romainville: Al Dante 2001. Pp. 4–19. Baudrillard, Jean: Vom zeremoniellen zum geklonten Körper. In: Die Wiederkehr des Körpers. 1982. Ed. by Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1994. Pp. 350–362. Behn, Aphra: The Emperor of the Moon a Farce. As It Is Acted by Their Majesties Servants at the Queens Theatre. London: Printed by R. Holt for Joseph Knight and Francis Saunders 1687. Early English Books Online. 24 July 2006. ⬍http://gateway. proquest.com/⬎. Benjamin, Walter: Der Autor als Produzent. Ansprache im Institut zum Studium des Fascismus in Paris am 27. April 1934. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 2. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1974. Pp. 682–701. —. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1974. Pp. 691–704. Bergius, Hanne: Dada als ‘Buffonade und Totenmesse zugleich’. In: Unter der Maske des Narren. Ed. by Stefanie Poley. Stuttgart: Hatje 1981. Pp. 208–220. —. Das Lachen Dadas. Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen. Gießen: AnabasVerlag 1989. Bhabha, Homi K.: The Location of Culture. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Bronfen, Elisabeth: Cross-Mapping. Kulturwissenschaft als Kartographie von erzählender und visueller Sprache. In: Kulturwissenschaften. Forschung – Praxis – Positionen. Ed. by Lutz Musner and Gotthart Wunberg. Wien: Facultas Universitätsverlag 2002. Pp. 110–139. Burmeister, Ralf, Eckhard Fürlus, and Künstlerarchiv der Berlinischen Galerie (Eds.): Hannah Höch. Eine Lebenscollage. Berlin: Verlag Gerd Hatje 1995. Busca, Joëlle: Les visages d’Orlan: pour une relecture du post-humain. Bruxelles: Lettre volée 2003.

136 Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York – London: Routledge 1993. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari: Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Trans. by Gabriele Ricke and Ronald Voullié. (Trans. of Mille plateaux 1980). Ed. by Günter Rösch. Berlin: Merve Verlag 1997. Dickerman, Leah, et al.: Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 2005. Erasmus, Desiderius: The Praise of Folie. Clarence H. Miller. Trans. by Thomas Chaloner. (Trans. of Moriæ encomium 1511). London – New York: Oxford University Press 1965. Fabbri, Paolo: The Passion of the Face. In: The Arcimboldo Effect. Transformations of the Face from the 16th to the 20th Century. Ed. by Karl Gunnar Pontus Hulten. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers 1987. Pp. 259–273. Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York – London: Routledge 1992. Gherardi, Evaristo, et al.: Le theatre italien de Gherardi, ou, Le recueil général de toutes les comedies & scenes françoises jouées par les comediens italiens du roy, pendant tout le temps qu’ils ont été au service. Enrichi d’estampesen tailledouce à la téte de chaque comedie. London: J. Tonson 1714. Gilman, Sander L.: Making the Body Beautiful. A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999. Haraway, Donna: A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge 1991. Pp. 149–181. Hauser, Jens (Ed.): sk.interfaces. Exploring Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society. Liverpool: Fact & Liverpool University Press 2008. Hausmann, Raoul: The German PHILISTINE is Annoyed. (First published Der Dada, December 1919). German Expressionism. Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. Ed. by Rose-Carol Washton Long. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company 1993. Pp. 270–272. Hayles, Katherine N.: How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press 1999. Huelsenbeck, Richard: Ein Besuch im Cabaret Dada. In: Der Dada 3 (1920). Pp. [6–8]. Reprint Edition Nautilus. Hamburg: Verlag Lutz Schulenburg 1984. Lavin, Maud: Cut with the Kitchen Knife. The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven – London: Yale University Press 1993. Makela, Maria, and Peter Boswell (Eds.): The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 1996. Makholm, Kristin Jean: Film, Portraiture, and Primitivism in the Photomontages of Hannah Hoech. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Minnesota 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm: Beyond Good and Evil. In: Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House 2000. Pp. 179–436.

137 Niklaus, Thelma: Harlequin Phoenix or The Rise and Fall of Bergamask Rogue. London: The Bodley Head 1956. O’Bryan, C. Jill. Carnal Art. Orlan’s Refacing. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press 2005. Oriach, Stéphan: Orlan: Carnal Art. Documentary. DVD. Paris: Myriapodus Films 2002. Orlan: Carnal Art. Paris: Flammarion 2004. —. Harlequin Coat. In: sk.interfaces. Exploring Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society. Ed. by Jens Hauser. Liverpool: Fact & Liverpool University Press 2008. Pp. 83–89. —. Intervention. In: The Ends of Performance. Ed. by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York, London: New York University Press 1998. Pp. 315–327. —. Monograph. CD-Rom. Paris: Jeriko 2000. —. Opération Réussie X. DVD [Performances La Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan (1990) and Opération-Opéra (1991), 4 videos on one screen, 8.5 minutes]. Dir. by Stéphan Oriach. Paris: Myriapodus Films 1991. —. Omniprésence. DVD [Two Performances in New-York and Paris (1993), 70 minutes]. Dir. by Stéphan Oriach. Paris: Myriapodus Films 1993. —. Orlan. Website. 24 April 2006. ⬍http://www.orlan.net⬎. —. refiguration self-hybridations: série précolombienne [Refiguration SelfHybridizations]. Ed. by Dominique Baqué et al. Romainville: Al Dante 2001. —. Virtuel et réel: dialectique et complexité. The Complex Dialectics of Virtuality and Reality. In: Orlan: refiguration self-hybridations: série précolombienne. Ed. by Dominique Baqué et al. Romainville: Al Dante 2001. Pp. 42–57. Passuth, Krisztina. Moholy-Nagy 1895–1946. New York: Thames and Hudson 1984. Ricœur, Paul: Die lebendige Metapher. Trans. by Rainer Rochlitz. (Trans. of La métaphore vive 1975). In: Übergänge. Texte and Studien zu Handlung, Sprache und Lebenswelt. Ed. by Richard Grathoff and Bernhard Waldenfels. Vol. 12. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1986. Rumold, Rainer: The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde. From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism. Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press 2002. Serres, Michel: The Troubadour of Knowledge. Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson. (Trans. of Le Tiers-Instruit 1991). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1997. Sheppard, Richard: Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism. Ed. by Marjorie Perloff and Rainer Rumold. Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press 2000. Stelarc [Arcadiou, Stelios]: Stelarc. Website. 26 April 2006. ⬍http://www.stelarc.va. com.au/⬎. Trask, Robert L.: Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge 1999. Warren, Minton: On the Etymology of Hybrid (Lat. Hybrida). In: The American Journal of Philology. 5.4 (1884). Pp. 501f. Zurbrugg, Nicholas: Marinetti, Chopin, Stelarc and the Auratic Intestines of the Postmodern Techno-Body. In: Body Modification. Ed. by Mike Featherstone. London (UK) – Thousand Oaks (CA) – New Delhi: Sage Publications 2000. Pp. 93–116.

III. Cross-Cultural Encounters: Race, Gender, and the Comic

Gaby Pailer

Multi-Layered Conflicts with the Norm: Gender and Cultural Diversity in Two Comedies of the German Enlightenment This essay explores two comedies of early German Enlightenment that deal with encounters of two religious or national cultures. Luise Gottsched’s Die Hausfranzösinn (The French Housekeeper) unfolds a struggle between French and German culture; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Juden (The Jews) presents a strange encounter between Judaism and Christianity. Based on theoretical crossings in theories of the comic and comedy, gender theories and colonial discourse analysis, which all address the potentials of subverting socio-cultural norms, the investigation concludes that both comedies suggest a new concept of cultural diversity and a more palimpsestual vision in their subversion of heterosexual and monolithic cultural norms. They differ, however, in terms of gender in that Gottsched’s subversive power is a comical one, whereas Lessing’s play ends with a rather serious plea for tolerance.

In the year 1767, Lessing passed the following judgement on Luise Gottsched’s comedy Die Hausfranzösinn (The French Housekeeper): “aber die Hausfranzösin ist ganz und gar nichts. Noch weniger, als nichts: denn sie ist nicht allein niedrig, platt, und kalt, sondern noch oben darein schmutzig, ekel, und im höchsten Grade beleidigend. Es ist mir unbegreiflich, wie eine Dame solches Zeug schreiben können” (Hamburgische Dramaturgie 348) (“the French Housekeeper is absolutely nothing. Less than nothing, even, for it is not only low and flat and cold, but also dirty, disgusting and offensive in the highest degree. It is incomprehensible to me how a lady could write such stuff ”).1 The same year, the publishers of a collection of German literary texts contemplated omitting Lessing’s comedy Die Juden (The Jews) from an anthology, “dessen Grundlage die Ehre unsrer Nation seyn soll” (Gerstenberg 347) (“that was supposed to be the foundation of the honour of our nation”). The two plays being rejected here are products of the same decade: Gottsched’s play appeared in 1744, and Lessing’s was written in 1749. Lessing’s criticism of Gottsched’s comedy is directed against the gross intolerance that seems expressed in the invectives of a German woman author against the French nation. The criticism against his own play, on the other hand, is directed at the ‘excessive’ tolerance of Judaism which the anonymous critic considers an unpatriotic element in an otherwise ‘German’ writer. 1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I would like to thank Raluca Cernahoschi (University of British Columbia) and Linda Dietrick (University of Winnipeg) for their productive comments and proofreading.

142 Thus the stage is set for the thematic crossing I want to explore: both comedies deal with aspects of cultural diversity by employing dichotomous national or religious concepts. Gottsched unfolds a struggle between French and German culture, Lessing a strange encounter between Judaism and Christianity. In both instances, we have representatives of a ‘foreign’ culture intruding into a ‘domestic’ one, and the revision of cultural norms is at the same time linked to gender aspects. Prior to investigating and comparing this thematic crossing in Gottsched’s and Lessing’s comedies, I would like to propose and briefly outline three theoretical points of reference: aspects of the comic and comedy, gender theories, and colonial discourse analysis.

Theoretical Crossings What all three theoretical areas have in common is that they question existing binary concepts and envision creative conflicts with established socio-cultural norms. In theories of the comic and comedy, norms often form points of reference. In an everyday situation, laughter may be triggered by an experienced incongruence between the expected and perceived result of a situation. This comic incongruence arises through a person’s failure in action or speech. Whether the reason for this failure be clumsiness, naivety, or a lack of information, the result is, in all cases, that the acting person is changed from the subject of his or her action into its object (Stierle 242f.). The perception of such a failure in acting or speaking implies the presence and acceptance of a socio-cultural norm in the spectator’s mind, a norm that includes knowledge about who is considered a human ‘subject’. The viewer’s laughing response, however, is not merely a psychic relief (as, most prominently, Freud believed), but can also involve social protest against or solidarity with the comical figure (Jauß). All three functions may work together, in the form of either laughing at or with the comical figure. Jauß distinguishes three types of comic heroes in relation to the norm: the anti-hero, who becomes the object of ridicule; the humorous hero, who, on the contrary, holds a strong subject-position and ridicules others; and, between these two, the grotesque hero whose body unwillingly or unknowingly acts subversively towards the norm. In his groundbreaking study of comedy, Greiner carries the hero-norm relationship further, in arguing that the principle of comedy is ambiguous because it subverts the discursive norm of society through the rebellion of the body (3–10). Laughter as a biosocial phenomenon and psycho-physical activity forms the interface between body and language. Accordingly, the ideal comedy invites the spectators to laugh with the comic character at the discursive order, and at the same time reminds them of their physicality and the necessity to question the discursive norm. Similarly, modern gender theories question socio-cultural norms and their discursive formation. The main feature of the norm in question here is the dichotomous perception of genders and gender characteristics based on the idea of two distinctive biological sexes and their ‘natural’ attraction to the opposite

143 sex. Judith Butler considers this ‘heterosexual norm’ as a cultural, political and societal power that forces individuals to ‘assume’ one or the other gender. The norm is hierarchical (in historical terms, the male gender is considered the norm, the female the deviance) and exclusive (due to the expected sexual orientation towards the opposite gender). Referring to Lacan, Butler describes the process of subject formation as an individual’s assumption of the symbolic order by means of ‘citation’. Accordingly, she envisions an opportunity to “‘cite’ the law to produce it differently, to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and co-opt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity” (14f.). A different concept of cultural normativity and subversive potential, as related to gender, stems from Julia Kristeva. Similar to Lacan’s concept of two spheres involved in subject formation, Kristeva differentiates two spheres: the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic is the maternal sphere, or chora, of which the human being forms part before entering the symbolic order of language and cultural signifying processes. In the process of assuming the symbolic, the semiotic is abjected. However, the semiotic forms a necessary part of culture, so that the desire for this sphere as an object will return in certain instances, and the process of abjection will be repeated (Powers of Horror 13). Her theoretical model of the semiotic and symbolic opens up an opportunity to rethink processes of assuming and questioning the symbolic, or discursive norm from a different angle. Other than Lacan’s “imaginary”, to which Butler refers, Kristeva’s semiotic exists and works within the symbolic, and the symbolic – the necessary realm of any signifying practice – cannot exist without it: “the semiotic, which also precedes it, constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice called ‘creation’. Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic. This is particularly evident in poetic language” (Revolution in Poetic Language 113). Finally, conflicts with a norm are also prominent in cultural theories, and particularly in colonial discourse analysis. Robert J. C. Young points out the aporetic structure that underlies the analysis of colonial discourse, which is rooted in the fact that all perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common discursive medium which was also that of colonialism itself: the language used to enact, enforce, describe or analyse colonialism is not transparent, innocent, ahistorical or simply instrumental. [. . .] It is for this reason also that a major task of postcolonialism must be the production of a ‘critical ethnography of the West’, analysing the story of a West haunted by the excess of its own history (Colonial Desire 163).

He criticizes Deleuze and Guattari’s view of capitalism as a deterritorializing and reterritorializing force that disrupts and dissolves an indigenous culture and reinscribes it according to the needs of the apparatus of the occupying

144 power (as presented in their works What is minor literature? and AntiOedipus). He considers this a rather simplicistic perspective and claims instead that we “need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription and reinscription, an historical paradigm that will acknowledge the extent to which cultures were not simply destroyed but rather layered on top of each other, giving rise to struggles that themselves only increased the imbrication of each with the other and their translation into increasingly uncertain patchwork identities” (173f.). In this view, the Western cultural norm becomes a force that needs to be analysed and questioned by determining its own evolution and layers, instead of being imagined as a monolithic power. Consequently, the colonized cultures are not just perfect citations of the norm: “[a] culture never repeats itself perfectly away from home” (174). There seems to be a sort of irony in the failure to copy the colonizing power and its socio-cultural norm, which at the same time indicates an opportunity for subversion. This brief survey demonstrates how conflicts with certain norms – sociocultural, symbolic, discursive – form the basis of comical situations, gender roles, and processes of colonization. The main shift from theories of the comic to theories of comedy can be seen in the role of subversion. What in real life may be nothing more than a misstep that triggers a laughing response through the comparison with a norm (Stierle), can be employed in literature and theatre as a subversive act. The form and degree of subversion is dependent on the different forms of comical heroes (Jauß) and to what extent the audience is invited to question the discursive order and its inherent normative definition of a human subject (Greiner). This theatrical or performative framing forms an interesting aspect in gender theories that conceive of subject formation as an act of ‘citation’ of the norm (Butler), or envision a semiotic sphere that works to disturb the symbolic order (Kristeva). Similarly, postcolonial discourse analysis proposes a concept where the norm of the colonizing culture is not seen as a fixed and monolithic power, but as something that is forced upon the colonized culture as an act of citation and, therefore, can be changed by deciphering the palimpsestual cultural layers (Young). Keeping these theoretical prerequisites in mind, I would now like to turn to the two Enlightenment comedies of Gottsched and Lessing and investigate the conflicts with cultural norms on different levels by looking at the specific comic strategies, the struggles between two national or religious cultures, and the gender roles and relations.

Gottsched, The French Housekeeper The action of Gottsched’s comedy takes place in a German port city, in the house of the merchant Germann. The French governess, Mademoiselle la Fleche, has convinced Germann to send his 15-year-old son Franz under her

145 supervision on a trip to Paris. While more and more of Germann’s money is spent on travel preparations – including the hiring of two French servants, the older Monsieur Sotenville and the younger La Fleur – the eldest daughter of the house, Luischen, and her cousin Wahrmund watch the extravagance with increasing wonder. When Wahrmund’s father, Germann’s half-brother and business partner, learns about the travel plans, he immediately suspects that some deception is being staged, and sets everything in motion to ‘unmask’ the frauds. However, la Fleche, Sotenville, and La Fleur manage to flee with the expensive travel acquisitions and something even more precious in tow: Hannchen, Germann’s youngest daughter. Using her as their hostage, they hope to force Germann not to block a previously written blank cheque. Luckily, Hannchen is able to escape, Germann’s fortune is saved, and it is to be expected that the thieves will be caught. The conflict of the two cultures, French and German, is deployed on two levels: firstly on a spatial level, with the deceptive desire for Paris as a place where everything is better than in the German port city, and secondly on a personal level, with the female lead character who evokes this desire in the German merchant’s children and hence seduces them to ‘cite’ the supposedly better French cultural norm. In the course of the play, the French capital is invoked in three different ways: as a royal city, as a luxury market, and as a locus of pleasure. At the beginning, Paris is referred to as a royal city, the location of the French court.2 In the opening scene, Franz tells Luischen and his cousin Wahrmund that he expects to be received by the king of France himself and to kiss the hands of several duchesses (Die Hausfranzösinn 74). When La Fleur complains about the new travel coach – merely because it was produced in Germany – and desires a French carriage comparable to the one Cardinal Fleury used to drive to Versailles, Franz joins in without even knowing who Fleury is. Hercule de Fleury was the tutor, then the prime minister of Louis XV. He died in 1743 (Le Roy Ladurie 337–354), just one year before Gottsched’s comedy appeared. The name of Franz’s advisor “La Fleur” seems to refer to the French minister’s name. Accordingly, Franz in his youth appears to be a caricature of Louis XV himself, especially in one instance where Luischen pities her brother: “Du guter Franz! ein junger Mensch, der bis in sein 17. Jahr nichts mehr weis, als was er von einem Frauenzimmer gelernet hat, der wird bey allen Vernünftigen, in Paris sowohl als anderwärts wenig gelten” (Die Hausfranzösinn 79) (“Dear Franz, a young man who, by his seventeenth year, does not know more than what he has learned from a woman, will be considered by all reasonable persons, in Paris as well as elsewhere, of little value”). It should be noted that Luischen refers to Franz as almost seventeen, 2

Although it is known that the French Court resided in Versailles, the contemporary German perception was often that it was in Paris.

146 when in fact he is only fifteen. Her description of “a young man” might thus refer to the French king himself: Louis XV, born in 1710, fatherless from his fifth year on and educated by women in his early youth, was almost seventeen years old when he came to power in 1726 (Le Roy Ladurie 318–320). Furthermore, Franz’s riding outfit with boots and spurs might further hint at Louis’s passion for riding and hunting.3 Secondly, Paris is referred to as a luxury market. Luischen’s dialogues with la Fleche circle around the unreasonable expenditures for French merchandise and French employees. The goods being ordered for the grande tour of the German(n) boy are connected with merchandise produced or traded in Paris (cf. Sargentson): When Franz accidentially rips his governess’s pinafore, he promises to have it mended with several metres of fine Parisian batiste (Die Hausfranzösinn 77). When Luischen complains that the governess has acquired all kinds of accessories but does not care about the more essential shirts for her brother, la Fleche proposes that those will be sewn in Paris by the Dauphin’s seamstresses (89). Towards the end of the play, a third aspect is discussed by Luischen and Sotenville: Paris as a locus of pleasure. Sotenville praises the courtly habit of the lever and explains adultery as the main feature of matrimonial morals (158f.). For Luischen, the Frenchman’s value system represents nothing other than idleness, immorality, and uncontrolled sexuality. All three aspects – royalty, luxury, pleasure – stand for ‘abnormal’ desires that need to be revised. Franz’s aspirations to meet the French king are already revised when he is turned into a caricature of Louis XV by his sister’s words; in the end, he will not go to Paris, but will be sent to German court cities such as Dresden, Berlin, Hanover, Vienna, and Munich (189). The second image, Paris as a luxury market, is revised through the reasonable voice in the play, father Wahrmund – whose name literally means “mouth of truth”. He is a merchant who has honourable business and trade partners in France; his eldest son Christian, who is staying temporarily in Bordeaux, is the one who alerts his father to the French frauds in Germann’s house. As for the third aspect, Paris as a locus of pleasure, the action almost takes a tragic turn when the frauds kidnap nine-year-old Hannchen and threaten to put her into a Parisian brothel, if Germann does not let them cash the cheque. Hannchen who, like her brother, had wished so much to escape to Paris, is lucky to escape from the deceptive image of desire. These multi-layered revisions of the desire for a ‘wrong’ norm can also be analysed in terms of comic failures, subject-object switches, and the constellation of comic heroes: Franz is the comic anti-hero par excellence. He pirouettes about and constantly contradicts himself depending on his governess’s newest 3

A portrait by Jean-Baptiste Van Loo from 1727 shows the 17-year-old on horseback (Le Roy Ladurie 319).

147 maxims. For instance, when he dresses in boots and spurs to visit relatives, Luischen and young Wahrmund point out to him the impropriety of the accoutrements. La Fleche agrees at first, but when she hears that he is visiting a German aunt, she corrects herself: the rule against boots applies only to the French (77f.). The boy is echoed by his father, who is so naive as to believe that he can cure his son of sleeping in his governess’s bed by sending him to Paris with her (98f.), as Wahrmund comments: “einen jungen Menschen von 15 Jahren bey der Französinn schlafen zu lassen! ha! ha! ha! da könnte das Bübchen [. . .] wohl ein Vater werden, ehe es noch buchstabieren lernte!” (99) (“let a young man of 15 years sleep with the Frenchwoman! Ha! Ha! Ha! The little boy could [. . .] well become a father before even learning how to spell!”). Moreover, the frauds are ridiculed for their affectation of French culture through several comic paradigms. Sotenville, for example, asks for a meal of “Schneppendreck” (119), a French delicacy, but is literally served pigeon dung by the servant Erhard (130). Similarly, la Fleche orders a bird cage for Luischen’s pet canine, but it is used by Luischen to hold the governess’s pug captive (144f.). Particularly in the middle of the play, comic paradigms are used to poke fun at French food, customs, and language. Thus, the frauds who trick father and son Germann become objects of derision along with their victims. At the end it turns out that they are not even true representatives of France. The “Mamsell” has, in fact, grown up in Magdeburg and speaks vernacular French (105). What she teaches the children are swearwords and dirty songs. (Magdeburg, by the way, was after Berlin the second largest settlement of French Huguenots, following the edict of Potsdam in 1685). Furthermore, we find out that la Fleche and the servant La Fleur are the offspring of a French actress and Sotenville, and the latter is a notorious thief who is wanted in France. In contrast to these two groups of German and French anti-heroes, who are the objects of derision, stand the humorous heroes and representatives of reason: Wahrmund and his two sons. One of the sons acts as a character in the play; the other sends a letter from Bordeaux which reveals the French frauds’ true identity. The Wahrmunds are depicted as cosmopolitans in the sense that they are able to acknowledge the achievements of other cultures without sacrificing their own. Why learn French, when you can hire translators? And why give preference to France when one also has business with other countries such as Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, England, Sweden, and Russia (107)? If we view the comic characters in terms of families, the comic constellation is one of an unreasonable family (the Germanns) being seduced and betrayed by another unreasonable one (Sotenville, la Fleche, and La Fleur), and both are brought to reason, or justice, by a third family (the Wahrmunds). Remarkably, the reasonable family, which represents the norm to be achieved, is exclusively male, whereas the unreasonable families include two genders. However, while the Germann daughters are victimized (Hannchen) or rendered powerless

148 (Luischen), la Fleche is a daughter who rules not only Germann’s, but also her own family. She is the one who pulls all strings. In some respects, Luischen is in permanent competition with her. Luischen seems, at first glance, also to be part of the reasonable characters. However, with her belief that German culture is superior to French culture, she shows an ‘unreasonable’ streak. In two instances young Wahrmund reprimands Luischen for her anti-French sentiments: “Meine Jungfer Muhme, man muß niemals ein ganzes Land nach zwey oder drey schlechten Beyspielen richten” (128) (“My young cousin, one must not judge an entire country by two or three bad examples”). Her over-valuation of German national culture makes her similar to la Fleche, who claims to represent a French culture which is merely imaginary. Through the competition of the two female antipodes, the play opens up another layer of conflict with the cultural norm. As already mentioned, the central character la Fleche triggers the desire for the ‘wrong’ French norm. In her role as governess, she makes Germann’s children and even Germann himself ‘cite’ French culture as superior to the German one. However, la Fleche is not an original representative of French culture, but rather ‘cites’ this culture herself through the lens of her upbringing in the German city of Magdeburg. This raises the question of originality of culture. In some respects, her actions can be seen as an attempt at colonizing the German family which is made to appear ridiculous by the incongruence of her upbringing, and the false claim that Paris is her “Vaterstadt” (79) (“home town”, or literally “father city”). While Gottsched’s play on the one hand addresses French culture in its determining function for the German one,4 it emphasizes on the other hand the reciprocity of both national cultures with the governess being only pseudoFrench. What does it mean, then, that la Fleche is not only in a sexually powerful position – her name, flèche (French: “arrow”), is rather phallic – but also fulfils a maternal function: it was Luischen’s mother who on her deathbed made her husband promise that he will hire a French governess (cf. 78, 88, 100). This promise is broken when a German relative is employed in the end. Thinking of the house as a symbolic system, where the ‘Hausvater’ (‘father of the house’) is supposed to rule (which is the lesson to be learned by Germann), it is interesting that the “Frenchwoman in the house” – a double meaning that the German title implies – disturbs the order as a personified maternal will. Considered from a Kristevan perspective, she represents the semiotic intruding upon the symbolic, living out fantasies of which the German daughter does not even dare dream. The play sets up a symbolic order according to which the sons are not to be educated by women, let alone by French women (94); the desire for

4

As for the French influence on German language and culture of the time, it deserves mentioning that French was the language of the courts (cf. Schlösser) and Gottsched’s reformation of the theatre was based on French models (cf. Krebs).

149 a wrong cultural norm is revised and an old norm is reinstated that, with the exclusively male Wahrmund family, has a strong patriarchal structure. At the end of the play, the French, and particularly the female figure la Fleche, are clearly expelled. Until then, however, the play provides ample room for the antics of the “Mamsell” acting in the deceased mother’s stead. As quoted in the beginning, Lessing judged Luise Gottsched’s comedy to be “dirty” and “disgusting”, criticism to which he adds a gender criterion: and this by “a lady”! A closer look however reveals that the comedy rather plays with the negative labelling of other cultures by demonstrating the re-emergence of the ‘abject’ and the semiotic challenge to the symbolic order. Let us now, by way of comparison, turn to his own comedy The Jews, which also deals with two cultures, Judaism and Christianity, and the revision of a socio-cultural norm.

Lessing, The Jews In Lessing’s play, a Traveller saves a Baron from an attack by a band of Jewishlooking thieves. The thankful Baron invites the Traveller to his house, where the latter finds out, much to everyone’s surprise, that the so-called Jews were the Baron’s own administrator Martin Krumm and his accomplice Michel Stich. Out of renewed gratitude, the Baron offers his daughter, the Young Miss5 (who has in the meantime grown partial to the stranger) to him in marriage. Yet when the Traveller indicates that there is an obstacle, and hesitatingly reveals that he is a Jew, the Baron withdraws his offer and wants to give him his entire fortune instead. The Traveller, however, is already wealthy, and he asks only for tolerance towards Judaism. The play focuses on the encounter of two religious cultures: Christianity as the German ‘national’ norm, Judaism as the deviance. Through the comic action, the Christian norm and its inherent prejudice against Judaism, is revised. Compared to Gottsched’s comedy, Lessing’s is rather serious, not only because the wedding is avoided, but also because the crime in question is no joke – it is attempted murder (cf. Barner; Berghahn). The danger in which the Baron finds himself “in [s]einem eignen Haus” (Lessing, Die Juden 407) (“in [his] own house”) exposes the extent of the discrimination against Jews, for Krumm and Stich reveal themselves to be serial killers (377) who would also murder, were they kings, all Jews (380). Despite the obvious seriousness of the subject matter, I would like to investigate the play in terms of comedy and comic heroes, and ask how the clash of cultures works. Krumm and his accomplice Strich fulfill the roles of comic anti-heroes through their unintentional self-disclosure; while chatting with the Traveller in 5

The Traveller (“Der Reisende”), the Baron (“Der Baron”), and the Young Miss (“Ein junges Fräulein, dessen Tochter”) have no personal names, only the villains and servants do.

150 his official capacity as administrator, Krumm cannot refrain from sharing his detailed knowledge about the attack and the real motive of the thieves: “Martin Krumm: Ja, ja, glauben Sie mir nur, sie haben ihn umbringen wollen. Ich weiß, ich weiß es ganz gewiß – Der Reisende: Woher könnt Ihr das wissen?” (379) (“Martin Krumm: Yes, yes, believe me, they wanted to kill him. I know, I know it for sure –/ Traveller: How can you know?”). The villains are unmasked with the help of two props: a couple of beards, which fall out of Krumm’s pocket (404), and a silver tobacco box, which Krumm steals from the Traveller. Especially the silver box leads to a number of typically comical subject-object switches and contributes to the serious turn as well: Krumm gives the box to Lisette, the object of his affection; however, she uses the box to obtain information about the stranger from his servant, Christoph. Yet Christoph, too, undermines his role as Lisette’s object by inventing a story in which his master was involved in a duel and had to flee as a consequence. (The truth is that Christoph does not have a clue who his master is). The box finally reaches the Traveller himself, who presents it to Christoph as a gift after all the confusion has been lifted. Since Christoph has just exclaimed, referring to the Bible, how inappropriate it is to serve a Jewish master: “Was? Sie sind ein Jude, und haben das Herz gehabt, einen ehrlichen Christen in ihre Dienste zu nehmen? Sie hätten mir dienen sollen” (413) (“What? You are a Jew, and had the heart to take an honest Christian in your service? You should have served me”), the gesture resembles a bribe, through which the Traveller is attempting to buy the servant’s good opinion towards Judaism. Comic heroes on a different level are the servant figures Christoph and Lisette. The Traveller once calls Christoph a “Narr” (407) (“fool”), and indeed his creativity about his master’s identity makes him seem rebellious in a playful manner against the discursive order. While the serious couple of higher social rank, the Young Miss and the Traveller, are not allowed to marry, a happy reunion is to be expected on the layer of the servant figures. The concluding dialogue between Christoph and Lisette even suggest that Christoph might be a Jew himself: “Lisette: Und wanns dazu kömmt, ist Er wohl auch ein Jude, so sehr Er sich verstellt?/ Christoph: Das ist zu neugierig für eine Jungfer gefragt!” (414) (“Lisette: And when it comes to the truth, you might be a Jew as well, as much as you disguise yourself?/ Christoph: That is too curious a question, for a young maid!”). Acts of citation play an important role in this comedy, first in the Jewish disguise of the villains Krumm and Stich (with the stereotypical beards), and second in the Traveller’s incognito up to the end, which gives the play a serious turn. Implying that a marriage with the Young Miss is impossible, he invokes “Schicksal” (412) (“fate”), whereas the Baron invokes “Himmel” (“heaven”) asking: “So gibt es denn Fälle, wo uns der Himmel selbst verbietet dankbar zu sein?” (413) (“So, there are cases, in which heaven itself prevents us from being

151 thankful?”). As Jürgen Stenzel rightfully suggests, the “heaven” invoked by the Baron is nothing other than the Prussian government and its anti-Jewish laws (120). But on top of that, “heaven” is also the name of the symbolic order and its foundational Christian cultural norm that in the course of the play is endangered by criminal activities in its own realm – as the Baron says, in his “own house” –, and reinstated in a revised form by a true representative of Judaism. As in Gottsched’s play, the relationship between the two cultures is one where the so-called foreign culture has a determining function for the domestic, or ‘national’, one. At the foundation of Lessing’s play lies a foreign national and religious model, for the rejected Judaism can be seen as the basis for the domestic, Christian religion. An anonymous critic of the time even speaks of a ‘maternal’ function of Judaism when he observes that Lessing’s play was written at a time, “wo der Verfasser mit vortreflichen Köpfen einer Nation in Bekanntschaft gerathen ist, deren Religion die Mutter der unsrigen ist, die wir aber ihrer Religion wegen verachten und hassen” (Review, 14 May 1767, qtd. in Lessing im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen 180) (“when the author has made the acquaintance of some of our nation’s outstanding minds whose religion is the mother of ours, but whom we despise and hate for their religion”). If we take into account this image of Judaism as the “mother” of a Christianity hating its mother, the relationship between the two cultures is here represented as a process of abjection of the sphere of the mother to allow for the creation of a Christian German national norm. Expressed in Kristevan terminology, Judaism would thus be the semiotic of the symbolic Christianity. Accordingly, in the play, the semiotic is abjected from two different angles: through the vulgar anti-heroes Krumm and Stich, but also through the refined Baron. In his role as potential father of the bride, the Baron acknowledges the humanity of the Traveller but decides to let him travel on, for Judaism (the semiotic) is to be prevented from taking up roots. Remarkably, the only characters who are free from religious prejudices are the two women, the Baron’s daughter and the maid Lisette. But only the comic female figure, who belongs to the servant class, is allowed to fulfil her desire for a husband, and even for one who might be a Jew. If we compare the comic system of both comedies, they share the commonality that the representatives of the ‘wrong’ norm are marked by means of citational acts. In Gottsched’s play, the French governess makes her pupils ‘cite’ French language and culture, although she (together with her family) is not really French herself. In Lessing’s play, we have villains who ‘cite’ Judaism through stereotypical disguise. In both cases, the frauds work to disturb the realm of a father. As opposed to the unreasonable characters, the representatives of reason support the norm that needs to be established: the Wahrmund family in Gottsched’s play, the Traveller in Lessing’s. Yet the goal in both comedies is not a dichotomous image of the two cultures, but rather a reciprocal one.

152 Through the layering of French and German, or Judaic and Christian culture, both comedies unfold a palimpsestual vision and plea for acceptance of cultural diversity. In both plays, the foreign culture challenging the domestic one can be seen as the re-emergence of the sphere of the mother, the semiotic intruding into the symbolic, thus questioning the cultural norm as a monolithic power. There is a difference, however, in terms of gender. Whereas Gottsched’s main character is a ‘phallic woman’, ruler of her own family and Germann’s family, acting in the deceased mother’s stead, and disturbing the patriarchal norm, Lessing’s comedy lacks a mother figure6 and leaves the disturbance of the socio-cultural and discursive norm through comic action to bring forward the rather serious and fairly modest request for tolerance.

Works Consulted Barner, Wilfried: Lessings “Die Juden“ im Zusammenhang seines Frühwerks. In: Humanität und Dialog. Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht. Ed. by Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Lawrence G. Lyon. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1982. Pp. 189–209. Berghahn, Klaus L.: Comedy without Laughter. Jewish Characters in Comedies from Shylock to Nathan. In: Laughter Unlimited. Essays on Humor, Satire, and the Comic. Ed. by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. Madison (WI): University of Wisconsin Press 1991. Pp. 3–26. Bohm, Arndt: Authority and Authorship in L.A.G.’s “Das Testament”. In: Lessing Yearbook 18 (1986). Pp. 129–140. Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York – London: Routledge 1993. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 1. 1972. New York: Viking 1977. —. What is Minor Literature? In: Kafka: for a Minor Literature. 1975. Minneapolis (MS): Minnesota University Press 1985. Pp. 16–27. Freud, Siegmund: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. In: Gesammelte Werke. Ed. by Anna Freud. Vol. 6. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1999. Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm: Briefe über die Merkwürdigkeiten der deutschen Literatur. Schleswig – Leipzig: Hansen 1766–1767. Gottsched, Luise Adelgunde Victorie: Die Hausfranzösinn, oder die Mammsell. Ein deutsches Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen. In: Die deutsche Schaubühne. Ed. by Johann Christoph Gottsched. Vol. 5 (1744). Reprint. Stuttgart: Metzler 1972. Pp. 67–190. —. The French Housekeeper. In: Pietism in Petticoats and Other Comedies. Trans. by Thomas Kerth and John R. Russel. New York: Camden House 1994. Pp. 139–209.

6

Similar to the lack of strong or positive mother figures in Lessing’s other plays, as Gustafson investigates in a Kristevan reading of his works.

153 Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992. Gustafson, Susan E.: Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers. Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1995. Jauß, Hans Robert: Über den Grund des Vergnügens am komischen Helden. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 103–132. Kerth, Thomas, and John R. Russel: Introduction. In: Pietism in Petticoats and Other Comedies. Trans. by Thomas Kerth and John R. Russel. Columbia (SC): Camden House 1994. Pp. xi–xxxv. Kord, Susanne: Little Detours. The Letters and Plays of Luise Gottsched (1713–1762). Rochester (NY): Camden House 1989. Krebs, Roland: L.A.V. Gottsched und die Vermittlung der französischen Komödie. Von der Elbe bis an die Seine. Kulturtransfer zwischen Sachsen und Frankreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Michel Espagne and Matthias Midell. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag 1999. Pp. 83–97. Kristeva, Julia: Die Revolution der poetischen Sprache. 4th ed. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1992. —. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press 1982. —. Revolution in Poetic Language. In: The Kristeva Reader. Ed. by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press 1986. Pp. 89–136. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel: The Ancient Régime. A History of France 1610–1774. Trans. by Mark Greengrass. Oxford – Cambridge (MA): Blackwell, 1996. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Die Juden. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge. In: Werke. Ed. by Herbert G. Göpfert et. al. Vol 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1996. Pp. 375–422. —. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Ed. by Klaus Berghahn. In: Werke. Ed. Herbert G. Göpfert et. al. Vol 4. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1996. Pp. 228–720. Lessing im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen. Zeitungskritiken, Berichte und Notizen, Lessing und seine Werke betreffend, aus den Jahren 1747–1781. Coll. and ed. by Julius W. Braun. Berlin: Stahn 1884. Reprint Hildesheim: Olms 1969. Loster-Schneider, Gudrun: Louise Adelgunde Gottscheds “Das Testament”. Ein parodistisches Vermächtnis zur Gottschedschen Komödienpoetik. In: Formzitate, Gattungsparodien, ironische Formverwendung. Gattungsformen jenseits von Gattungsgrenzen. Ed. by Andreas Böhn. St. Ingbert: Röhrig 1999. Pp. 59–83. Pailer, Gaby: Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched: Die Hausfranzösinn, oder die Mammsell. Ein deutsches Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen. In: Lexikon deutschsprachiger Epik und Dramatik von Autorinnen (1730–1900). Ed. by Gudrun Loster-Schneider and Gaby Pailer. Tübingen: Francke 2006. Pp. 168–170. Sargentson, Carolyn: Merchants and Luxury Markets. The Merchants Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris. London: The Victoria and Albert Museum 1996.

154 Schlösser, Rainer: Luise Gottscheds “Die Hausfranzösin” und das Französische in Deutschland. In: Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3.1 (1997). Pp. 49–62. Stenzel, Jürgen: Idealisierung und Vorurteil. Zur Figur des ‘edlen Juden’ in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Juden in der deutschen Literatur. Ein deutsch-israelisches Symposium. Ed. by Stéphane Moses and Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1986. Pp. 114–126. Stierle, Karlheinz: Komik der Handlung, Komik der Sprachhandlung, Komik der Komödie. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 237–268. Young, Robert J. C.: Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge 1995.

Sabine Wilke

Indigenous Laughter: The Voice of the Other in Tales from the “South Seas” The essay investigates early contact narratives between Polynesians and Europeans in the 18th and 19th century (Bougainville, Foster, Cook, E.T.A. Hoffmann) and their inherent depictions of native agency. Narrative descriptions and visual representations of the natives’ reaction to contact with Europeans contain many valuable clues for a more ‘adequate’ discussion of the moment of encounter. The frequently humorous passages in which indigenous agency is reported indicate that the European voyagers were taken by surprise, wondering, how anybody could possibly laugh at the representatives of the obviously superior civilization. Indigenous laughter seems to threaten the European norms of social behaviour while faithfully recording it; the European explorers, at the same time, found a way of containing it through the narrative.

Anthropologists of Pacific Island cultures have repeatedly pleaded for “a more even-handed discussion of contact between Polynesians and Europeans than has been common in accounts and critiques of eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century voyages of so-called discovery” (Calder, Lamb, and Orr 1). Ethnographers may have access to data collected through archeological fieldwork or other methods, but literary historians such as I have to resort to textual evidence, in this case the tales written by white Europeans – scientists, ship captains, artists etc.—who were in pursuit of “conquest”, whether they consciously supported the agenda or not. As opposed to the case of local knowledge about the Spanish conquista preserved in Aztec manuscripts (cf. Kiening 166) we have no responses authored by indigenous people from the era of first contact in the Pacific. What I am proposing is to look critically at the corpus of early European contact narratives, their plentiful illustrations, and the fictionalization of these narratives in contemporary prose, and to re-examine these data with the intent of seeking out (secondary, and, to be sure, projective) descriptions of native agency. My argument is that in early European tales of conquest narrative descriptions and visual representations of the natives’ reaction to contact with Europeans contain many valuable clues for a more “adequate” discussion of the moment of encounter. Especially the – frequently humorous – passages in which indigenous agency is reported stand as indicators of a narrative form of excess that suggests that these European voyagers were taken by surprise by the natives’ reactions and did not know how to interpret indigenous agency or contain it properly. How could anyone laugh at the representatives of the obviously superior civilization? Indigenous laughter seems to threaten the European norms of social behavior and, while faithfully

156 recording it, the European explorer, at the same time, found a way of containing it through that narrative. Mary Pratt has introduced two important concepts into the discussion that shall be reviewed here: the idea of transculturation and the concept of the contact zone. Contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 4). What I propose in this paper is that the train of influence in the contact zone traveled not only one-way: to be sure, European cultures put their imprint onto the ‘primitive’ cultures that they ‘discovered’ (by introducing iron, modern tools, etc.), but the encounter in turn also had some effect on the self-understanding of Europeans and the way they identified culturally. The concept of transculturation can steer us away from this (false) idea of a one-way street by insisting on indigenous agency in the process of selecting which cultural materials were appropriated by indigenous cultures and which ones were not. As Lynne Whitey has shown, “the discovered people were engaged in their own form of exploration among the foreigners who visited their shores, with their own methods of recording their observations, by preserving European objects and adding stories of the explorers to their long and complex oral traditions” (10). Robert Young has shown that colonial discourse is not as homogenous as previously thought, and that it contains traces of the other inside itself (cf. 22–27). This idea is echoed by Steve Clark’s work on the travel narrative that insists on its hetero-glossic function. There are “indigenous modes of expression and oppressed voices inscribed within the narratives of the conqueror” (4f.). These traces are always already hybrid, they can never emerge without any kind of European framing (cf. Herzog 1, Spivak 104, Spurr 3f.). Homi Bhabha’s theoretical intervention brought to the fore the complexity of the concept of the hybrid (cf. 28). With the help of Bhabha, one can understand the laughing native as the quintessential representation of the hybrid, not as the unframed voice of the other (as ethnographers may have it) since he/she speaks only through European discourse. Indigenous laughter occupies the space of cultural difference, a third space, so to speak, from which the enunciation of culture is acknowledged. The natives are laughing at the Europeans, but the textual and visual representations of this laughter turn this site of the potential return of the semiotic (and the potential disruption of European discourse) into a scene of reaffirmation – only to be deconstructed from within as we will see. It is the European text that offers a level of (unintended) self-reflexivity through moments of comic relief where the reader can laugh with the natives at the European explorers. As Stefan Horlacher and Andreas Böhn have shown in the introductory essays to this volume, strategies of the comic are social games in which human beings play with the values, norms, and meaning of their society,

157 but these strategies are seldom applied towards its destruction. The seemingly transgressive impulse of indigenous laughter is redirected in the European narrative of first contact. We will see, however, how the readers of these narratives – the contemporary readers as well as today’s – have the chance to rescue the initial subversive impulse. Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s account, Voyage autour du monde: par la frégate du Roi la Boudeuse et la flûte L’Étoile, is often credited with providing the frame for the idolizing descriptions of life in Polynesia. His famous narrative of Tahiti as the New Cythera where the women are friendly and sexually attractive, the men are tall and healthy, the climate is ideal, where there is enough food and water and nobody needs to work hard to live a comfortable life makes abundant reference to the classical period. In such a world, indigenous laughter can only assume the most benign manifestation: it becomes the smile of innocence and beauty – a gendered smile, as it turns out, a smile we know so well from the Mona Lisa and other iconic renditions of classical beauty in the history of Western art. Bougainville reports only one instance of indigenous laughter other than the smile of innocence as a reaction to the crew’s attempt at trying to find out whether or not two large wooden figures found in one of the leaders’ house had any religious significance: “In order to find out whether these were idols, we knelt before them, then spat on them, stepped on them, these actions, each one so different, attracted in equal degree the laughter of the watching Indians” (73); in other words, the Tahitians placed no particular religious emphasis on these figures and were rather amused by the way the Europeans treated their objects. This aspect of amusement, I argue, is a friendly expression of indigenous agency as it is transmitted to us through Bougainville’s narrative. The natives are laughing at the Europeans who are performing certain scenes that have a comic relief function for the indigenous audience. The staged drama inadvertently turns into a comedy and the actors have no clue why that is and how it happened. Captain James Cook, as we know from John Hawkesworth’s compilation of Cook’s voyages from 1773, An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere from the same year, faced a similar dilemma. On the one hand, he was aware of his dependence on the good will of the islanders to secure enough fresh food and water for his crew and so gave strict orders not to provoke the native population. On the other hand, he was appalled by the amount of native thievery and characteristically dealt with it by taking canoes and people hostage until the missing item was safely returned (cf. Whitey 107). This strategy was in essence what led to his demise on the third voyage. And it created problems for the voyage itself as the islanders’ reaction to the practice of hostage taking consisted of a refusal to trade and a cutting off of the visitor’s food supply. Confronted with a hostage situation, they were not amused as they were when Bougainville

158 staged his comedy with the two wooden figures. In a number of cases, Cook had to visit the leaders and beg for the continuation of trade. The Europeans needed fresh food more urgently than the islanders needed nails and glass pearls. I would like to analyse one scene from the first voyage that links up with the topic of laughter and that is the first encounter with native New Zealanders, who appeared to Cook to be frightened upon the sight of the European visitors: they “waved their weapons in the air and broke into a violent dance, sticking out their tongues, rolling their eyes back into their heads until only the whites showed and singing in harsh, guttural tones” (qtd. in Whitey 129–130; cf. Cook 1: 278–280). Cook’s staged drama of first contact produces another theatrical scenario in which the islanders perform what looks to Cook and his crew like a “violent dance”. The allegedly frightened New Zealanders perform a drama of threat and enhance the intended effect with facial and body movements. To Cook, who has no visual competence in the semiotics that informs this dance, this scenario seems violent; from a different vantagepoint, however, it could just as well be interpreted as comical, as the norm of first greeting is challenged in such a performative encounter. The truth is, one will never know. All we have are the (projective and otherwise framed) descriptions of the natives’ reactions to Europeans. No primary subjects exist that could tell a different story. I would like to turn to a scene at Dusky Bay on Cook’s second voyage that had Johann and Georg Forster on board in charge of collecting plant species (cf. Richardsen 59). Upon sight of the Resolution, a few natives paddle towards the boat in a small canoe, Cook leaves some items for them, but nothing is touched, and only a week later they make first contact, this time also introducing gender into the narrative: The man called to us as we passed by from the point of a Rock on which he stood with his staff of destruction in his hand, the two women stood behind him at the skirts of the Woods with each a Spear in her hand, the man seemed rather afraid when we approached the Rock with our Boat, he however stood firm. I threw him a shore two handkerchiefs but he did not descend the Rock to take them up. At length I went up and imbraced him and presented him with such articles as I had about me which disapated his fears (2: 116).1

Cook continues to tell about how the scene unfolded, their “chitchat which was little understood on either side” (ibid.), the natives’ refusal to accept fish and wild fowl, their performance of yet another dance, finally their exchange of goods. The rest of his tale is spent on describing their interaction until their departure. Cook describes one more attempt to connect with two other natives who were “hollooing to us” (2: 124) from the other side of the bay, but would 1

All quotations are in original spelling.

159 not come closer. Only when Cook approached them alone one “made a speech not one word of which I understood, in it were some long pauses waiting as I thought for me to make answer, for when I spoke he proceeded” (2: 124f.). Native speech is rendered as impenetrable “chitchat” that is also performative in the sense that speech is validated by gesture and posture. In this instance we can see how the European becomes an observer of a foreign semiotics that he does not know how to interpret as a system. Typically, individual behaviours and actions are related to what might seem to the observer to be a similar behaviour or action within a European context, but the system is never understood as such. Indigenous hallooing, native speech, wild dancing, and enticing smiles are all taken out of context and described in these European contact narratives as single incidents without referring to the cultural context which informs these behaviours. Cook’s narrative authority is rendered questionable by his complete inability to assume a native perspective (a position Georg Forster came close to). The passages in these European tales of South Sea voyaging in which native agency expresses itself are locations of narrative excess that disrupt the authority of the author. The author intended to represent native agency in a more contained way that would make it seem like the natives would welcome and embrace their European friends. Instead, we see how the narrative falls apart and projects European fears and inadequacies while facing these native cultures. These proto-modern scenes (referring to Andreas Böhn’s contention of the laughing-with-position in this volume) are comedies in which readers may laugh (and dance) with the natives about the European lack of flexibility. Georg Forster traveled with the second of Captain Cook’s voyages and wrote an authoritative account of the events that is to this day hailed as the cradle of modern ethnographic writing (cf. Gilli, Gomsu, Neumann, Strack, and Wuthenow for a small sample of scholarly positions that applaud Forster’s ethnographic work). Forster, we will see, is much more attuned to the performative aspect of scenes of first contact with indigenous culture; in fact, he sees Homeric heroes perform Homeric battles when he looks at Polynesian warriors. Forster also comments on the same memorable story of first encounter with New Zealand natives in Dusky Bay. Here is Forster’s version of the same events: “The New Zealanders halloo’d at their approach” but would not come nearer: “there were seven or eight people [. . .], who looked at us for some time, but notwithstanding all the signs of friendship which we could make, such as calling to them to come to us, waving a white cloth, and promising beads, they did not care to come nearer, and paddled back again the same way they came” (83). In Forster’s account two systems of semiotics clash. Signals like the friendly calling, the white cloth, and the offer of beads that are understood within a European context fail to have the same effect in native cultures. This failure produces quasi-comic relief for the readers who can chuckle about the

160 idea of waving a white cloth at a Pacific Islander. But Forster takes this scene further than Cook. Through Forster we may acknowledge the performative aspect of the scene and actually get to see a version of Cook that was perceived by the native islanders. It is almost as if Forster left us a clue to the ridiculous behaviours on the part of the Europeans and has them perform an act of comedy for the contemporary readers left behind. Another encounter that opens with native hallooing follows just a few days later: As we were returning home, we heard a loud hallooing on the rocky point of an island, which on this occasion obtained the name of Indian Island; and standing in to the shore, we perceived one of the natives, from whom this noise proceeded. He stood with a club or battle-ax in his hand, on a projecting point, and behind him, on the skirts of the wood we saw two women, each of them having a long spear. When our boat came to the foot of the rock, we called to him, in the language of Taheitee, tayo, harre mai, ‘friend, come hither’; he did not, however, stir from his post, but held a long speech, at certain intervals pronouncing it with great earnestness and vehemence, and swinging round his club, on which he leaned at other times. Captain Cook went to the head of the boat, called to him in a friendly manner, and threw him his own and some other handkerchiefs, which he would not pick up. The captain then taking some sheets of white paper out to the native. The man now trembled very visibly, and having exhibited strong marks of fear in his countenance, took the paper: upon which Captain Cook coming up to him, took hold of his hand, and embraced him, touching the man’s nose with his own, which is their form of salutation (Forster 85f.).

That is a dramatic, even comic scene if one was ever written. Forster transforms Cook’s rather factual prose and creates a classic scene of first encounter in which both sides are entirely ignorant of the semiotics of the other culture, where signals are offered but not understood, and where, in the end, the superiour civilization wins the other over and breaks the ice, an ideal scenario intented to validate the effect of European voyaging and to turn this tale into an anti-conquest narrative. The comic relief is produced by the meticulous attention to detail in Forster’s narrative and the stubborn European adherence to a first encounter protocol that does not lead to the intended result. This narrative excess provides a comical effect for the reader who, again, laughs with the native at the European. The fact that the first contact is always intended as contact with and between men regardless of how the other society is organized adds to the comic effect of that passage. Before I analyse fictional sources I would like to examine some of the images of Pacific peoples that were circulating in Europe at that time. I am curious as to whether we will see similar strategies of dealing with the expression of native agency and laughter that were encountered in the analysis of the Enlightenment travelogue, where the description of indigenous laughter slipped away from the otherwise homogenizing tendencies of the text as

161 narrative excess, questioned the authority of the narrating voice, and produced a comical effect for the reader. Bernhard Smith has done pioneering work on the way Europeans imagined the Pacific in their art. Smith starts with the premise that the “mimetic art of Europe promoted the cult of personality and of individualism in the Pacific”, but he adds that “it is well to remember that a contradictory process was also set in motion by those strange artifacts brought back by the voyagers, the aesthetic appreciation of which assisted the rise to prominence of non-mimetic art in twentieth century Europe and North America” (Imagining the Pacific 109; cf. European Visions and the South Pacific). The art of Europe indeed favored the cult of personality as can be seen by the many portraits painted of European explorers. These portraits usually render the subject from an aggrandising frog’s perspective posing in front of an idealized landscape as is evident in the many well-known portraits of Captain Cook. In contrast, I have included some representations of native leaders drawn on one of Cooks’s voyages: for example, Sydney Parkinson’s sketches in pencil entitled Attitudes of Defiance New Zeland (cf. fig. 1) and the engraving entitled The Manner in which the New Zealand Warriors Defy their Enemies, made by R. B. Godfrey after Parkinson’s return to England (cf. fig. 2). The demand for physiognomic information in the sketches focuses primarily on the defiant behaviours whereas the canons of taste typically operate more powerfully in the engraving, transforming the field studies into acceptable imagery according to

Figure 1. Sydney Parkinson, Attitudes of Defiance New Zeland. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Six pencil sketches, each approx. 8 ⫻ 61/2: 203 ⫻ 168. w/m (b.) bell and palisade (c.) crown (d.) GR (e.) Pro Patria (f.) G.

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Figure 2. The Manner in which the New Zealand Warriors Defy their Enemies. Engraving by R. B. Godfrey after Parkinson. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Parkinson (1773) pl. XVII (fp. 92).

the prevalent mode of portraiture (half profile, light shining on the face, full bust, returning gaze, etc.). Similar processes are operating in the following set of images especially the study of a younger man smiling (cf. fig. 3) and the later portrait developed from that study (cf. fig. 4). In the study, versus the much more dignified portrayal in oil that shows but a feeble smile, the native is depicted as laughing. In this set of images, ethnic differences of a physical kind were definitely noted and portrayed in the interest of physiognomical studies. Indigenous facial expressions including smiles, however, are better preserved in the field studies and sketches than in the finished oils and engravings where such expressions are rendered in a more contained way in deference to contemporary aesthetic regimes. The pictorial excess is clearly more noticeable in the studies. If one compares media – the polished and published versions of the European travelogue and the illustrations that frequently accompanied these publications – one can see that the laughing native marks the boundaries of both media, but that he is more specified as a product of a theatrical scene in the texts. The studies of indigenous laughter focus on agency whereas the finished oils transport the native into European aesthetic regimes. Fifty years after the first European had traveled through the Pacific, a tradition of portrayal – narrative as well as pictorial – of first contact had already been established and different genre expectations had formed. Otto von Kotzebue and Adelbert von Chamisso, on their way through the Pacific between 1815 and 1818 on the “Rurik”, judged the natives of Hawaii as perfectly ridiculous – here the intent of comic relief on the part of the author is

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Figure 3. William Hodges, Full face of a younger man with tousled hair, smiling, 4 ⫻ 21/2: 100 ⫻ 64. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. ML ref. SSV*/MAP/1b.

deliberate. We are supposed to laugh with Chamisso at the Hawaiians. The people there are “happy like children” (Chamisso 221) but their native ways have been largely transformed into parodies of European behaviours: they now run around with missionary clothing, try to conform with missionary rules of behaviours, and in general represent a very sad and perfectly ridiculous stage of humankind in Chamisso’s assessment (cf. 232). Chamisso read Cook’s travelogue as a child and admits to fantasizing about this foreign and attractive world in the Pacific that he simply cannot find any more by the time of his travel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I would like to focus on a scene that Chamisso relates when he and another scientist decide to leave the boat in Hawaii for the first time in order to collect plant species. Chamisso tells how he and the German scientist on board, Eschholtz, were immediately surrounded by “a more smiling than threatening crowd” (220). A chief swung his

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Figure 4. William Hodges, Portrait of an unknown Polynesian, red chalk, 211⁄4 ⫻ 143⁄4: 540 ⫻ 373. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. ML ref. PXD 11f. 19a.

spear against them “laughing” and then embraced them as friends – again, the focus is on first encounter as a scene populated by men. Chamisso is excited about collecting his first Hawaiian plants: A Cyperace! I called over to the doctor and showed him the plant from afar. ‘Küperake! Küperake!’ our guide started yelling while swinging a handful of grass over his head and dancing like a maniac. That is how they are, these people, happy as children and you become like them when you live among them. After what I said in my ‘Remarks and Impressions’ about the people of Hawaii, all I need to do is make them appear on stage in little anecdotes and scenes (221).

This is an important passage, not only because it deals with indigenous laughter, mimicry, and theater but because this is a self-declared tale of anticonquest (cf. Weinstein, Reise um die Welt 377f.). Like Bougainville, Cook,

165 and, to some extent, Forster before him, Chamisso relates this anecdote purely from the perspective of the European who performs this dignified activity of collecting plant species and can only be amused by the silly behaviour displayed by the native whom he only needs to “put on stage” in “a little scene” to get the reader to laugh at him. Like Cook, he cannot transcend the European frame and unlike Forster he cannot tell his story in such a way that the performative aspect of it becomes clear. We can see, however, how the native was mimicking European behaviour and making fun of it, that his laughter is not childish, but parodistically undermines the seriousness of the European scientist’s endeavour. The reader may laugh with the native at the European who is unable to detect the parody. Some of these comic dramas in which the European finds himself as object of indigenous ridicule are captured in fictional tales from the South Seas. Where the Enlightenment travelogue could not produce the perspective of parody of European behaviours (Forster comes closest to this with his attention to the performative nature of the contact zone) the fictional renditions bring this point across. The German writer of Gothic tales, E. T. A. Hoffmann, discussed his plans to write a story about two botanizing naturalists in Hawaii and their discovery of a rare insect with Chamisso in 1819. He decided to call the story Haimatochare based on the Greek for “the one who desires blood” laying the groundwork for his ensuing preoccupation with another blood-sucking insect in his tale Master Flea (cf. Hoffmann 512). Like many tales from the South Seas, Haimatochare is framed as an editorial hoax with Hoffmann claiming to have received a series of letters from a friend, “A. v. C.” (Adelbert von Chamisso), that he wishes to bring forward. In these letters two British naturalists write to the governor of New Southwales begging him to take both of them along on his next voyage to Hawaii. The bulk of these letters focuses on a self-description of the desires that make up passionate naturalists and they use the language of (human, heterosexual) love to do that. On a land expedition to explore the fauna and flora of Hawaii, the naturalist Menzies describes the scene of first contact with a rare insect in the language of love, desire, and passion – a move that links the desire of the supposedly innocent naturalist-hero to the overall prevalent European desire for discovery and classification that is a desire to appropriate. Foreign objects are taken from their environments, brought back to Europe, renamed within new classificatory systems, and shown to the public. Menzies takes Haimatochare back to the boat where he is challenged by the other botanist, Broughton, who shot the dove on which she was sitting when Menzies found her and claims to be the first one to discover the species. Needless to say, a bitter struggle ensues which results in a duel and the death of both naturalists. The story is told in a way that highlights the behaviours of the Europeans. Their passion to botanize and appropriate is exposed in this ridiculous first contact scenario in which a bug plays the role of a native princess that is treated and

166 addressed as such. The rules of European heterosexual courtship are tweaked by Hoffmann’s narrator resulting in the parodistic effect of laughing at these protagonists. Gender identity and colonial identity go hand in hand in this scenario of first contact reconfigured as site of love at first sight. While the discovery of the insect was narrated with the help of the language of love and desire and hence acts as comic relief for the reader who indulges in the ridiculous nature of the scene, the sexual pursuit of Menzies by Queen Kahumanu in this story is framed with the deliberate language of parody (cf. Weinstein, Capturing Hawai’i’s Rare Beauty 160). Broughton relates the actions of this figure in the following way: A native queen acting out gestures and poses of melancholy, practicing them in the woods and then showcasing her performance at the native court in the evening can only impress the English naturalist with ridicule. He does not see the possibility of parody through mimesis and mimicry. Native desires directed towards Europeans cannot be represented in a straightforward and aggressive way on the character level; they have to be contained, just like the oil paintings took the edge away from images of laughing natives. In Broughton’s tale, indigenous agency is reduced to the parodistic performance of comic melancholy. Hoffmannn’s reader, however, is capable of turning the laughter back at the characters thanks to the way these characters are portrayed by the narrator. Representations of indigenous laughter and agency in European contact narratives bring out the hybrid nature of native figures and add an element of gendering to these figures. Forster’s smiling nymphs are idealized and contain images of heterosexual seduction. Forster and Cook’s laughing and club swinging natives are perceived as threats and stand for images of defiance. Chamisso’s childlike islanders come across as ridiculous parodies of their former grandeur; Hoffmann’s melancholic queen in hopeless sexual pursuit of the European naturalist transcends that level of ridicule through the narrative perspective which turns against the protagonists. All scenarios investigated here are scenarios of theatrical performance. European and indigenous agency become part of a comic drama of mutual discovery in which both sides are confronted with situations they cannot interpret. The Europeans – master interpreters and proven world conquerors – are clearly challenged in many ways. Cook is appalled by the economy of thiefery practiced by the natives, Forster criticizes what he sees as instances of prostitution, Chamisso is made fun of by his native aid. These behaviours are enlarged in Hoffmann as if portrayed on stage, and the comic nature of them comes out through parody. These scenes are funny because European culture is exposed in all its formality, its stiffness, and silly rules of behaviour. Hoffmann also plays on the gender aspect of these scenes of first contact by pushing the norm of heterosexual courtship. One can laugh with the natives at the Europeans. And one can laugh while reading the European tales and indulging in their detailed and excessive descriptions of native culture

167 from a perspective that is entirely ignorant of that culture, yet claims to be able to make generalizations. The fun is in the detail and how that detail challenges European norms of social behaviour.

Works Consulted Bhabha, Homi K.: The Location of Culture. London: Routledge 1994. Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de: The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. Trans. and ed. by John Dunmore. London: The Hakluyt Society 2002. Calder, Alex, Jonathan Lamb, and Briget Orr (Eds.): Voyages and Beaches. Pacific Encounters 1769–1840. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 1999. Chamisso, Adelbert von: Reise um die Welt mit der Romanzoffschen Expedition in den Jahren 1815–1818. Sämtliche Werke in zwei Bänden. Vol. 2. Ed. by Werner Feudel and Christel Laufer. München: Hanser 1982. Pp. 81–650. Clark, Steve (Ed.): Travel Writing and Empire. Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London: Zed 1999. Cook, Captain James: The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Ed. by J. C. Beaglehole. Vol. 1: The Voyage of the Endeavor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1955. —. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Ed. by J. C. Beaglehole. Vol. 2: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1961. Edmond, Rod: Representing the South Pacific. Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaugin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. Forster, George: A Voyage Round the World. Ed. by Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof. Vol. 1. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2000. Gilli, Marita: Georg Forster. Das Ergebnis einer “Reise um die Welt”. In: Europäisches Reisen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Ed. by Hans-Wolf Jäger. Heidelberg: Winter 1992. Pp. 251–274. Gomsu, Joseph: Georg Forsters Wahrnehmung neuer Welten. In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik 8 (1998). Pp. 538–550. Herzog, Todd: Hybrids and Mischlinge. Translating Anglo-American Cultural Theory into German. In: The German Quarterly 70 (1997). Pp. 1–17. Hoffmann, E. T. A.: Haimatochare. In: Werke Ed. by Herbert Kraft and Manfred Wacker. Vol. 4. Frankfurt/M.: Insel 1967. Pp. 153–65. Howe, K. R.: Nature, Culture, and History. The Knowing of Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2000. Kiening, Christian: Das wilde Subjekt. Kleine Poetik der Neuen Welt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006. Neumann, Michael: Philosophische Nachrichten aus der Südsee. Georg Forsters “Reise um die Welt”. In: Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Hans-Jürgen Schings. Stuttgart: Metzler 1994. Pp. 517–544.

168 O’Brien, Patty: The Pacific Muse. Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. Seattle – London: University of Washington Press 2006. Pratt, Mary Louise: Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge 1992. Richardson, Brian W.: Longitude and Empire. How Captain Cook’s Voyages changed the World. Vancouver B.C.: UBC Press 2005. Smith Bernhard: European Visions and the South Pacific. New Haven – London: Yale University Press 1985. Smith, Bernhard: Imagining the Pacific. In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven – London: Yale University Press 1992. Smith, Bernhard and Rüdiger Joppien (Eds.): The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press 1985. Spivak, Gayatri: Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader. Ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester Wheatsheat 1994. Pp. 66–111. Spurr, David: The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press 1993. Strack, Thomas: Zur kulturellen Dimension individueller Fremderfahrung. Georg Forsters “Reise um die Welt” als Kommentar zum kognitiv-kommunikativen Potential des Reiseberichts. In: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 114 (1995). Pp. 161–181. Weinstein, Valerie: Capturing Hawai’i’s Rare Beauty. Scientific Desire and Precolonial Ambivalence in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Haimatochare”. In: Women in German Yearbook 18 (2002). Pp. 158–178. —. Reise um die Welt. The Complexities and Complicities of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Anti-Conquest Narratives. In: The German Quarterly 72 (1999). Pp. 377–395. Withey, Lynne: Voyages of Discovery. Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press 1987. Wuthenow, Ralph-Rainer: Reise um die Welt. In: Neue Sammlungen. Zeitschrift für Erziehung und Gesellschaft 9 (1969). Pp. 528–40. Young, Robert J. C.: Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London – New York: Routledge 1995.

Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza

Subverting the Pantragic Heroine: Nestroy against Hebbel By ironically referring to Johann Nestroy as a Viennese “plum-pudding-genius”, Friedrich Hebbel reveals a deep conflict between the two writers which has, above all, one cause: Judith. Nestroy’s 1849 travesty, Judith und Holofernes, is a parody of Hebbel’s 1840 tragedy, Judith. In this parody, Joab (disguised as Judith) becomes Bethulia’s celebrated heroine by cutting off a papier-mâché head. Nestroy thus rejects Hebbel’s Judith, who triggers her own psychological destruction by decapitating Holofernes. In giving Hebbel’s concept of the pantragic heroine a severe slap in the face, Nestroy questions Hebbel’s pantragic concept of drama and his dichotomous understanding of gender. This essay demonstrates how Nestroy subverts Hebbel’s concept of the pantragic through a variety of comic elements.

Friedrich Hebbel waited nine years to see the performance of his tragedy Judith on the Viennese stage. The première took place on 1 February 1849. Judith was played by Hebbel’s wife, Christine Enghaus. The following day, Hebbel wrote in his diary: “Gestern ging meine Judith [. . .] über das Hofburgtheater [. . .]. Ihrer Natur nach flößte sie dem Publikum Respekt ein, gewann ihm aber keine Liebe ab” (Tagebücher 3: 4526) (“Yesterday, my Judith was performed in the Hofburgtheater [. . .]. Due to its nature, it earned the audience’s respect, but it couldn’t win its love”).1 Instead of receiving Vienna’s love, he received Vienna’s criticism. The first hostile review was published two days later. And two days after that, a brief sketch appeared in Der Wiener Zuschauer (The Viennese Observer) under the mocking title: “Judith und Holofernes Nummero zwei, oder: Wie viele Akte braucht man, um den Kopf zu verlieren?” (“Judith and Holofernes Number Two, or: How Many Acts Does One Need in Order to Lose One’s Head?”).2 It did not end here. A few weeks later, Johann Nestroy gave his parodistic answer to this question: one act only! On 13 March 1849, the first anniversary of the Revolution in Vienna, Nestroy’s one-act play Judith und Holofernes was performed anonymously in the Carltheater. This time Judith – or in fact Joab in Judith’s clothes – was played by Nestroy himself. Nestroy’s première won what Hebbel’s could not: storms of enthusiastic applause.3 During 1 Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are my own and emphases according to the original. 2 The review was reprinted in McKenzie’s historical-critical edition of Judith und Holofernes (318–321). 3 Despite the overall popularity of the production Judith und Holofernes, several contemporary critics accused the play of wishing to perpetuate hatred and contempt for Jews (Walker 99).

170 its first month, his play was performed seven times and its average profit was 373 Gulden higher than that of his other March pieces (Hüttner 3–25). It enjoyed such popularity – going on to amuse sixty-seven audiences in the following thirteen years (Hein 4) – that the actor playing Holofernes in the Viennese productions of Hebbel’s play was henceforth requested by the audience to play his role as a self-parody (McKenzie 129). Hebbel, though, did not seem to care. Although he carefully followed the reception of his Judith, he remained remarkably silent on Nestroy’s success. This was a surprise considering that he had just revised his harsh words about Vienna’s “PlumpuddingsGenius” (Vermischte Schriften 2: 366) (“plum-pudding-genius”) by praising Nestroy’s outstanding jokes (3: 261). When he finally mentioned Nestroy again, in the early 1860s, his words were profoundly offensive. He called Nestroy a “Genius der Gemeinheit” (2: 224) (“genius of meanness”) whose plays poisoned the Viennese stage. There is no reason to doubt Karl Kraus’s explanation of Hebbel’s rejection of Nestroy after Nestroy had demolished his tragedy: “Hebbel, der Nestroy ablehnt, nachdem Nestroys Witz ihm an die tragische Wurzel gegriffen hat” (16) (“Hebbel, who rejected Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit had tackled his tragic root”). The “tragic root” is a keyword here because it refers to a conflict between the two writers which has, above all, one cause: Judith. Nestroy’s travesty aims at the core of Hebbel’s tragedy: the pantragic heroine. With his figure of Joab, who becomes – disguised as Judith – Bethulia’s celebrated heroine by cutting off a papier-mâché head, Nestroy rejects Hebbel’s figure of Judith, who faces her own psychological destruction by cutting off Holofernes’s head. In giving Hebbel’s concept of the pantragic heroine a severe slap in the face, he hits more than just the figure of the “paralysed” woman who brought Hebbel not only joy and courage (Tagebücher 1: 1865), but also his first recognition as a writer. Nestroy questions two things that are essential to Hebbel’s writing: his tragic concept of drama and his dichotomous gender model, in which the borders between the sexes are clearly defined and female border-crossers are afflicted with paralysis. This essay aims to demonstrate how Nestroy subverts Hebbel’s pantragic heroine through a variety of comic elements. First, I shall give an introduction to the intertwining of Hebbel’s discourses of the pantragic and of gender, using as an example his reflections on the story of Judith. After that, selected aspects of Nestroy’s travesty will be discussed. Besides questions about his stage of Viennese “G’spaß” and central features of the text, this essay mainly focuses on the personified travesty itself: on Joab, the cross-dresser.

Conceiving the World ‘Pantragically’ Das Drama stellt den Lebensprozeß an sich dar. Und zwar nicht bloß in dem Sinne, daß es uns das Leben in seiner ganzen Breite vorführt, [. . .] sondern in dem Sinne,

171 daß es uns das bedenkliche Verhältnis vergegenwärtigt, worin das aus dem ursprünglichen Nexus entlassene Individuum dem Ganzen, dessen Teil es trotz seiner unbegreiflichen Freiheit noch immer geblieben ist, gegenübersteht (Hebbel, Ein Wort über das Drama 3). Drama represents the action of life on life itself, not merely by bringing life in all its fullness before us, but in the sense that it reveals the critical relationship in which the individual stands to the universal from which he is separated, but of which, in spite of his incomprehensible freedom, he has never ceased to be a part (Rees 27).

Although Hebbel was a dramatist – he wrote, and wrote about, tragedies, tragicomedies, and comedies – he was primarily interested in the renaissance of the German tragedy and bürgerliches Trauerspiel. His concept of the ‘tragic’ or the ‘pantragic’, as he calls it, is a conglomerate of idealistic and materialistic, deistic and pantheistic, mystical and speculative thoughts of the 19th century (Keller 117). According to Hebbel, the fundamental principle in life is a dualism, a conflict between the Individual and the Universal, or God, the Eternal, the Idea, as Hebbel calls it. Between the two forces, the individual and the universal, there is a never-ending struggle (Tagebücher 2: 2129). At the same time, the eternal needs the temporal, for only through the temporal can the eternal reach consciousness of itself – “Selbstgenuß” (3: 4039). But while the struggle of the individual against the forces that hold the world together in its inmost fold is as endless as it is unavoidable, the victory of the individual is impossible. In Hebbel’s tragic system, there is only one necessity: that the world subsists (2: 2828). The task of the drama, the highest form of art, is to show in a symbolic way the relationship in which the world and man stand at any particular time of the idea. The drama is a large circle made up of smaller ones; time fills the small circles with its material content. The small circles – the individual acts and personal struggles – must dissolve into the great circle, the universal, and thereby be purified. Although Hebbel relates the “burning pain” of the pantragic experience to all the human “Polypen-Glieder” (3: 3736) (“tentacles”) of the universe, this experience is not as neutral in gender matters as it may seem. His pantragic view of the world is connected with his pantragic view of the Querelle de Femme. Friedrich Schiller’s poem Die Geschlechter (The Sexes) is more than just a poem. It reveals in its flowery way how literary production creates and confirms notions of sex and gender, in this case the newly established bourgeois two-sexmodel: “Leise lös’t sich das Band, es entzweyen sich zart die Naturen” (284) (“Silently the tie loosens, gently the natures divide”). This idea of the “loosened tie” between the two “natures” plays a vital role in Hebbel’s diaries and letters, in which he explores the big “process” between the two sexes: “Das Weib und der Mann in ihrem reinen Verhältniß zu einander” (Tagebücher 3: 3475) (“Woman and man in their pure relationship to one another”). This “pure relationship” between woman and man is characterized as a dichotomy. For example, Hebbel

172 assigns to the woman a collection of characteristics exclusively related to the reproductive sphere, to the “Topographie des Lebens” (Briefwechsel 1: 157) (“Topography of Life”). Moreover, this “pure relationship” resembles a gigantic battle: “Das Weib muß nach der Herrschaft über den Mann streben, weil sie fühlt, daß die Natur sie bestimmt hat, ihm unterwürfig zu seyn” (Tagebücher 4: 5648) (“Woman tries to rule man because she feels that nature has condemned her to be inferior to him”). Hebbel rejects women who leave the narrowest circle of female existence and challenge the hierarchy between the sexes (Briefwechsel 1: 156f.). At a time when securities are no longer secure, when the “big secret” – “das Nichts”, “the Nothing” – is lifted, when the heavens are empty and reduced to charcoal, “verkohlt” (Tagebücher 1: 689), Hebbel insists, like many of his male contemporaries, that there must be a naturally given order – and, therefore, border – between the sexes. According to Hebbel, a female border-crosser, a Grenzgängerin, can only be a mistake of nature: she causes stars to falter and men to fall from deep precipices (Briefwechsel 1: 156f.) – but not only men fall. Women are also affected: “Das Weib ist in den engsten Kreis gebannt: wenn die Blumenzwiebel ihr Glas zersprengt, geht sie aus” (Tagebücher 1: 366) (“Woman is confined to the narrowest circle: if a flower bulb breaks its glass, it goes out”). The metaphor of the “circle” is an indicator that Hebbel’s concept of the pantragic and his concept of gender are intertwined. The more the individual oversteps the borders of its narrow circle, the more it becomes entangled in tragic guilt. As a consequence, the narrower the borders of its circle are, the faster the individual reaches these borders and the more likely it is that it will become entangled in tragic guilt. Although individualization always involves tragic guilt, this is particularly true for female individualization. Since woman is, according to Hebbel, “Beschränkung, Gränze” (2: 2309) (“limitation, border”), who repeatedly tries to overstep the borders of her narrowest circle, the tragic principle is engraved in her female ‘nature’. One could argue that Hebbel’s concept of the pantragic fulfills a function of containment in gender matters. If woman leaves the narrowest circle of her domestic existence, then she goes out, like a flower bulb – and with her Hebbel’s fear of the female border-crosser. This function of containment can be clearly seen in his theoretical reflections on the biblical figure of Judith.4 Hebbel develops the core piece of his 1840 tragedy – the model of the tragic heroine – in his diaries and letters. Although he sees Schiller’s romantic “Jungfrau von Orleans” (“Joan of Arc”) as an unconvincing character (Briefwechsel 1: 142), his confrontation with the story helps him find his tragic motif. Die Gottheit selbst, wenn sie zur Erreichung großer Zwecke auf ein Individuum unmittelbar einwirkt und sich dadurch einen willkürlichen Eingriff [. . .] in’s

4

In my book, I show how Hebbel’s construction of femininity has a function of ‘containing’ emotions.

173 Weltgetriebe erlaubt, kann ihr Werkzeug vor der Zermalmung durch dasselbe Rad [. . .] nicht schützen. Dies ist wohl das vornehmste tragische Motiv, das in der Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orleans liegt. Eine Tragödie, welche diese Idee abspiegelte, würde einen großen Eindruck hervor bringen (Tagebücher 1: 1011). The Godhead itself when, for the attainment of great ends, it directly influences an individual and thereby allows itself an irregular interference with the mechanism of the world, cannot protect its agent from destruction by that very wheel which, for a moment, it stopped or diverted. This is, I take it, the most tragic motif in the history of the Maid of Orleans. A tragedy which reflected this idea would produce a great impression (Rees 57f.).

Two paintings, by Guilo Romano and Horace Vernet, turned Hebbel’s attention to the biblical story of Judith. “Da steht sie, eine reizende Gestalt, [. . .] ganz gottrein und doch weltbefleckt, wie eine entweihte Hostie”, wrote Heinrich Heine about Vernet’s Judith et Holopherne in Paris in 1831, “in ihrem Auge funkelt süße Grausamkeit [. . .], denn sie hat auch den eignen beleidigten Leib zu rächen” (36) (“Here she is, a charming figure, [. . .] divinely pure, but stained by the world, like a defiled host; in her eye sparkles sweet cruelty [. . .] since she still has to seek revenge for her own offended body”). With his famous words about Vernet’s “entweihte Hostie”, Heine unwittingly anticipated Hebbel’s “wirkliches Weib” – with one crucial difference, of course: Hebbel’s “defiled host” in his 1840 tragedy ends up emotionally paralysed. Die Judith der Bibel kann ich nicht brauchen. Dort ist Judith eine Wittwe, die den Holofernes durch List und Schlauheit in’s Netz lockt; sie freut sich, als sie seinen Kopf im Sack hat und singt und jubelt vor und mit ganz Israel drei Monde lang. Das ist gemein; eine solche Natur ist ihres Erfolgs gar nicht würdig [. . .]. Meine Judith wird durch ihre That paralysirt; sie erstarrt vor der Möglichkeit, einen Sohn des Holofernes zu gebären; es wird ihr klar, daß sie über die Gränzen hinaus gegangen ist, daß sie mindestens das Rechte aus unrechten Gründen gethan hat (Tagebücher 2: 1872). I cannot use the Judith of the Bible. There Judith is a widow who entraps Holofernes by craft and cunning; she rejoices when she has his head in a sack, and sings and makes merry for three months with all Israel. This is mean. Such a nature is not worthy of its success. My Judith is paralysed by her deed; she staggers at the possibility of bearing a son to Holofernes; it becomes clear to her that she has overstepped the bounds, that she has, at least, done the right thing from unright motives (Rees 61).

Hebbel uses the biblical Judith as a model of a female border-crosser: a woman who leaves her narrowest circle and kills a man. When she has his head in her sack, she celebrates. However, “[d]as Faktum, daß ein verschlagenes Weib vor Zeiten einem Helden den Kopf abschlug, ließ [Hebbel] gleichgültig, ja, es empörte [ihn] in der Art, wie die Bibel es zum Teil erzählt” (Hebbel, Vorwort 4) (“[t]he fact that long ago a cunning woman cut off a hero’s head left [Hebbel] cold; the way in which the Bible tells the story in part, indeed, angered [him]”). With his Judith, Hebbel overcomes the biblical border-crosser: “In der Judith

174 zeichne ich die That eines Weibes, also den ärgsten Contrast, dies Wollen und Nicht-Können, dies Thun, was doch kein Handeln ist” (Tagebücher 1: 1802) (“In Judith, I portray the act of a woman, hence the strongest contrast, this willing-to-do and inability-to-do, this act which is yet not action”). He depicts a woman who leaves her narrowest circle, lures the man into her net, and becomes entangled in it because of him: “Die meinige [Judith] ist ein wirkliches Weib, das sich verirrt und dafür gestraft wird” (2: 1944) (“My [Judith] is a real woman who gets lost on her way and is punished for it”). When she has his head in her sack, she becomes paralysed. The deterministic aspect of Hebbel’s pantragic concept curbs the heroine, who goes out, like the “flower bulb”. Siegfried Matthus’s 1985 opera Judith sets Hebbel’s scene of Judith’s paralysis to music. The cymbals, the glockenspiel, and the harp lend such an uncanny sound to the scene that Judith’s faint tones seem to waft across from beyond the grave. Eventually the orchestra falls silent. After speaking her last words, Judith falls silent too, as if the life inside her were extinguished. The passacaglia by choir and orchestra is a prayer for salvation; it neither consoles nor reconciles. In other words, Hebbel’s tragic stage intends to make Judith lose her head after decapitating a man. Nestroy’s theatre of Viennese “G’spaß”, however, deals quite differently with its headhunter. Here, the members of the audience are supposed to laugh their heads off when the blow Judith excecutes in a man’s tent leads to the fall of a fake head and the downfall of the (now) headless Assyrians.

Worshipping the Viennese “G’spaß” In explaining his concept of Viennese “Ernst” (“seriousness”), Nestroy gives us a hint of what Viennese “G’spaß” (“fun”) is. Although seriousness has many serious, even horrific sides, Nestroy sees in every serious situation on stage electric spots which produce sparks of laughter when rubbed: “Der Ernst hat eine feyerliche Seite eine schauerliche Seite, überhaupt viele sehr ernsthafte Seiten; aber ein electrisches Fleckerl hat er doch immer, und da fahren bey der gehörigen Reibung die Funken der Heiterkeit heraus” (Die lieben Anverwandten 73). In his opinion, “G’spaß” is never just funny but sentimentally good-natured, and it always has two sides which make one laugh and cry simultaneously: “Ein G’spaß soll niemahls witzig seyn, sondern so gewiß sentimental gutmüthig, daß man mit’n halbeten G’sicht lachen und mit der andern Hälfte weinen kann” (Weder Lorbeerbaum 23f.). With his concept of “G’spaß”, Nestroy shapes his own theatre of laughter “in which the two aspects, seriousness and laughter, coexist and reflect each other, and are indeed whole aspects” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 122). The term “culture of laughter” goes back to Mikhail Bakhtin who emphasizes the deep philosophical meaning of laughter and sees

175 it as a universal category, as a behaviour in the world and to the world (Rabelais 66). But at the same time, his chapter on “The History of Laughter” reveals that the specific triggers and realizations of laughter – why and how we feel and express amusement by smiling and emitting loud, inarticulate sounds – are profoundly historical; they bear the distinctive marks of time. Due to their elusive nature, the comic and laughter can only be approached obliquely, circumspectly, and with certain precautions.5 Nestroy cultivates laughter in order to achieve two things. First of all, he wants to entertain his audience: “G’fallen sollen meine Sachen, unterhalten, lachen sollen d’ Leut’, und mir soll die G’schicht a Geld tragen, daß ich auch lach’, das is der ganze Zweck” (Weder Lorbeerbaum 39) (“My things should be liked, the people should be entertained, they should laugh, and the story should bring me some money so that I can laugh as well – that’s the whole purpose”). Furthermore, he wants to criticize “the evil and the bad”. According to Bakhtin, laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and liberates it. “Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naïveté and illusion, from the single meaning” (Rabelais 123). In German, lachen (to laugh) and lächerlichmachen (to expose someone to ridicule) are related. Nestroy sees this function of exposure and criticism through laughter as the only moral effect of the comic. The comic is the most powerful tool “to neutralize the attraction of the forbidden” and to fight “the evil and the bad”: “Das Lächerlichmachen ist [. . .] das wircksamste Mittel den in der Menschennatur wurzelnden Reitz des Verbothes zu neutralisieren. Das Lächerlichmachen des Bösen und Schlechten ist die einzige moralische Wircksamkeit der Komick” (Briefe 93). The adjective ‘comic’, which in Greek means ‘that which relates to comedy’ is, in modern usage, confined to the sense of ‘laughter-provoking’. Many scholars argue that the characteristics of the comic are incongruity and contrast in the object – the behaviour of the observed person – and emotional seizure and relief on the part of the subject – the observer and his set of expectations.6 Although the term ‘comedy’ has supported numerous meanings over the centuries, it consistently refers to a more structured use of the comic and is mainly applied to theatrical dramas with a happy ending. Aristotle states in his Poetics that comedy originated in phallic songs, recitations of fertility festivals, and is a light treatment of the otherwise profane and ugly (15). Nestroy uses the comic in order to produce laughter and he uses specific genres in order to produce the comic.

5 6

Cf. Horlacher’s approach to laughter in this volume. Cf. the contributions by Pailer, Böhn, and Horlacher in this volume.

176 Rewriting Judith’s Stories A reading of Nestroy’s Judith und Holofernes reveals three things. First, his text is travesty and parody of (at least) two texts: the biblical Book of Judith and Hebbel’s tragedy, entitled after its heroine. Nestroy himself designated Judith und Holofernes as travesty with song. Although theories of comedy are heterogeneous, many do distinguish between travesty, which preserves the action and characters and trivializes the tone and form of the treatment, and parody, which trivializes the action and characters, but retains the tone and form of the original (Yates 112). In Nestroy’s Judith und Holofernes, however, elements of travesty and parody constantly overlap. The closeness of the parody in many scenes to Hebbel’s text, which was available to Nestroy in printed form after 1841, shows that Nestroy’s text developed in an essentially literary way (Yates 113). Parodictravestying forms ridicule the ‘serious word’ in all its generic guises. [T]he process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fit into a high and straightforward genre (Bakhtin, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse 55).

Second, Nestroy’s text is a text of Judith with its own aesthetic reality (Hein 77). There are several scenes in Nestroy’s text for which there are no analogues in the Bible or in Hebbel’s play.7 The abundance of deviations of Nestroy’s text from the original texts produces a whole host of comic effects. It was particularly funny in March 1849 because the audience still had a fresh impression of Hebbel’s Judith. With his muscleman Hanswurst in the role of Holofernes and his disguised soldier Joab in the role of Judith, Nestroy breaks with conventional readings of the story of Judith. His incorporation of satirical takes on contemporary Viennese issues makes this all the more true. Third, Nestroy’s text has a subversive core piece: the travesty of the travesty. The absence of a ‘real’ Judith thus concerns more than just Nestroy’s self-censorship, as Bruno Hannemann claims (124). With his travesti en femme, Nestroy reverses the reception of Judith’s stories and Hebbel’s tragic version in particular. The comic genre itself sets the course of undoing established norms. Practices of parody can serve as strategies to undermine gender models. [T]here is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects. The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations 7 Cf. Scheck’s work about Parodie und Eigenständigkeit in Nestroys Judith und Holofernes.

177 [. . .] and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: “man” and “woman” (Butler 186f.).

One can argue that Nestroy’s parody with its personified travesty reveals Hebbel’s supposedly natural heroine as what she really is: a bourgeois parody of the biblical Judith, consisting of naturalized clichés.

Playing with Images “So was nennt man kein Wunder jetzt mehr heutzutag’,/ Man findt’s ganz natürli und kein Hahn kraht darnach!” (Nestroy, Judith und Holofernes 98) (“We moderns find such things in no way wondrous, though,/ But really rather commonplace, no cause for cocks to crow!”) (Harrison and Wilson 105). The chorus in Joab’s second song indicates that this travesty has its own way of dealing with ancient stories. Although the Carltheater audience might not have been familiar with all the details of Hebbel’s play (Yates 113f.), one may still assume a few things. The audience was probably acquainted with the basic features of the biblical plot and perhaps even with the major inventions of Hebbel’s play, e.g. the figure of the widowed virgin, the sexual encounter between Judith and Holofernes, and Judith’s paralysis. Therefore, this audience would have brought certain expectations to a play entitled Judith und Holofernes. Nestroy undermined these expectations in multiple ways to produce comic effects. How did he execute this? The first answer is that he broke theatrical illusions. While Hebbel’s text upholds biblical illusions in order to successfully stage Judith as a suffering heroine, the spatial, linguistic, personal, and temporal insecurities in Nestroy’s text destroy the biblical setting. According to the dramatis personae, the events on Nestroy’s stage take place in the Assyrian camp and in Bethulia. The audience is prepared for a biblical setting – until Holofernes teaches them otherwise by calling Bethulia “Bettltuttien” (92), a name which comes from Italian perdutto, “broke” (Hein 10). But “Beggarthulia”, as it could be said in English, is not the only foreign word. While most German Judith plays set in modern times use a standardized form of German, Nestroy’s play uses Viennese dialect, soaked with foreign words and fictional Yiddish. Holofernes’s statement about “deutsch – will ich sagen hebräisch” (108) (“German – I mean Hebrew”) points out the obvious: the figures are aware that they do not speak Hebrew, not even a bisserl. In other words, this Bethulia is verwienert – and so are its inhabitants. The characters themselves produce more doubts about the biblical scenery. Some characters do not come from the Bible; a good example is Idun. Although he is introduced as a – male – Assyrian captain, the figure comes from Germanic legends where Idun is the – female – goddess who guards the golden apples of youth. Some others do not come from the Book of Judith. A good example is Joab who is so

178 pugnacious in the Book of Samuel that he gets cursed. And most characters do not even pretend to be at home in an old-testamentary world. This is particularly true for the Jews. Ancient Israelites are equipped with the alleged defects of modern Viennese Jews (Walker 107). Another example is the “Judenfresser” (109) (“Jew-eater”) Holofernes, who knows that he lives in Vienna (92), but that he has to act as if he were one of these “grauen Vorzeitler” (90) (“prehistoric graybeards”) from Assyria. Joab is even more explicit in his second song. In treating all old-testamentary stories as relics of past times, he makes possible a temporal leap forward into the “heutzutag’ ” (“nowadays”), the age of the 1848 wine, the sour brew of the Revolution. The actual revolution in matters concerning Judith is started by him. Joab initiates the play with images of Judith. In contrast to Hebbel’s tragedy, in which only one ‘real’ Judith enters the stage, the audience of Nestroy’s travesty is confronted with three surprises about Judith. These surprises give the second answer to the question of how Nestroy’s play creates some of its comic effects: it concurrently introduces a ‘bunch’ of Judiths. These images of Judith do not cause horror, sorrow, or compassion. Rather, they cause astonishment (everything is different in this play), excitement (anything can happen in this play), and baffling laughter (everything and everyone is upside down, mixed up, and disguised in this play). The first surprise is that there is a Judith, but she does not appear on stage. The only figure listed as Judith in Nestroy’s dramatis personae remains behind the scenes, crying over Manasses’s death (97). Although Joab, who introduces his sister Judith, wants her to follow in the footsteps of her famous namesake, he is confronted with the simple fact that this could-be-heroine is not available for heroic deeds. In other words, this is a Judith play without an acting Judith. This mourning Judith in absentia does not only demonstrate that biblical and nonbiblical images of Judith are intertwined; she also gives someone else – her brother – the opportunity to act on her behalf. The second surprise is that there is a Judith who appears on stage, but this one is not a Judith. It is Joab disguised as Judith. In Nestroy’s text, it is a volunteer in the Hebrew army who decides to play Judith’s role. Joab initiates the first play within the play. The audience knows what the victim Holofernes cannot know – that this is not the biblical Judith, who, apparently, visited him in his dreams; this is “Betrug! Verfälschung! Felonie!” (114) (“Fraud! Deception! Trickery!”). As a selfappointed hero/ heroine, Joab knows what the audience expects from a story of Judith – namely, Holofernes’s head – and he prepares himself accordingly. He masquerades as a richly-adorned Hebrew girl (106). In this dual role, the modes of speech distinguish the characters: Joab, as himself, speaks in prose, while as Judith, he speaks in verse. He drives the Assyrians crazy in his sumptuous raiment; they perceive him as a cute, cuddly, charming Hebrew girl. This is accentuated by the physical contrasts of the staging. In the première, the slim Nestroy takes the part of Judith, while Holofernes is played by the tubby Wenzel Scholz (McKenzie 130). Joab’s masquerade shows that nothing is as it

179 seems in gender matters, and in so doing presents the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as highly effective illusions. But this is not all. It also helps the main protagonist to keep distance from the plot. Since Joab knows that he is not Judith, he dissociates himself from Holofernes’s demands for “Bussi[s]” (110), Viennese kisses. Moreover, it serves as a means to subvert a particular image of femininity: Hebbel’s “flower bulb”. The third surprise in this play is that there are two more images which function as models. The biblical image is implicitly evoked through the title of the play, the dramatis personae, and central aspects of the story, e.g. the presence of a besieged city called Bethulia and a brutal captain called Holofernes. Inspired by his sister’s name, Joab explicitly mentions Israel’s saviour in the 15th scene. Furthermore, he introduces himself to Holofernes as a foolish version of the “Alttestamentarische” (107) (“Old Testament girl”). The references to the biblical Judith emphasize the contrast between biblical and non-biblical readings of the story, and show that Bethulia’s liberation is possible without causing tragic side effects. This keyword – the tragic – points to the second image: Hebbel’s Judith. The dramatis personae, where Joab’s servant is called “Mirza”, gives us the first hint. Even more important in this context, however, is the way Joab plays with central motifs and scenes from Hebbel’s Judith to carry out the functions of Nestroy’s travesty. His play is an additional tool: a bit of Hebbel’s image helps Joab pull the wool over Holofernes’s eyes. It is a warning: too much of Hebbel’s image puts his heroic mission at risk. And it is a clear rejection of Hebbel’s pantragic model.

Playing with Hebbel’s Unheroic Heroine: Unmasking Judith’s Selfish Self Joab’s playful engagement with the tragic Judith begins with his inspiration in the 15th scene of Nestroy’s play: “Ha, Beleuchtung von Oben, –! profetische Einwirkung von Unten –! Begeisterung von allen Seiten –! [. . .] Wo is der Kammerschlüssel von der Judith?” (97) (“Aha! Illumination from on high –! Prophetic influence from below –! Enthusiasm from all sides –! [. . .] Where is the key to Judith’s chamber?”). On the surface of the text there is little doubt. Due to his inspiration, Joab feels that he has a duty to play the role of Judith. In this scene, Joab presents himself as a critical, secularized contemporary for whom miracles and miraculous decisions are “ganz was Ordinär’s” (“something very ordinary”): “Mein Plan is ein Wunder des Himmels wenn er gelingt –!” (98) (“My plan is a miracle from Heaven – if it works!”). But much more happens under the surface of the text. Joab makes fun of the ‘divine’ calling of Hebbel’s Judith by showing that her inspiration is based on selfish needs. First, Joab’s expression “illumination from on high” refers to the strange light of knowledge that, at the end of the scene, Hebbel’s Judith experiences and associates with divine powers. In the emptiness of her chamber, Hebbel’s Judith reaches for a rather human solution: herself. She is willing to turn

180 Jesus’s painful cries for help – “My God, my God, why did you leave me?” (Matthew 27,46) – into a very personal order: “Gott! Gott! Mir ist, als müßt’ ich Dich am Zipfel fassen, wie Einen, der mich auf ewig zu verlassen droht!” (25) (“God! God! It is as if I had to grab you from below like someone who wants to leave me forever!”). Joab brings to light two things: Judith’s supposedly divine call is cast as a product of autosuggestion and Hebbel’s diary entries about God’s influence in worldly or, more precisely, in Judith matters are cast as theoretical concepts. Second, Joab’s expression “prophetic influence from below” refers – in the literal way – to the sensual motifs hidden behind Judith’s heroic decision. Although Hebbel’s Judith plays the saviour of her people, she is not only driven by her phantasies of sweet “abysses” and “fusions”, she also craves openly for sinful deeds. “Ich mögt’ ihn sehen!” (23) (“I want to see him!”), is her first reaction to Holofernes’s invasion. She is even more explicit after her calling: “Der Weg zu meiner That geht durch die Sünde! Dank, Dank Dir, Herr!” (26) (“The path to my deed leads through sin. Thank you, thank you, my lord!”). Joab exposes Judith’s self-sacrifice as a product of her sexual desires. Third, Joab’s expression “enthusiasm from all sides” refers to something that Hebbel’s Judith desires, but represses: the triumphal victory at the end. Her words after the murder show that she was already driven by her social needs before the murder: “weh’, man wird mich rühmen und preisen, wenn ich’s nun verkünde, und noch einmal wehe, mir ist, als hätt’ ich auch daran vorher gedacht!” (74) (“woe, one will praise me now when I announce the victory, and again woe, I think I even thought about this before!”). Joab reveals Judith’s role as Bethulia’s chosen saviour as a product of her drive for personal prestige. In other words, by making fun of Judith’s multi-layered hamartia in the scene of the calling, Joab tackles the “tragic root” of the tragic heroine.

Mocking Encounters between the Sexes In the scene between Judith and Holofernes, the audience is confronted with a peculiar encounter. The muscleman Holofernes, hiding his “schönes Geschlecht” (97) (“beautiful sex”), meets the lithe and lissom “Hebräer-Maid” Judith, hiding her male sex. Introducing himself to Holofernes as an innocent widow, Joab announces the subversive play with Hebbel’s widowed virgin. With his mock-sentimental adaptation of Judith’s narration of the story of Manasses, he illustrates the effect of Verwienerung: “Nestroy tells the story, but in verse: in doggerel couplets, with deliberately clumsy rhymes, which by jarring on the ear of the audience [. . .] serve to make a number of parodistic points” (Yates 117). Nestroy’s story shows that Hebbel’s story is obsolete. First, the story loses its important role: “’s Schaut nix heraus bey der G’schicht” (108) (“This story leads nowhere”). In Hebbel’s text, Judith’s marriage

181 with Manasses is a key scene which sets the course for the entire story. The motif of the widowed virgin motivates the climax of the tragedy – the murder – which transforms Judith into a paralysed heroine. In Nestroy’s text, the story functions as a pseudo-biographical anecdote which is used to entertain Holofernes and to win his trust – and to tackle once more the “tragic root” of the tragic heroine. Second, the story questions the image of the suffering woman. It shows that the encounter between Judith and Manasses can turn out in a different way. In Hebbel’s text, the wedding night is a nightmare. Judith’s heart stops beating, her blood turns to ice, and she falls into self-hatred because Manasses cannot fulfill his task and tortures her with his evil looks. Although tears also appear in Nestroy’s text, the Judith in this story fights against the man who is frightened by the moonlight, against Manasses’s “horrific, stiff sheep face”: “[W]as treibt er/ [. . .]/ ‘Willst mich schrecken’, – sag’ ich – ‘genug’/ [. . .]/ ‘du garst’ger Manasses!’” (108) (“[W]hat is he doing?/ [. . .]/ ‘Do you scare me’ – I say – ‘it is enough!/ [. . .]/ you nasty Manasses!’”). The climax of the story, Manasses’s death, is undermined when a near-quotation of Hebbel’s version is followed by an anti-climactic translation: “‘Ja’ – sagt er – ‘jetzt will ich dir’s sagen, du –’ Bumsdi! fall’n ihm die Augen zu” (109) (“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I shall tell you, you –’ Bumsdi, his eyes close”). Nestroy’s new story demonstrates that Manasses’s impotence and death is not a convincing reason for a heroine to become a psychological hardship case. Third, the story involves certain risks. Joab’s story of Manasses is an indicator that the play with a tragic Judith becomes a dangerous adventure. It produces unexpected events. The anecdote increases Holofernes’s interest in Judith and leads to his “Bussi” demands. Judith’s refusal of the “Bussi[s]” triggers the conversation about Bethulia’s downfall that is responsible for Judith’s outburst of rage: “Also keine Rettung für meine Nation?!/ Meinen Ruf bracht’ ich zum Opfer, und hab’ nix davon!?” (111) (“Then my nation won’t be saved?!/ I’ve got nothing for the loss of my name!?”). Hebbel invented the furious Judith. Nestroy’s pushy Judith, however, unfolds a different dynamics here and makes Holofernes suspicious. He whispers that he doesn’t trust her and resorts to his ruse which puts Joab’s project at risk. But armed with her ability to play with images, this Viennese Judith is prepared for the worst.

Juggling with an “Abundance of Heads” While the figures of Judith before Hebbel’s play start their mission in the Assyrian camp in secrecy, Hebbel’s Judith confronts Holofernes directly with her murderous intentions (66). Nestroy’s Judith follows her example and introduces the scene with an open threat: “Geben S’ lieber Obacht, daß ich Ihnen nicht morde” (111) (“You better take care I don’t kill you”). But after that, everything differs from Hebbel’s text. Although melodramatic music accompanies the

182 events until the end, there are several indicators that in this decisive scene Nestroy’s Judith says goodbye to Hebbel’s Judith. First, Nestroy’s Judith uses as a model certain features of her “mean” biblical predecessor. In Hebbel’s text, it is the combination of Manasses’s restrained and Holofernes’s unleashed sexual drives that turns Judith into a murderess. In Nestroy’s text, Judith cold-bloodedly carries out her plan. Without any emotional outbursts, she beheads Holofernes, or more precisely, what she thinks is Holofernes. In his role as Judith, Joab is even more convinced of his victory than any other Judith. Before the beheading scene takes place, he instructs the servant to launch the hidden rocket in order to announce the fall of Holofernes’s head. And after this scene takes place, he does not leave the camp silently but, instead, causes an open scandal: “Seht Assirier! hir [sic] halt’ ich ihn beym Schopf,/ Ihr habt einen Feldherrn ohne Kopf!” (113) (“See, Assyrians, what I hold by the hair of the head,/ Your field marshal is headless!”). In contrast to Hebbel’s unhappy heroine, Nestroy’s Judith does not show the slightest scruples or regrets about the murder, but she is stricken with horror when she realizes that she cut off the wrong head! Second, Nestroy’s Judith cuts off the wrong head. Holofernes’s unexpected ruse prevents his expected death. After hearing the threatening words of the furious Judith, this suspicious Holofernes does not pursue sexual punishments. Since he knows about the bloody end of his biblical predecessor, he takes other precautions. In doing so, he introduces the second play within the play. He asks the chamberlain to place a fake head on his bed. Furthermore, he tells Judith two relevant things: where to find his sword and where to find his head. The fake head makes all the difference when Nestroy’s Judith strikes her murderous blow but does not thereby become a murderess. By cutting off a fake head, any tragic development is denied and the parody reaches its climax: the victorious play with the fake head. A “kaschirte[r] Kopf ” (112) is made of papier-mâché or plaster. If one interprets Nestroy’s “kaschirten Kopf ” as a Pappmaschee head, the dual meaning of the German word Papp-Kopf becomes interesting: it is both a head made of paper and other materials mixed with glue as well as a colloquial term for ‘idiot’. In any case, a fake head is always a head without a brain. Though a head-centered reading might seem excessive, it is worth noting that Holofernes’s Papp-Kopf develops its own dynamics in the text. Because this Judith is not a Papp-Kopf, she is able to win the battle against the Assyrians with a fake head. Since the Assyrians completely rely on a Papp-Kopf to deceive and defeat a potentially dangerous visitor, they behave like real PappKöpfe, provoking their absurd end. Third, Nestroy’s Judith gains her victory over Holofernes with “ein Überfluß an Köpfen” (113) (“an abundance of heads”). The juggling with an abundance of heads is particularly significant in a story of Judith. On the one hand, this text tackles one core aspect of the biblical story. Nestroy’s Judith also saves her

183 head by making the Assyrian soldiers lose their heads, but, in contrast to the Bible, there is more than one head involved in this scene – a fake head and a real head that is still attached to Holofernes’s neck. The real head, however, is declared invalid by both the panic-stricken Assyrian army – too busy running to look – and the approaching Hebrew army. “Assad: Auf Holofernes zeigend. Er ist enthauptet, der Kopf gilt nicht!” (113) (“Assad: pointing to Holofernes. He’s been beheaded already; that head doesn’t count!”). On the other hand, the “mean” biblical heroine functions again as a model in this scene. Nestroy’s parody allows the biblical plot to fulfill its redeeming mission. Independently of how one reads Holofernes’s “kaschirten Kopf ”, there seems little doubt that the wrong head produces the right result. In contrast to Hebbel’s Judith, Nestroy’s Judith does not lose her head when the rejoicing Hebrews arrive in the camp. Triumphal shouts do not shatter her. On the contrary, the melodramatic music is drawn out by the howl of triumph: “Schlachtmusik [. . .] Man hebt Joab auf einen Schild und trägt ihn in Triumph herum; vor ihm wird Holofernes in Ketten geführt [. . .] Triumphgeschrei . . .” (114) (“Martial music [. . .] Joab is lifted upon a shield and carried about triumphantly. Before him Holofernes is led in chains [. . .] Triumphal shouts . . .”). During this celebration, the Hebrew boy in Judith’s clothes enjoys being Bethulia’s adored hero or heroine and in so doing he or she shows, again, three things. First, the heroic deed of a Judith does not have to end in selfdestruction, if this Judith takes certain precautions, that is, if she replaces Hebbel’s tragic inventions with biblical and/or comic inventions in the decisive scenes. Nestroy grants the Jewish heroine a travestic, but glorious comeback on the stage of Viennese “G’spaß”. Second, the border between the sexes can be crossed without causing tragic side effects, such as slayed generals and paralysed border-crossers. The only one who resembles a withering flower bulb in the play’s last scene is a brutal bully with a Papp-Kopf, lamenting his dark fate. Third, the success story of a border-crossing cross-dresser questions the supposedly natural – invincible – borders in Hebbel’s gender model – and therefore his Blumenzwiebel scenario. All those who want to play heroines can still become real heroines in the bourgeois age – if they are given a real chance.

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Jakub Kazecki

Black and White in Color or Black Victory? The Comic Effect of Displacement in the Film Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976) by Jean-Jacques Annaud The paper explores how Black and White in Color by Jean-Jacques Annaud is a comedy about racial, national, and gender norms in the conditions of World War I colonial French Africa. It investigates incongruence as the main condition of the comic situations in the movie and its (subversive) effect on the norm: the comic effect subverts not only the norm of the dominant culture of a ‘white man’, meaning that the viewer does not laugh exclusively at the colonial attitude of French settlers. The comic effect subverts also the viewer’s understanding of relationships in Africa: viewers laugh at themselves when realizing that simply modifying or reversing the norm does not eliminate the incongruence, and the reality is far more complex than expected. Thus, the comic effect presented in the movie can be described as postcolonial comic effect, and the source of the comic events is displacement.

The film Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976), co-written and directed by JeanJacques Annaud, was originally released in France under the title La Victoire en chantant, only to be reedited and renamed as Black and White in Color for the 49th Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film competition. After its 1976 Academy Award’s success, the Ivory Coast submission was then re-issued the following year as Noirs et blancs en couleur in France. It is quite possible that this renaming served to translate the Academy Award success back into a positive French reception of the film and to avoid the lacklustre reception of the original cut. If one considers the alternative English title, Black Victory, and the German distributor’s, Sehnsucht nach Afrika (that is, Longing for Africa), a diverse field of interpretation opens up even before one begins to watch the film. The inclusion of various translations of the movie title within the title of this article is intended to underscore how plural title translations may prime interpretations of this dark-comedy concerning French colonial times; placed within a broad range of potential readings, these titles emphasize the elements that are perceived as constituting the main problem of the work. Black Victory, the alternative title used in distribution, suggests the revenge of suppressed black Africans on white French colonialists and the triumph of one race over another as a result of racial struggle. Or, the title expresses a possibility of a word-play and leads to an association of black comedy with questionable military advances, suggesting a subversive anti-war message. The German version of the title, Longing for Africa, implies colonial sentiment: a desire for a lost exotic

188 place. In comparison, the title Black and White in Color1 suggests a spectrum of racial valuation and invites questions regarding facile conceptual and ‘racial’ dichotomies (e.g. white/black, or good/evil), while subtly emphasizing the presence of the cinematic mode of colour-chromatic representation. These various possible movie interpretations – as encouraged by the titular translations and modifications – can appear, if not strange, then comical to the viewer, who is left to make up his or her own mind about the movie and its portrayal of racial, gender, and national relationships. The diverse interpretations suggested by the differing titles are necessarily at variance with the viewer’s subjective reception of the movie’s content. The titular interpretations appear to the viewer to be out of place and can be seen as amusing in their stubborn attempts to cling to a specific hermeneutic order. The viewer, too, has an interpretation ready, and she or he may be quite serious about it. As this paper aims to demonstrate, beyond titular variations, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black and White in Color is a comedy about racial, national, and gender norms in the conditions of colonial French Africa that bases its comic effect on incongruence. The following sections investigate the sources of the comic effect in the movie and their (subversive) effects on the societal norm given by the film’s framework. Arguably, the comic appearances subvert more than just the norm of the dominant culture of ‘white man’, meaning that the viewer does not laugh exclusively at the colonial attitude of French settlers. The comic effect subverts also the viewer’s understanding of communual relationships in Africa: the viewer may even laugh self-reflexively when realizing that simply modifying or reverting to the norm does not eliminate the incongruence and that the social reality is far more complex than expected. Thus, the comic effect presented in the movie can be described as postcolonial comic effect, and the source of the comic events appears to be displacement. To demonstrate how the comic effect works, this paper approaches selected aspects of the figures’ displacement, namely their spatial, temporal, and cultural dislocation. Also of interest is the influence of this displacement on the national, racial, and gender norms established at the ‘centre’, which is, in this case, France. Set in Africa during the First World War, Black and White in Color is a comedy about a small group of French colonists who, finding themselves trapped for life in a foreign place, try to resist boredom, indifference, and nostalgia. They have come to Port Coulais, a tiny village at the border of the French Equatorial African territories, and have settled down there for reasons that are left to the viewer’s speculations: the three salesmen were possibly looking for better commercial opportunities than those available in France; the wives followed their husbands; the two Catholic priests were sent to the ‘Black continent’ 1

For the remainder of the paper, Annaud’s film will be referred to by this title.

189 to convert the heathens; an army officer, approaching retirement age, was similarly dispatched to the colony to defend remote French borders. They are joined by a young intellectual looking for an exotic adventure. These settlers have departed from their country – their linguistic, cultural, and geographical centre – and have moved to the margin of the French colonial empire. They are displaced, looking forward to hearing news from the place they consider their home: Hubert Fresnoy, the film’s protagonist, writes to his former teacher in Europe requesting information about “what is happening in Paris these days”, while the camera slowly pans over the roofs of an African village (11⬘ 47⬙), as if following his nostalgia for life in the French capital. Sergeant Bosselet drowns his longing for home in wine and contemplates the sparsely decorated African palm that fulfils the role of the Christmas tree during the hot and humid days of the winter holiday season of 1914 (8⬘ 40⬙): Christmas will not be ‘white’ this year. With regard to dislocation or displacement, postcolonial theory usually stresses the experience of the colonized, not that of the colonizers; the dislocation of the colonized is seen as one of the elementary experiences of people who are looking for their (lost) identity (Glage). Yet the same can be said about the colonizers: through the fact of their displacement – moving from Europe to the colony – their identity, too, undergoes changes. In contrast to the colonized people, however, the colonizers have the possibility of (re-)constructing more effectively a familiar context and of maintaining the power structures that allow an identifying relationship between the self and the occupied place. This possibility results from the hegemonic position of the colonizers in the dominated society. What is interesting here is that a subversive element is embedded in the very process of expanding through colonization. Intended to extend the ‘centre’ of its dominant authority, imperial expansion has a destabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power. The colonial world, pushed to the margins of experience, at the same time exerts an opposite pressure on the ‘centre’ and allows for a position where all experience, including the experience of the ‘centre’, can be viewed as de-centred, pluralistic, and diverse. Thus, the notion of postcolonialism implies the modification of the centre (accepted before as normative), which is a subversive process. For instance, it has been observed that exotic travel and knowledge acquired from foreign lands have often had important cultural and political implications in the travellers’ own societies. Although the travel often served colonial interests, travel experience and travel reporting also had the potential to raise the travellers’ status and influence in their own societies, depending on whether they were able to initiate changes whilst abroad (Helms). The colonizers had the possibility to influence the centre, whereas before they might have been on the margin within their own societies. In Black and White in Color, the events in the colony also serve to awaken and allow the fulfilment of the characters’ aspirations, which thereby come to play a more important role at the centre. Fresnoy, initially despised as

190 a bookworm and a dreamer, has gained respect and become the authoritarian leader of the community, a role it is doubtful he would have played in France. Understood within the colonial context, displacement has immense subversive potential. It has an impact on both the centre and the margins, and, consequently, on both the oppressed and the oppressors. Displacement initiates change, resulting in the redefinition of social roles (including national, racial, and gender ones). Yet it also implies the existence of a supposedly superior racial or cultural model opposed to an ‘Other’ which designates different appearances within the same racial and cultural paradigm. A geographic dislocation or cultural disorder, displacement creates a basis for the perception of incongruity of experiences and surfaces, of behaviour patterns, and of the value systems of the oppressor and the oppressed (the representatives of hegemonic and subordinate communities). Incongruity, defined as a contrast between appearance and reality, between two events, the one that is predictable and the other that is sudden and surprising, was adopted by theorists of humour as a precondition for comic effects (Palmer). If incongruity is a subjectively perceived deviation from the consistency of the world structure, from how things ‘are supposed to be’ and how people ‘are supposed to behave’, then the comic effect results from the violent disappointment of one’s tensed expectation of a solution to the narrative situation. The confrontation between the world of the ‘centre’ and the ‘Other’ has, therefore, comic potential. Comic potential might seem to include many things, but it has to be noted that not all incongruous situations are funny. In fact, the incongruity of displacement of the colonized is often tragic. The comic effect is possible only in situations in which the viewer does not experience physical danger or threat in any other way (Morreall 188–207). For example, the solution cannot attack the viewer’s identity: the characteristics he or she imagines as constituting his or her race, nation, or gender. It is important that the viewer of the comic situation is able to elevate herself or himself above the situation: incongruous events do not appear comical to someone who has internalized the structure so deeply that it has become transparent to oneself. Morreall sees the comic event as a method to expand the viewer’s world-view. Understood as a reaction to the violation of the constructed norm, the comic event resulting in laughter has a subversive function when, at the moment the structure is recognized, it allows for the adoption of new experiences and the modification of the norm. Two selected scenes from the movie illustrate the displacement of the figures and provide an ideal starting point for investigation. The first scene shows the French settlers getting ready to watch the battle against the Germans. All dressed up and excited, standing right by the water, they are ready to cross a weak stream in the savannah and to enter the area colonized by the Germans. One of the French settlers, Paul Rechampot, ceremonially states: “It’s now 9:12. 9:12 on January 22, 1915. We’re preparing to go forth from our native

191 land. The land where life is sweet ends right here. Over there is enemy territory, . . . which we will conquer by force. That over there could easily be the Rhine. In fact, it is . . .” (32⬘ 22⬙). In this scene, the audience’s laughter is initiated by the contrast of the rather modest strip of water and the importance that is associated with its presence. The stream is not even thought of as a parallel to the French-German border river Rhine, but as being “in fact” the border between the two enemy states. Yet, the attempts to cross the stream, undertaken by the two salesmen, do not resemble the proud river crossing as seen in the opening montage, conveyed through the retouched and colourized black-and-white postcards which shaped the imagination of French civilians in the first months of the Great War (0⬘ 12⬙). Additionally, the comic effect is caused by the emphasis given by Monsieur Rechampot to the moment that, in the opinion of the French colonists, is the historical beginning of the war. Visible on many levels in this scene is the displacement that serves as a source of the comic effect. Geographic displacement is the first level: the French patriots put the Rhine on the map of Africa, doubling its topographical presence. The act of doubling is a mockery because not only does the African stream not match the characteristics of one of Europe’s biggest rivers, but it also makes the ‘original’ river laughable. The possible crossing of the ‘original’ Rhine (an act of solemn importance reminding the viewers of Caesar crossing the Rubicon) loses its impact in the eyes of the audience and transforms into a pathetic gesture, further undermined by the clumsy and awkward movements of the two salesmen. Temporal and historical displacement is the second level: the fact that Rechampot declares the official beginning of the First World War at the end of January 1915, five months after the factual outbreak of the war in Europe. In addition, unlike in Europe in August 1914, it is not the German but the French settlers in Africa who take on the role of the aggressors, breaking into the enemy’s territory. The third level of displacement is the social dislocation. Figures dress up as for a picnic in a suburb of Paris (as seen, for example, in Monet’s painting Le dejeuner sur l’herbe [The Picnic], an illustration of the social practices of the middle class before the war), although they are going to battle in the hot equatorial savannah. The presence of women and civilians – the salesmen, their wives, and the young geographer – carried to the battlefield in sedan-chairs by natives, renders the idea of military confrontation ridiculous. On the side of the soldiers, the leader Sergeant Bosselet does not have any combat experience (although he is five years away from retirement) and the hastily recruited fighters, all native, have not received any training. In the second scene, we see the priest Jean de la Croix teaching the drafted native men what to call the parts of military equipment in French and instructing them about the nature of God, mischaracterizing the ability to ride a bike as one of the blessings of being Christian (65⬘ 07⬙). What we see in this scene is the displacement of language and technology. As men caught in the countryside,

192 these natives are confronted with the spoken French language and the technological achievements of Western civilization. They can repeat the sounds of the individual syllables but cannot form them into words, and they cannot construct the meaning of the words. The group of future soldiers is able to pronounce loudly each syllable in the word “ba-yo-nette”, but instead of pronouncing the whole word, they reduce the syllables down to “ba-nette”. Neither do they know the use of a bayonet, nor the rules of the oppressor’s language. Bare repetition of syllables here makes the naming power of language questionable: reduced to sound imitation with the meaning stripped off, the French language in the African context is crippled and disfigured. The only person who is aware of the mistake and attempts to correct it is the French priest. For the natives, the deadly tool can be called by any random name; it would not make any difference. The glorious technology of Western Civilization is presented to the natives in the form of a bicycle. However, the bicycle does not represent, contrary to its primary purpose, the transportation vehicle that could allow natives to move faster from one place to another. Instead, the two priests use the technology to demonstrate how powerful Christianity is. They claim that religion allows those who believe in the ‘better God’ to use the vehicle to ride in circles, around the tree, without falling. Thus the ability to use the bike symbolizes the higher state of technological advancement. It can be observed, however, that the progress identified with the technological achievements is denied through the subversive image of the circular movement of the bike. The priests misuse technology to establish the difference between the God of the white man and the God of the black man, endeavouring to join two structures impossible to unite without mutual concessions: they seek to maintain colonial rule (the black man riding a bike is still black although the bike becomes here the symbol of the white man’s supremacy) and, at the same time, to propagate Christian ideas which presuppose the equality of all men (God gives all men the strength to ride the bike). In the two scenes analysed above, the figures attempt to imitate situations and structures which have their origin in the remote (to them) centre of France and which are dislocated to West Central Africa by the representatives of hegemonic culture. The camera’s eye registers the figures’ actions as well as their geographic context and the reactions of the natives, both of which the colonial figures cannot or do not want to see or to understand. Here, the replica of ‘French’ society almost matches its model, but, as one can observe for oneself, does not quite. “Almost the same, but not quite” is the description used by postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha to define mimicry as one of the most important characteristics of colonial presence (85). Bhabha observes that ambivalence occurs at the site of colonial dominance. Through colonization, the ‘Other’ is admitted into the dominant system, but is simultaneously expected to remain the subject

193 of colonial authority. Colonial mimicry “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (ibid.). Using English 19th-century colonial literature as an example, Bhabha argues that in the very act of repetition, the notion of originality is lost and centrality is de-centred: “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents” (ibid., original emphases). Mimicry is therefore essentially subversive and, when observed from the distance of the reader or of the viewer, immensely comical. The distance to the observed appears to be a necessary condition for identifying mimicry. Mimicry is revealed only through “mode[s] of representation”, as Bhabha comments: “the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence” (88). Black and White in Color, by exposing the mimicry resulting from displacement, offers viewers the possibility to examine the ‘original’ only to conclude that the ‘original’ has lost its originality and that dominant constructions have to be revised, or to conclude something relatively novel in the already widely popular postcolonial discourse, that is, that any assumption about what constitutes difference can also be problematic. Comic displacement and the mimicry resulting from it can be observed in other scenes of the movie, as well. The French language, the medium through which the hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and through which the concepts of morality, logical order, and truth become established in the African settlement, is not able to assure its own supremacy. A scene with the priests’ native assistant, Thomas, who has a parcel for Fresnoy, shows that linguistic indolence can be turned against the original speakers of French and used to trick the suppressors (14⬘ 48⬙). Thomas not only pretends to be a convinced Christian but also pretends not to understand the priests when they ask him to release the parcel. They even speak in broken French for him to ‘better’ understand them: the norms of the language, to better execute their power, have to be broken, and the French partners in the conversation are ridiculed about their own simplification of the rules of the language. The joke is on them: the two priests are convinced that they outsmarted the ‘stupid black man’, while in fact it is he who has cheated them, playing by the standards set by the selfsame colonizers, that of religious hypocrisy and the grammatical logic of language. Thomas’s strategy of taking the language literally, treating the subject-verb relation without the usual flexibility present in the communication of the French native speakers, becomes a convenient means of taking advantage of the situation. In another scene, the black servant Marius in Rechampot’s shop cleans up the floor and eagerly listens to the conversation of the shop owners. When the French point out that he should be quiet while his white masters

194 talk, he explains, “The bruise is making noise”, not he (57⬘ 55⬙). Language proficiency turns against the native speakers of the official French language when the linguistic mimicry of the users of French as a second language uncovers the grammatical and logical breaks and lacunas, exposing them for critical reflection. Similarly, the self-assumed mastery of language does not rescue the French from a baffling confrontation with modern military technology, which does not belong to the sphere of their experience. What is more, the encounter with the unknown element that is not yet familiar and therefore cannot be described with a name questions the dominant position of the colonizers who are now leaving their well-known terrain. The settlers are intrigued by a staccato sound from the battlefield. They do not know what to call it. Fresnoy identifies it as a “machine gun”. While the rest of the picnickers are not familiar with the new word and stumble over the specialized term, the black servant repeats it flawlessly, better than the native speakers (37⬘ 45⬙). From this point of view, the outbreak of the war on the micro-scale is also a beginning of a new era in the colonized territories because the process of naming the new phenomena becomes a community experience, connecting the settlers and the colonized people. On the other hand, the language mimicry operates also on the level of pronunciation, which masks the subversive components of the spoken words. The real meaning of the words used by the natives can be hidden by the friendly intonation of utterances, tricking the unaware settlers. Africans from the village, speaking (or singing) about the French settlers in their native language, ridicule the white men, accusing them of being fat, having smelly feet, or attracting flies (14⬘ 13⬙ and 55⬘ 24⬙). In this case, the mimicry is additionally directed not towards the perfect imitation of the whites, but towards the perfect imitation of the image of apparently ‘innocent’ savages that is developed by the colonizers and projected upon the natives (Fresnoy admits to this image in his letters to France). What appears to the priests to be a nostalgic song is revealed to be a malicious tune mocking the settlers. An interesting aspect of mimicry can be observed in the social roles assumed by the characters in the movie. The news about the outbreak of the war in Europe alerts the lethargic French community and radically changes their attitude against each other, putting them in specific national and gender roles and requiring a revision of their racial views. What was good-naturedly laughed at a few weeks earlier, such as the military drill of German soldiers visiting the French settlement and purchasing groceries for which they want to pay later (4⬘ 10⬙), now becomes the desired masculine role, appropriate for the time of war. National roles are also redefined immediately. When Fresnoy

195 opens the parcel he has just received from France, the priest, who has been reading one of the newspapers, declares: - My friends, we’re at war. - Who is “we”? - Us. France. [. . .] - Who are we at war with, Father? - Germany, of course! - Really? I would have said the English. - Damn it! - What? - That means I’m out 57 francs and 75 centimes! Germany’s never going to pay now! (16⬘ 50⬙).

The ‘imagined community’ to which the settlers instantly subscribe is recalled through visual and textual signals originating in the past: postcards and newspapers received by Fresnoy from France, and photographs in the newspapers, arrived at Port Coulais with a few months’ delay. In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson refers to three institutions of power – the museum, the census, and the map – as especially important for the self-understanding of the colonial nation in the age of mechanical reproduction. The effects of employing the structures of national power are visible in the small group of settlers imitating the attitudes of the distant centre: they draw the borderline between Germany and France in the savannah, they recognize themselves in the trenches of the Western front, and they categorize the inhabitants of the African villages into ‘French’ and ‘not-French’. Recalling their national identity serves to highlight the reductio ad ridiculum of processes to which the societies in Europe were subjected. The designation of the Germans as Protestants and the categorization of the French according to their age, gender, profession, and skin colour, put individuals in strict societal roles. Differences start to emerge within the group of ‘Frenchmen’: priest Jacques claims to know the ‘German mentality’ better than the others because he is Alsatian, Fresnoy is disqualified from deciding about the community’s future because he is not a ‘real man’, and Bosselet, officer of La Coloniale, is required to take an appropriate action in the name of the whole group. Appropriately frightened, the women are looking for a strong man’s protection in the time of crisis, culminating in the scene in which Marinette plays the damsel in distress to sexually provoke Fresnoy (50⬘ 55⬙). But, the camera also shows the intrigued black servant at the very moment of articulation of national identity: “Who is ‘we’?” “Us. France”, and the tension of the dramatic scene discharges in laughter. In contrast, and as seen at the same time in Europe, the constant presence of black French citizens subverts the notion of a homogeneous national community.

196 Shortly after the unsuccessful first attack on the enemy’s positions, the inclusion of African people into the French national community becomes a necessity even in a war on such a small scale. Before the battle, the soldiers (all six of them) were recruited, while the colonizers did not acknowledge the necessity of either explaining the purpose of the conflict or trying to win the natives’ support. The African soldiers were treated as worthless human material, acquired for the price of a piece of “useful kitchen equipment” (a metal bowl) and given French names, for the purpose of military evidence. They were an addition to the more valuable rifles which, unlike the wounded soldiers, had to be collected from the battlefield. After the defeat, the shift in the approach to the native people is remarkable and accompanies the shift in the command of the French camp. Racial differences have to be tolerated in the name of war with the Germans. The African soldiers exercise, march, and fight under the French national flag, receive proper uniforms, learn the French language, and become listeners of nationalistic literature and converted Christians. The rapid change in the approach to the colonized people is introduced by Fresnoy, who in his correspondence with his French teacher comes to the progressive and possibly ‘shocking’ conclusion that the natives are “not far from meriting the honorable name of ‘men’ ” (12⬘ 16⬙). Actions undertaken by Fresnoy seem to indicate a modernization, a social change necessary to keep up with the enemy. Michael Kline in his article on Black and White in Color rightfully observes that through the hasty process of Francization “the structures of Republic’s civilizing mission are being parodied” also because Fresnoy’s initial humanism quickly turns into another form of exploitation (592). On the other side of the border, Germans incorporated the black soldiers into the structure of the military a long time ago and provided them with the feeling of belonging to a national community. The first scene of the movie demonstrates very well that this step in the colonization process has already been taken in ‘Germany’: black soldiers in German uniforms speak in the language of Goethe about how tired they are after the long day of drill exercises, but also about how they should not complain about it because it does not belong to the German national character (03⬘ 01⬙). The subversion of existing racial roles, characteristic for the new stage in the relationships between the French and the natives, strikes the viewer especially in the sequence of the big parade of the French troops before the campaign (73⬘ 05⬙). Fresnoy has established himself as the leader of the small group, and his African lover expects the respect due to the monarch and receives it, from both men and women (the latter are additionally humiliated by the admittance of the nobilitated ‘negresse’ into their own milieu). During the parade, the African soldiers sing the stanzas of the traditional French song of departing troops, Chant du départ, comparable to the Marseillaise in popularity and patriotic message. But what initially sounds like a united choir of French soldiers from

197 a distance, where only uniformed human blocks of companies and units are perceived, disintegrates in close-up into individual voices: the viewer sees African faces pronouncing French words very badly (76⬘ 08⬙). The mispronounced opening verse of the song, La Victoire en chantant, which translates as “victory singing” or “victory through song”, serves here as a parodistic comment on the assumed univocality of the nation and, simultaneously, undermines the chances of winning the battle. The national unity, built so tediously during the months of preparation, collapses again, and the parade turns into a mockery. The ultimate questioning of national roles is presented in the final sequence, in which East Indian soldiers under the British flag arrive on the scene to announce the end of the war and to take control of the situation (83⬘ 50⬙). They force the white French settlers to acknowledge the incomers’ dominance. Now, the English language becomes the language of power, and the French settlers, remarkably, do not understand it. It is a ‘black’ commander in British uniform who now rules over both the blacks and the whites of ‘France’ and ‘Germany’. This ‘black’ commander is a hybrid: he is at the same time representative of the new colonial power on the territory, oppressing both the Africans and Europeans, and the oppressed himself. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ lose their initial significance; the movie ends with neither a black nor a white victory. Black and White in Color avoids the traps of nostalgic dichotomies which appear to be typical of French cinema in the ’70s and ’80s (Sherzer): the colonized natives are highly diverse in their characters and in their traditions, divided by social borders similar to those of the communities of colonizers. While they may be ‘Others’ for the colonizers, they are also different from one another. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud depicts the cultures of white and black people as constructed, constantly changing, and loaded with internal tensions and conflicts, constantly questioning the assumptions about race, gender, and nationality supposed by the viewer. The confrontation of the French settlers and of the Africans with cultural models of the ‘Other’ (which can be delimited racially, but also socially within the same racial group) and the demonstration of the incongruence between those models create possibilities for comic effects. To reach that effect, the film operates mostly with the notions of displacement and mimicry: the displacement of geographic location, time setting, as well as changes in social roles, to which the characters adapt as much as they are able and are allowed. What is compromised by the representation of mimicry is the necessity of history the way the figures in the movie understand it: as the re-creation of events in Europe. Monsieur Fresnoy, along with his German opponent, Lieutenant Krafft, seems to be very convinced of the historical necessity of the actions they have taken during the conflict on African soil, which happens to be an exact, small-scale replica of the European war theatre, with its own atrocities

198 and long-lasting stalemate. In the final scene, the two commanders walk into the sunset, deeply content with themselves, smiling and believing that the history they have witnessed has taught them a valuable lesson: that they have grown into their roles of ‘progressive’ leaders who understand the racial relationships in Africa better than anyone, successfully creating the conditions for a total war that engages the entire population under the national banner. The relationship between Fresnoy and Krafft may be well read as a polemical take on the French-German officer duo from La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion), the First World War classic by Jean Renoir (1937). If the viewer takes into consideration the allusion to Renoir’s movie, another displacement appears here, the displacement of comradeship: while the French captain de Boeldieu and the German aristocrat von Rauffenstein represent the diminishing ethos of the officer corps (symbolically stressed by the fact that de Boeldieu dies and von Rauffenstein is crippled in the course of the war), the young elitist couple from Black and White in Color, in their best shape and humour, announces the dawn of the era of ‘progressive’ racism. Viewers may consider whether this particular development of events was really necessary; the negative answer appears to be obvious. At the end of the film, the viewer is put in a position similar to that of Fresnoy and Krafft: one cannot escape one’s own limitations in seeing the world, so one is constantly (re-)constructing the borders of one’s own categories of gender, race, and nation. That is why one is constantly confronted with incongruence, and that remains a source of comedy.

Works Consulted Anderson, Benedict R.: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London – New York: Verso 1991. Annaud, Jean-Jacques (Dir.): Noirs et blancs en couleur (Black and White in Color). France 1976. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin: The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London – New York: Routledge 2002. Bhabha, Homi: Of Mimicry and Man. The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. In: The Location of Culture. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Pp. 85–92. Biggs, Melissa E.: La Victoire en chantant (Black and White in Color or Black Victory). In: French Films, 1945–1993. A Critical Filmography of the 400 Most Important Releases. Jefferson: McFarland 1996. Pp. 279f. Canby, Vincent: “Black and White in Color” Focuses Less on War than Leadership. Rev. of “Black and White in Color”, dir. by Jean-Jacques Annaud. In: New York Times 9 May 1977. P. 27. Cudmore, Pierre Etienne: From Banania to Chocolat. The French Colonization of Africa and Contemporary Cinema. In: Atenea 15.1/2 (1995). Pp. 95–103.

199 Gallagher, Michael: Black and White in Color. In: Cineaste 8.2 (1977). Pp. 42–44. Glage, Liselotte (Ed.): Being/s in Transit. Travelling, Migration, Dislocation. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000. Greene, Naomi: Memory and Its Losses. Troubled Dreams of Empire. In: Landscapes of Loss. The National Past in Postwar French Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999. Pp. 131–158. Helms, Mary W.: Ulysses’ Sail. An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988. Kazecki, Jakub: Laughter in the Trenches. Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives. Ph.D. Thesis. University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C. 2006. Kline, Michael: War, Parody, and Historical Memory in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Black and White in Color”. In: French Review. Journal of the American Association of Teachers of French 79.3 (2006). Pp. 586–596. Morreall, John (Ed.): The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York 1987. Palmer, Jerry: Taking Humour Seriously. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Renoir, Jean (Dir.): La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion). France 1937. Sherzer, Dina (Ed.): Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds. Austin: University of Texas Press 1996. Smith, Lesley: Rev. of “Black and White in Color”, dir. by Jean-Jacques Annaud. In: PopMatters. 25 August 2003. 9 April 2007. ⬍http://popmatters.com⬎.

Karin Lornsen

The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn This essay investigates humoresque aspects of performance, gender, the picaresque, and linguistic incongruity in the novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn) by the German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar. The main triggers of laughter and pleasure are based on play and incongruity, translingual transfers, a bodily concept of language, jokes and puns, theatrical enacting and impersonating, masquerade, and finally mimicry of female stock figures. Özdamar’s choice of a theatrical and performance-based approach to gender identities and perceptions of urban spaces follows the path of comic and picaresque traditions.

The following paper will deal with humoresque aspects of performance, gender, the picaresque, and linguistic incongruity in the novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998) (The Bridge of the Golden Horn)1 by prominent German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Özdamar’s choice of a theatrical and performance-based approach to gender identity and perception of urban spaces follows the path of comic and picaresque traditions and makes it therefore an interesting object of investigation in the light of gender, humour, and media. Much of the novel’s humour can be traced back to the key stimuli of laughter play, incongruity, power struggle, and relief (cf. Smuts). In consideration of the wide range of comical aspects in Özdamar’s second novel, the following analysis focuses on three principal parts: The first aim is to examine the nature of the heroine’s juvenile discovery in the light of a picaresque literary tradition. The second part deals with different forms of verbal humour, wit, and laughter with a main focus on translingual shifts that create new, unconventional meanings beyond Turkish and German language norms. The third part of this essay finally discusses aspects of masquerade, mimicry, and (theatrical) performance that the heroine applies in a tactical manner in order to subvert gender norms, female stock figures and gender coded urban spaces. Özdamar’s prose trilogy includes also Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1992) (Life is a Caravansary) and Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003) (Strange Stars Turn to Earth).2 The plot of The Bridge of the Golden Horn spans a nine-year period portraying the political, social, and private life of the heroine between 1966 and 1975. The novel ties in with the prequel by further 1 2

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Only the first part of the trilogy has been translated into English.

202 developing the character’s biography against the background of the 1968 movement. A major part of chapter one is set in Berlin where the eighteen year-old arrives in 1966 as a classic ‘Gastarbeiter’ (‘guest worker’) however pursuing the long term aim of becoming an actress. West Berlin is experienced as a place of encounter with different individuals and social groups who introduce her to the ongoing student movement and draw her into the communist philosophy. After her return to Turkey, the now politically educated heroine takes theatre classes in Istanbul and becomes involved in the mounting violence between ultranationalists and communists. She engages in numerous political and sexual affairs and, after a brief imprisonment by Turkish military, she leaves Istanbul for Berlin in order to pursue her acting career. The novel concludes with her departure on 21 November 1975, the day of Franco’s death, which can be read as a sign of renewal and hope. In the few scholarly appraisals, The Bridge of the Golden Horn has been evaluated as a novel of a leftist socialisation and female adventure (Fessmann 4), as a Berlin novel (Schütz and Döring 196), as a novel about Europe (McGowan), and as a hybrid genre in the style of a postmodern Bildungsroman à la Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) (cf. Ghaussy; Orali¸s). Moreover, Özdamar’s unique interplay of diverse languages and the criticism of German labour market policy resulted in a comparative study between Turkish-German minority literature and postcolonial texts (cf. Milz). In contrast to the debut novel, The Bridge of the Golden Horn seems to elude any simple classification in terms of cultural or linguistic criteria and negates any stigmatization as exotic, oriental, or fabulous (cf. Konuk). Instead, the few academic analyses focus on the political backdrop of the plot as well as the experimental narrative style which is characteristic of all of Özdamar’s texts. Due to the playful way of story-telling, one is inclined to evaluate Özdamar’s sequel as picaresque (Shafi 207; McGowan 63) and the juvenile heroine, with characteristics of Günter Grass’s child-narrator Oskar Matzerath (Orali¸s 49), as a postmodern picara.

Picaresque Reminiscences The Bridge of the Golden Horn can be read as a hybrid of fictional picaresque with elements of an adventure novel, an historical novel, and urban fiction. The comparison to the European tradition of picaresque fiction, marked by its episodic plot, quasi-autobiographical perspective, and lowborn narrator, requires some explanation and differentiation. Traditionally, the picaresque genre relies on “satire” that is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the employment “of sarcasm, irony, ridicule, etc. in exposing, denouncing, deriding, or ridiculing vice, folly, indecorum, abuses, or evils of any kind”. A piquaresque novel usually depicts the adventures of a roguish hero (picaro) or heroine (picara) of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt

203 society. However, the ‘picaresque’ in The Bridge of the Golden Horn refers more to a literary technique to produce humour and to disguise social criticism than to the precise genre or character. Unlike the classical picara figures, portrayed in La Pícara Justina (1605) or Grimmelshausen’s Courasche (1670), Özdamar’s heroine is neither an outsider of the society nor does her bad consciousness or any other moral authority force her to come to terms with a sinful past.3 The narrator is introduced as an independent and mobile artist and is granted autonomy in respect to her discovery of metropolitan life-style, her sexual development, as well as her narrative accounts. She is thus not morally judged or labelled as “inherently funny” due to her heritage or social milieu as the traditional picara is.4 However, in the course of the heroine’s wandering through European hubs, she shows solidarity with diverse marginal groups and therewith dwells in similar social spaces as the classical picara. The fact that many of the heroine’s acquaintances live at the edge of society’s respectable environments (cf. Müller 145f.) or practice a peculiar lifestyle is the vehicle for much of the humour in the story: The narrator gives detailed accounts of her encounters with tarted-up prostitutes in Berlin, a shrewish group of female guest workers, an odd surrealist circle of Istanbul’s bored bourgeoisie, a madman, numerous homeless, peasants, street vendors, and many other social misfits. Each community is communicating in its own sociolect using unique expressions and phrases that appear not only ‘foreign’ to the narrator but are also presented as incomprehensible to the reader, filtered through the heroine’s lack of knowledge and imagination. The picaresque element is especially dominant in the way the heroine perceives her surroundings. The classical picara and Özdamar’s heroine share an ignorant, somewhat naïve and innocent, but nevertheless sharp and bold attitude. The heroine’s interest in audible, visual, and sensual impulses in her immediate surroundings is sparked by her passion for the world of the theatre and her natural power of observation. In the way she perceives and narrates the world, analytical and critical reflections give way to descriptive and associative imaginations. Incapable of grasping the deeper meaning of the communist philosophy promoted by her intellectual circle of friends, she turns her attention to the palpable aspects of life. Overwhelmed by the political jargon in Friedrich Engels’s Der Ursprung der Familie (The Origin of the Family), she focuses instead on the book’s cover, its smell, and the dirt between the pages. “Wenn ich etwas nicht verstand, las ich öfter hinten auf dem Buch das Preisschild – so und so viele Lira. Das Wort Lira beruhigte mich, weil es leicht zu verstehen war” 3

A picaresque characteristic that is referred to as “pseudo-autobiographical verisimilitude” (cf. Kaler 50–58). 4 Stamm declares the shady genealogy of the picaro as the most “original of the humorous devices employed in the picaresque novel” (482).

204 (Özdamar, Die Brücke 94) (“If I didn’t understand something I sometimes read the price tag on the back of the book – so and so many Lira. The word Lira calmed me down since it was easy to understand”). Thus, by literally judging the book by its cover she brings the corporal, carnal, and substantial back into the text. The source of much of the novel’s humour is this particularly child-like, always questioning standpoint that is set in contrast to the political and social crises and human suffering around her. The often violent encounters between student activists and conservative officials during the 1960s in Berlin are portrayed as a battle between chickens and henhouse owners, drawing on the idiomatic jargon of newspaper headlines (157f.). Rallying cries and slogans appear to her like foreign loan words. “Vor den Wörtern wie Feudalismus, Imperialismus, Unterbau einer Gesellschaft, Überbau einer Gesellschaft stand ich wie vor einem Brunnen, der sehr tief war” (240). (“I perceived words such as feudalism, imperialism or understructure and substructure of a society as if I was standing in front of a well which was very deep”). The heroine’s unillumined view on the ongoing social transformations ultimately appears as political satire occupying a middle space between the dominant ideology and the discourse that resists it.5 The narrator’s perception – descriptive, unbiased, and imaginative – occurs, on the one hand, as limited; on the other hand, the heroine’s verbatim and associative interpretation of milestones of European history challenges the normative philosophic and cognitive presumptions of the reader’s worldview. Furthermore, Özdamar’s juvenile heroine shares a similar relationship to sexuality, womanhood, and her physique as middle-aged picaras such as Brecht’s Mutter Courage (Mother Courage) or Grimmelshausen’s Courasche. They likewise dismantle and demystify the rhetoric of femininity that assigns the female body to one of the three extremes of purity, seduction, and motherhood. Since the heroine in The Bridge of the Golden Horn highly values her lack of restrictions, she experiences any female traditional assignments such as premarital virginity, marriage, or birth-giving as burdens on and obstacles to her pursued acting career. Her urge to ‘rescue herself’ from her diamond – a metaphor of premarital virginity – culminates in ironic scenes which undermine the notion of the weak female sex. In order to liberate herself from the dogma of virginity she abuses a limping socialist (162). While breaking with many sexual and bodily restrictions in the form of an abortion, female erotic 5

In an interview, Özdamar describes that she resorts to the stylistic device of humour in order to create distance and to look at things from an outer perspective – a technique that she modeled on Brecht’s epic theatre: “Thanks to this distance one will recognize that there lies another reality under the reality which is just waiting to be retrieved” (Cizmecioglu).

205 desires, homoerotic and extramarital relationships, the narrator also pokes fun at the ongoing women’s right’s movement and the premise of the female orgasm. During her actor’s training, the heroine diligently practices the female climax “mit verschiedenen Schrei-Tönen” (210) (“with different screaming sounds”), poking fun at the female orgasm as the poster child of sexual revolution during the 1960s. As regards the conception of the main character, the episodic structure of the plot, and the narrative point of view, The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a reminiscence of the picaresque genre. However, many of the humorous devices of authentic picaresque material (Stamm) are adopted and translated into modern, metropolitan living situations.

Linguistic Incongruity In the context of Özdamar’s style of writing, the secondary literature repetitively applies the concepts of “performativity” along with “masquerade” and “mimicry” (cf. Breger; Sölçün; ¸ Konuk). This can be traced back to Özdamar’s bodily concept of language, topics of gender and media, and the theatrical metamorphosis of the heroine. This puts her in perspective of an avantgardistic concept of art.6 A performative and playful concept of language, including corporal and carnal imagery, translinear translations from Turkish to German, and emanating neologisms, are the trademarks of Özdamar’s rhetoric. This unique idiom is commonly interpreted as a variation of the Brechtian alienation effect (cf. Littler 220f.), to make the familiar seem strange, and has been acknowledged as humorous following the tradition of parody and irony. One comical effect emerges from Özdamar’s distinctive use of onomatopoetic, bodily, and almost vulgar language incorporating body fluids, symptoms of sickness, excrements, or sexual organs. Many of Özdamar’s works demonstrate how onomatopoetic expressions can function as ‘lingua franca’ in a foreign lingual environment. The just immigrated heroine in The Bridge of the Golden Horn copes with her daily life in Berlin with the aid of mimics, gestures, and sounds that come in handy while shopping for groceries. “Um Eier zu beschreiben, drehten wir unsere Rücken zu der Verkäuferin, wackelten mit unseren Hintern und sagten ‘Gak gak gak’” (19) (“In order to describe eggs we turned our backs to the shop assistant, wiggled with our bottoms, and said ‘Gak 6

Özdamar’s admiration of authors of the avant-garde such as Baudelaire and especially Else Lasker-Schüler (cf. Bax 17) is emphasized by equivalent intertextual references in her complete works. For instance, the title of the last part of the prose trilogy Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde refers to the love poem Liebessterne by Lasker-Schüler which also aids the heroine to tranquilize an aggressive dog at the beginning of the text.

206 gak gak’”). Sexual encounters and physical conditions are often illustrated in the same manner. One of two cousins, room mates of the heroine in Berlin, is referred to as the one with pimples in her face and smelly breath, repeatedly calls her younger relative a whore, and when the two kiss and make love it sounds like “matsch, matsch” (23) (“mash mash”). The belief that certain words are “inherently funny”, for reasons such as onomatopoeia or sexual innuendo, is widespread among theories on comics and pop-art (cf. Harvey; Carrier). However, Özdamar’s use of physical comedy and bodily rhetoric goes one step further by exceeding the rules of language and corporal norms, by “bringing the body back into the text” (Ghaussy 11). Even though Özdamar constrains her distinctive linkage of Turkish and German grammar, thesaurus, and proverbs in The Bridge of the Golden Horn, much of the prequel’s humour is still based on the incongruity of language systems. The incorporation of pidgin-like vocabulary witnesses the languagecontact phenomena between Turkish and German since the 1960s. The verbatim transfer from Turkish words, phrases, and idioms into German often happens without any explanation. The new, translingual outcome, which entails a change of meaning, leaves the monolingual ‘German’ reader sometimes puzzled, but always amused. For instance, the origin of the peculiar title of chapter one, “Der beleidigte Bahnhof ” (“The insulted train station”), is revealed to the reader as a cross-lingual play on words: The ruin of the Anhalter train station in Berlin, which was bombed during Word War II, appears to the narrator simply as broken or Turkish “kilmak”. Not knowing or caring about its common name, her clique decides to rename the structure however choosing the second denotation of “kilmak”, namely “insulted” (25), and hence inspiring human sentiment toward the inanimate monument. Özdamar’s language synthesis is commonly read as a humorous denial of cultural hegemony, mocking the prevalent notion of a homogeneous language or language community: “This flight of language often gives in to the irresistible force of parody and irony for parody [. . .]. It is a form of rewriting or recasting with comic libratory effect” (Seyhan 110). However the renaming of the Anhalter station does not allude to the deficient register of a guest worker’s German or a “Kanak Sprak” which has been previously a source of laughter,7 but rather emphasizes Özdamar’s concept of negotiating meaning in transcultural 7 “Kanak Sprak” (“Kanak Talk”) is a German idiom created by Turkish youth in Germany in the late 1980s. The sociolect is named after the book Kanak Sprak (1995) by German-Turkish author Feridun Zaimo˘glu. The term “Kanak” was originally used as a derogatory term for Turkish people however it has been co-opted by some Turks and used proudly as a term of self-identification. The subversive power of an ironic embrace of ethnical stereotypes has been taken into account by various TurkishGerman comedians such as Osman Engin, Muhsin Omurca, and Sinasi Dikmen.

207 trading zones. The humour of this translingual equivocation is not based on a laughed-at situation that is the exclusion of a minority from a normative language society, but is to be understood as rhetorical technique illustrating how bewildering neologisms are created through shifts of linguistic conventions, evoked by a “nomadic travel through different loci of meaning” (Ghaussy 4). The blurring of language borders functions here as “the ab-use of language” (Purdie 34f.) with humorous impact since joking always includes some marked transgression of the symbolic law. The novel’s wit and lingual agility is not to be understood as an exclusive Turkish sense of humour (Wierschke 170–72) however, it often implies a reader knowledgeable of both German and Turkish in order to grasp every single play on words.8

Performance, Mimicry, and Masquerade The sovereign perspective of narrating allows the narrator in The Bridge of the Golden Horn to playfully switch between the positions of narrating and being narrated which goes along with the novel’s leitmotifs of performance and mimicry. While the major part of the plot is presented from the perspective of a first person narrator, the heroine decides at one point to take the position of an outer observer, pulling the strings of the narrated characters. During the amorous play in Paris with her first boyfriend, the Spaniard Jordi, she lets go of her involved self by evoking an act of separation with the aid of a mirror. “Es war, als ob ich als ein zweites Ich neben mir liefe” (130) (“It was as if I was walking beside me as a second I”). While the mirror image is presented as the narrator’s acting double and is referred to as “das Mädchen” (133) (“the girl”) until the loving couple separates again, the first person narrator takes on the position of a stage director by prompting the girl and encouraging her, “mach es mit dem Jungen” (138) (“do it with the boy”). In contrast to the common interpretation of the Doppelgänger theme in literature as an omen of death (such as in E.T.A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe), this corporal and mental split is presented as an experimental and pleasurable self-discovery and as a parodistic reenactment of the hybrid, quasi-autobiographical subject which is always present throughout the story-telling (Breger 43). Apart from this narrative aspect of performance, the level of the plot presents performance as a “practice of everyday life” (de Certeau) and tactical mechanism to subvert gender-coded city spaces and female stock figures. The coming-of-age of the heroine circumscribes an emancipation process that is strongly linked to the perambulated urban settings. Especially the period of life set in Berlin appears strongly gender-restricted and challenging. However, throughout the 8

Deniz Göktürk assesses that Özdamar’s texts are essentially untranslatable since the linguistic humour would get lost through the transfer into another language system (82).

208 portrayed life, the heroine develops humorous strategies to outflank and subvert the morally tainted topographies. Upon her arrival in Berlin, the eighteen year old heroine from Istanbul is assigned to work on a contractual base for a “Telefunken” branch. Her first points of reference are simply the place of employment at a radio factory and the place of residence at a women dormitory, which she calls the “Frauenwonaym”,9 in the Stresemannstraße, Berlin-Kreuzberg. Both locations, factory and dorm, are labeled as female domains by the older and more conservative colleagues and roommates. The presence of the unchaperoned woman in internal spaces does not seem to question a traditional gender hierarchy. The open and public spaces, particularly the street life, appear as inaccessible for the young heroine because they are condemned as immoral whereabouts for the single women. The younger protagonists who disregard this unwritten spatial convention are repeatedly branded as whores (“Huren”) and sluts (“Nutten”). The Turkish worker’s club next door, in which the clique later on spend their evenings, is particularly mistrusted by the older women and appears as male counter world to the women’s dorm. While the “Frauenwonaym” is idealized as a shelter of traditions and maternal security, the worker’s club is demonized as a threat of the precious hymen. “Ihr habt euch von euren Müttern und Vätern abgeschnitten. Eure Väter und Mütter sollten euch mit Seilen an sich binden. Ihr werdet eure Diamanten verlieren” (88) (“You cut yourselves off from your mothers and fathers. Your fathers and mothers should keep you on a leash. You are going to lose your diamonds”). Gradually, the narrator distances herself from certain women of her residence. Even though her roommates are all Turkish newcomers to Berlin and exposed to the same inhumane working conditions, the young actress cannot identify with the conservative moral concepts set by the older women. She describes how the community slowly disunites and how a group of younger workers liberate themselves from their internalized oppressions: “[d]ie Frauen, die ‘Zucker’ sagten” (37) (“[t]he women who said ‘sugar’ ”) form a friendship with the communist residence advisor, “die Frauen, die in der Toilette schliefen” (38) (“the women who slept in the washroom”) discover the nightlife of Berlin, and “die Frauen, die türkische Männersamen auf die Brote schmierten und aßen” (41) (“the women who put Turkish semen on their bread”) enter male connotated places such as the Turkish worker’s club next door. As a result of this segregating act, she shows solidarity with three other young women Rezzan, Gül, and Engel who joins them later. This moral, ideological, and political separation happens simultaneously with a spatial alienation. The four young women ‘discover’ that evening provides a life beyond a binary of factory/residence or worker/housewife (37). This trespassing of the 9

“Wonaym” is another ‘spelling mistake’ in this case of the German word “Wohnheim”, which means residence or dorm.

209 undisputed daytime opens them up to new perspectives on Berlin and gives them a sense of belonging to the strolling crowd: “Das war Berlin. Dieses Berlin hatte es für uns bis jetzt nicht gegeben. Wir hatten unser Wonaym, und dieses Wonaym war nicht Berlin. Berlin begann erst, wenn man aus dem Wonaym herausging” (63) (“This was Berlin. This Berlin didn’t exist for us to that point. We had our residence and this residence was not Berlin. Berlin began, as soon as one stepped out of the residence”). In the course of their emancipation process the three girls discover wit and humour as powerful tools in the struggle for everyday life. During the young girls’ discovery of Berlin’s nightlife, they visibly gain self-confidence and adopt a shrewd and witty attitude that they strategically use in situations with the male public. As the narrator’s clique is wandering through the pub scene of a wintry Berlin, they attract the attention of German men who promptly identify them as credulous foreigners and thus as ‘easy prey’. “Die Männer fragten: ‘Where are you from?’ Rezzan und ich konnten etwas English sprechen, und Rezzan antwortete: ‘From the north pole, we are eskimos, our sledges are outside’” (41) (“The men asked: ‘Where are you from?’ Rezzan and I knew some English, and Rezzan answered: ‘From the North Pole, we are Eskimos, our sledges are outside’”). Rezzan’s joke functions here as a snappish answer to rebuff the men’s attempt to label the girls as exotic others. This power struggle between the position of the inferior and the superior, be it in respect of gender or culture, has been proven as a main source of laughter (Smuts). During her second stay in Berlin the heroine draws on the conciliatory and relieving effect of humour to overcome a conflict situation in a co-ed residence where she works as translator and advisor. The male tenants resent the permissive attitude of some single, female co-habitants. “Manche der alleinstehenden Frauen hatten nach ihrer Meinung ihre türkische Ehre wie ein Kleid ausgezogen, und besonders die Männer wollten ihnen dieses Kleid wieder anziehen” (Die Brücke 113) (“In their opinion, some of the single women had stripped off their Turkish honour like a dress, and especially the men wanted them to put that dress back on”). In order to avoid an escalation of the conflict the protagonist hands around a bottle of wine and refers to the ironic image of a reversed scenario. “Ich sagte: ‘Freunde, bald werdet auch ihr Kneipen finden und auch einmal deutsche Frauen küssen. Ist es denn schön, wenn dann vierzig Frauen auf euch zukommen, um euch zu schlagen.’ Die Männer hörten sich das an, und plötzlich lachten sie und gingen zu ihren Frauen zurück” (114) (“I said: ‘Friends, soon you will discover bars and you will also kiss German women. Would it be nice, if forty women approached you and beat you up?’ The men listened to that and all of a sudden they laughed and returned to their wives”). The heroine draws here on the humorous impact of the burlesque motif of the woman in the breeches role – employed by Grimmelshausen, Brecht, and Shakespeare – which reverses the conventional gender hierarchy. Evoking a

210 scenario reminiscent of the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the heroine’s tale pictures a horde of forty women wearing harem pants punishing the adultery committed by a group of Turkish guest workers. On the one hand, the laughable effect is based on the temporal and spatial incongruity, an oriental gang of thieves in contemporary Berlin. On the other hand, the confusion has its source in masquerade which includes cross-dressing, the appropriation of male habits, and the corresponding symbolic attributes. The gender reversal dismantles ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as (theatrical) play, as stage performance and as vestimentary encoding which predispose gender and sex. The narrated period in Berlin is, moreover, mediated through important intertextual subtexts. The heroine is exposed to the impact of stereotypical women figures. Several male counterparts are trying to intimidate her by citing misogynic text passages from western classics. The reference to Shakespeare’s Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (102), Ophelia from Hamlet, Baudelaire’s courtesans in Fleur du Mal (53), or Brecht’s abused mistresses in Baal (71) are attempts to convince her of a promiscuous lifestyle in theatre circles and to push her towards sexual intercourse. However, those canonical stock characters are stripped of their expressiveness. The improper place of citation, such as smoky student pubs, and the intoxicated condition of the speakers draw on the humorous effect of incongruity and ironically subvert that imagery.10 With her knowledge of western stage classics, the heroine is capable to out-argue the antagonists in the same manner, for instance, by stressing her identification with classical heroes over heroines. “‘Welche Rolle willst du spielen, Ophelia?’– ‘Nein, für Ophelia bin ich zu dünn, zu groß. Aber Hamlet vielleicht’” (23) (“‘Which part do you want to play, Ophelia?’ – ‘No, I am too skinny for Ophelia, too tall. But maybe Hamlet’”). Throughout the conversations with the outspoken and erudite residence advisor who will be her stage manager in the second part of the novel, Shakespearean quotes function as a kind of metalanguage by which to negotiate the concept of female sexuality.11 Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream revolves around the theme of gender power relations, and it also emphasizes the constant flux of identities that undermine any notion of truth and authenticity. In the play, the demands of male dominance and female obedience 10

In her short story Karriere einer Putzfrau (A Charwoman’s Career), published in Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue), Özdamar draws similarly on the comic effect of incongruity. A Turkish charwoman is performing a fast-paced one-woman show embodying several Shakespearean characters while sweeping the floor of a theatre stage in Berlin. This recontextualization of the canonical original transgresses not only social, linguistic, and cultural borders, but also undermines the common notion of an aesthetic sublimity of a western canon. 11 Sabine Milz interprets the multiple references to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy as a leitmotif in Özdamar’s novel, not only linking together diverse parts of the heroine’s life but also providing the script in which she can recognize her own conflicts and find the (theatrical) means to resolve them.

211 are challenged by playfulness and wit, as well as through language and role games (cf. Montrose; Howard). This strategic practice is taken up by Özdamar’s heroine particularly for the Turkish setting in the novel. During her observations of urban architecture and pedestrian behaviour the heroine shows special interest in marginalized characters, prostitutes in particular, who pursue their business in the back allies of Europe’s metropolitans. In the first part of the novel, those two woman figures seem to oppose each other. Due to the impact of internalized moral standards, the narrator initially disrespects the prostitutes of Berlin who offer their service along the Potsdamerstraße. The four young women ridicule the semblance of the prostitutes standing in the rain with their pet dogs on their arms, waiting for customers. Seated at the window of Rezzan and Gül’s apartment in the upper floors, the four literally look down upon them. The girls decide to play a trick on the prostitutes by pouring water on their heads to make them even wetter: “Dann saßen sie im Bett, lachten und gossen nach einer halben Stunde noch einmal ein Glas Wasser über die Hure und über ihren Hund. Die Huren schimpften, ihre Hunde bellten” (90) (“Then they were sitting on their bed, laughed, and half an hour later they poured another glass of water on a whore and her dog. The whores yelled and their dogs barked”). The German concept of Schadenfreude, the pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune, circumscribes the humour of this scene that is derision coupled with a powerful sense of inferiority. Over the next months the heroine refrains from this kind of disrespectful behaviour towards social outsiders. Strategic ways of deconstructing female stock figures are primarily revealed in the second part of the novel which deals with the theatre training of the heroine at a drama school in Istanbul. Trained to pay careful attention to the nuances of language, facial expressions, movements as well as to costumes and gestures, she turns out to be a perceptive and often ironic observer of herself and her fellow human beings. The improvised and experimental approach of her program teaches her to understand the public space and daily life in accordance with the artificiality and illusion of the stage. At the same time, the borders between audience, actor, and character as well as stage, auditorium, and reality start to blur.12 12

In the context of the heroine’s theatre training, Özdamar discusses different drama and film theories which are either based on realism and imitation or on disillusion and alienation. The narrator’s education mainly focuses on the so called Method Acting which her teacher Memet studied during his stay at “The Actors Studio” in New York (200). According to this method, the actors are expected to replicate the emotional conditions under which the character operates in real life, in an effort to create a life-like, realistic performance. Due to this body-focused approach the heroine refers to this teacher as “der Körperist” (205) (“the body-ist”) whereas her second educator is referred to as “der Kopfist” (205) (“the head-ist”). The latter represents Brecht’s theory of epic theatre and urges his students to observe and analyse social conditions and establish a connection with the audience (204).

212 Resistance of gender norms is achieved, in part, through mimicry, or more specifically, parody. Özdamar produces Bhabha’s “double articulation” of imitation and menace to parody female stock figures (86). Homi Bhabha, in his influential essay collection The Location of Culture, details historical and literary events in which dominant (British) discourses are displaced, transformed, and transfigured in their repetition as “almost the same but not quite” (86). In its displacement through mimicry, Bhabha argues, the basis of colonial discourse, its rules of recognition, is estranged. However, Özdamar’s narrator does not use mimicry in an aggressive, provocative, or vengeful manner by consciously mocking or ridiculing the dominant discourse; instead, the heroine employs embodiment and masquerade to express her solidarity with characters that are deemed outsiders by society. Furthermore, her eagerness to experiment with gestures and body language commonly associated with specific social types, and her unbiased, child-like curiosity regarding human behaviour inherently question gender stereotypes by pointing out the hypocrisy of genderspecific moral codes. However, the novel does not refrain from pointing out the ambivalence of mimicry and the limits of subversive humour. The heroine is aware that the interchange of reality and fiction has its limits and that the playfulness of masquerade and mimicry can not always be translated to real life: “alles, was im Leben schwer war, war am Theater leichter. Tod, Haß, Liebe, schwanger sein. Man konnte ein Kissen unter das Kleid stecken und schwanger spielen, dann das Kissen wieder rausnehmen und am nächsten Abend das Kissen wieder herein tun” (184) (“everything which was difficult in life was easier on stage. Death, hate, love, being pregnant. You can put a pillow under your dress and act pregnant. Then you take the pillow off and put it back the next evening”). Even though the notion of the biological fate is somehow undermined by the heroine’s abortion (199) and her friends’ elective cosmetic surgeries and beauty treatments (179f.), the novel actually never ignores the restrictive factors of life in respect to social, economical, political, or physical confines. During her actor’s training and her experiments with props and masquerade, the heroine critically reflects on the context and the adequateness of humour. “Die Leute sterben wirklich, und wir lachen, was machen wir hier?” (209) (“People are dying for real and we are laughing, what are we doing?”). Thus, she concludes that humour and laughter create the necessary distance in order to criticize the norm, but also often disregard or downplay the seriousness of everyday human struggles and sufferings. An interesting aspect of mimicry can be observed in the social roles with which the narrator experiments during her programme in Istanbul. In the course of the heroine’s theoretical and practical theatre training, and with her native, child-like fascination for seemingly profane details in movies, newsprint, and daily life, mimicry emerges as a two-way concept. The stage

213 functions as mimicry of everyday life, and the public space functions as mimicry of the artificiality of stage: On the one hand, the heroine pays special attention to urban, often marginalized protagonists who carry on their businesses in the streets. She utilizes her observations of diverse groups and individuals in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara as inspiration for her work on stage. During daily walks and commutes, she captures gestures and expressions of carriers (208), sweaty water vendors (208), screaming hawkers, paperboys, and protesting peasants (210f.) and then re-enacts their body language on stage: “Auf der Bühne versuchte ich, die [Wasserverkäufer] zu improvisieren, die schwitzten, und wollte so das Drama einer Figur zeigen” (208) (“On stage I tried to improvise [the water vendors] who were sweating and attempted to show the drama of a character”). On the other hand, she declares the city as stage and the crowd as auditorium to practice what she was taught in school. She and her girl friends make use of the Berlin public in order to re-enact classical film scenes. For instance, they bribe a student of engineering with beer so they may practice Hollywood kisses on him (53f.). Mimicry thus emerges as a performance-based humour and a parodistic self-dramatization of the protagonist resulting from the blurring of art and life, staged characters and social roles. After all, every copy can only be the copy of a copy, and the notion of authenticity is stripped of its meaning (Lehnert 37). However, the heroine’s aim is not the simulation of masculinity through cross-dressing or gender impersonation but rather the overemphasis of female attributes by transferring them to a theatrical level. In line with gender and postcolonial studies, mimicry functions here as a continuous negotiation process of gender identity mitigated by the releasing effect of simulation and humour. The stock figure of the whore comes into play again, after the heroine returns to Istanbul where her social setting is predominantly male. During the politically motivated meetings at hotspots like the restaurant “Kapitän”, she reflects on her situation being one of the few females among the guests. In greeting the different comrades, walking from table to table, she likens herself to local prostitutes who carry the nickname “Konsumartisten” (216) (“consume artists”) because they get invited for drinks at every table they pass by. In order to avoid being labelled as one of those easy girls she steals the men’s thunder and introduces herself intentionally as “consume artist”. This gesture not only causes
a conciliatory laughter among the men but also has the projected effect of “Bu hnen des Wissens” (217) (“stages of knowledge”) rendering her respected as “ein Mädchen mit Bewußtsein” (ibid.) (“girl with consciousness”). However, she quickly tires of acting “Ich bin keine Hure” (ibid.) (“I am not a whore”). Hence she declares one day: “Gut, sollen sie doch denken, daß ich eine Hure bin, dachte ich plötzlich. Huren hatten auch Mütter gehabt wie ich” (ibid.) (“Fine, let them think that I am a whore. Whores also have mothers as I do”). This conclusion breaks with the initial differentiation between the figure of the

214 mother and the whore and considers that the pejorative image of prostitutes is based on generalisation, prejudices, and male double standards. This awareness is reinforced in the course of the heroine’s acting career. During her employment at the Ankara Ensemble, she is assigned the part of a madam in a political “Hurenstück” (“whore play”) reminiscent of Brecht’s Mutter Courage. She recollects her training in method acting and decides to consult real-life sex workers in order to create a realistic and convincing character on stage. Her visits to local brothels teach her about a prostitute’s work wear and the jargon commonly used in this environment. The premier of the political drama causes two different kinds of reaction. While the female audience, including the whores who inspired the role, is deeply moved, the male spectators laugh at the madam’s appearance. While the whores and the socialists among the audience feel ideologically connected, the intersection of “Marx-, Engels- und Hurensprache” (300) (“the languages of Marx, Engels, and the whores”) generates a peculiar lingo, the bourgeois spectators interpret the main character as morally condemnable and exaggerated which makes them unable to grasp the deeper socio-critical message of the play. The interplay between theatrical role and social role is finally carried to the extreme. During the tour of the ‘whore play’ through Turkey, the heroine’s theatrical skills prove useful in a life-threatening situation: During the climax of the military coup in Istanbul she utilizes different female stock characters as masquerade to trick the threatening ‘masculine’ surroundings. In order to provide her persecuted friends of the film commune with groceries, she mimics four stereotypical women figures. One day she puts on her “whore costume” again, the following day she dresses up as a housewife with fake baby and string bag, and the next time she poses as an old peasant woman with head scarf and long coat (313f.). Her imitations of those female characters, who are likewise common protagonists of Istanbul’s landscape, legimitate her presence in the street and create the impression of normality in the eyes of the military patrol. Thus, this text passage illustrates how female gender clichés, which actually limit female emancipation and reinforce gender stereotypes, are strategically used to expand a woman’s space of action. The whore costume ultimately blurs the line between authenticity and performance since it was inspired by real-life prostitutes, was then acted out on stage, and finally, was utilized in daily life to keep up appearances. Consequently, the image of the whore is stripped of its pejorative stigma by being declared as a set of stereotypes that can be acted out in the arena of everyday life. Taking the many various aspects of humour in The Bridge of the Golden Horn into consideration, it can be said that the main triggers of laughter and pleasure are based on play and incongruity in the form of picaresque citations, translingual transfers, a bodily concept of language, jokes and puns, theatrical enacting and impersonating, masquerade and, finally, mimicry of female stock

215 figures. Özdamar’s protagonist appropriates wit, puns, and word play as tools to negotiate the female presence in public spaces. She experiments with masquerade and embodiment in order to question female stock characters that rely heavily on cultural stereotypes. The crux of the matter is that the novel equates theatrical role and gender role. Due to the change of the heroine’s positions as an observing spectator or as a performing actor respectively, she declares the city as stage and the strolling or bustling crowd as extras or as audience. This delicate interplay between artificiality of the stage and screen and actuality of the street blurs the boundaries of role and actor, masquerade and substance, and ultimately questions the social standards about ‘appropriate’ feminine and masculine behaviour in public. By experimenting with different female archetypes of everyday life, history, or fiction she uncovers the artificiality and performativity of those gendered and sexualized images in an ironic manner.

Works Consulted Bax, Daniel: Deutschland, ein Wörtermärchen. In: die tageszeitung. 20 November 2004. P. 17. Bhabha, Homi K.: The Location of Culture. London – New York: Routledge 1994. Breger, Claudia: “Meine Herren, spielt in meinem Gesicht ein Affe?” Strategien der Mimikry in den Texten von Emine S. Özdamar und YokoTawada”. In: AufBrüche. Kulturelle Produktion von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland. Ed. by Cathy S. Gelbin, Kader Konuk, and Peggy Piesche. Königstein/Ts.: Ulrike Helmer Verlag 1999. Pp. 30–59. Carrier, David: The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2000. Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 1988. Cizmecioglu, Aygül: Interview with Emine S. Özdamar. “Geschichten unter Kopftüchern”. In: Netzeitung. 9 November 2006. ⬍http://netzeitung.de⬎. Fessmann, Meike: Europäerin aus Anatolien. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. 23 May 1998. P. 4. Geißler, Cornelia: Die 40. Tür im Märchen (Interview). In: Berliner Zeitung. 25 March 2003. P. 21. Ghaussy, Soheila: Das Vaterland verlassen. Nomadic Language and ‘Feminine Writing’ in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Leben ist eine Karawanserei”. In: The German Quarterly 72.1 (1999). Pp. 1–16. Göcmener, Bettina: “Die Immigration beginnt erst jetzt”. Interview with Emine S. Özdamar. In: Die Welt Online. 6 July 2006. ⬍http://www.welt.de⬎. Harvey, Robert C.: The Art of the Comic Book. An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 1996. Howard, Skiles: Hands, Feet, and Bottoms. Decentering the Cosmic Dance in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. In: Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3 (1993). Pp. 325–342.

216 Kaler, Anne K. The Picara. From Hera to Fantasy Heroine. Bowling Green (OH): Bowling Green University Press 1991. Konuk, Kader: “Identitätssuche ist ein [sic!] private archäologische Graberei”. Emine Sevgi Özdamars inszeniertes Sprechen. In: AufBrüche. Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland. Ed. by Cathy S. Gelbin, Kader Konuk, and Peggy Piersche. Königstein/Ts.: Ulrike Helmer Verlag 1999. Pp. 60–74. Lehnert, Gertrude: Wenn Frauen Männerkleider tragen. Geschlecht und Maskerade in Literatur und Geschichte. München: dtv 1997. Littler, Margaret: Diasporic Identity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Mutterzunge”. In: Recasting German Identity. Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic. Ed. by Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay. Rochester (NY): Camden House 2002. Pp. 217–233. Lornsen, Karin: Transgressive Topographien in der Türkisch-Deutschen Migrantenliteratur. Ph.D. Thesis. University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C. 2007. McGowan, Moray: “The Bridge of the Golden Horn”. Istanbul, Europe and the ‘Fractured Gaze from the West’ in Turkish Writing in German. In: Yearbook of European Studies 15 (2000). Pp. 53–69. Milz, Sabine: Comparative Cultural Studies and Ethnic Minority Writing Today. The Hybridities of Marlene Nourbese Philip and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. A WWWeb Journal 2.2 (2000). 6 July 2006. ⬍http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clcwebjournal⬎. Montrose, Luis Adrian: “Shaping Fantasies”. Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture. In: Representations 1.2 (1983). Pp. 61–94. Müller, Regula: “Ich war Mädchen, war ich Sultanin”. Weitgeöffnete Augen betrachten türkische Frauengeschichte(n). Zum Karawanserei-Roman von Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In: Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil. Positionen deutschsprachiger MigrantInnenliteratur. Ed. by Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997. Pp. 133–150. Oralis¸ , Meral: Der Spiegel als Wunschraum oder Das literarische Schreiben als ‘Provinz des Fremden’ bei E. Sevgi Özdamar. In: Interkulturelle Begegnungen. Ed. by Manfred Durzak and Nilüfer Kuruyazici. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2004. Pp. 49–60. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 12 March 2004. ⬍http://dictionary.oed.com⬎. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi: Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1998. Purdie, Susan: Comedy. The Mastery of Discourse. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993. Schütz, Erhard, and Jörg Döring: Text der Stadt – Reden von Berlin. Literatur und Metropole seit 1989. Berlin: Weidler 1999. Shafi, Monika: Joint Ventures. Identity Politics and Travel in Novels by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafer Senocak. ¸ In: Comparative Literature Studies 40.2 (2003). Pp. 193–214.

217 Smuts, Aaron: Humor. In: The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. 14 March 2007. ⬍http://www.iep.utm.edu ⬎. S¸ölçün, Sargut: Gespielte Naivität und ernsthafte Sinnlichkeit der Selbstbegegnung. Inszenierungen des Unterwegsseins in Emine Sevgi Özdamars Roman “Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn”. In: Migration und Interkulturalität in Neueren Literarischen Texten. Ed. by Aglaia Blioumi. München: Iudicium 2002. Pp. 92–111. Stamm, James R.: The Use and Types of Humor in the Picaresque Novel. In: Hispania 4 (1959). Pp. 482–487. Wierschke, Annette: Schreiben als Selbstbehauptung. Kulturkonflike und Identität in den Werken von Aysel Özakin, Alev Tekinay und Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Frankfurt/M.: IKO – Verlag für interkulturelle Kommunikation 1996.

IV. Gender, Genre, and the Comic: Literature, Radio, Television, and Cinema

Andreas Seidler

Moral Ideal and Physical Desire: Gender Roles, Sex, and Comic Elements in the Rococo Tales of Christoph Martin Wieland One of the central problems within the thought of the Enlightenment is the conflict between intellect and sensibility, and it is this philosophical struggle that appears as a source of comic situations in Wieland’s rococo tales. Some of the comic effects derive from a reversal of traditional gender roles. In the verse narratives, characters of either sex relate in a similar way to their desires, and they are equally permitted to act upon these desires. Conversely, those characters, who suppress or deny their sexual desires, man or woman, are the ones who ultimately look ridiculous.

The conflict between intellect and sensibility was the central problem in the thought of the Age of Enlightenment. The philosophical rehabilitation of sensibility during the Enlightenment was the most important weapon in the struggle against theological ontology and morals (cf. Kondylis). The genre of rococo tales is generally not considered to be the venue of philosophical conflicts. But focusing on the confrontation of a platonic-Christian morality with the revaluation of sensibility and physicality we find it to be a constitutive element in Christoph Martin Wieland’s verse tales of the 1760s. Wieland was one of the most successful German writers in the second half of the 18th century. It was the epoch of the emancipation of German literature: Literature was released from the constraints of religion and morals. Until that time fictional writing had been determined by its moral values. Poetry was to illustrate religious, metaphysical or political doctrines. But from the middle of the 18th century onwards representatives of literature began searching for their own exclusive standards, Christoph Martin Wieland being one of the pioneers in this campaign. The challenged poets were now forced to find a paying audience for their works, as they were no longer written in the service of Church or Sovereign. Therefore literature had to stand on its own merits. Wieland found that using erotic motifs was one way to add to the attraction of his writing. Literature had to appeal to the human senses instead of teaching moral lessons. Thus Wieland’s rococo tales can be read as reflections of the historic transformation of literature itself. Dirk von Petersdorff analysed the relationship between morality and sensibility on the basis of Wieland’s best known verse narrative Musarion (1009–1019). I will concentrate on the collection of Komische Erzählungen (Comic Tales), published anonymously in 1765, and on two further verse narratives added to the collection in later editions. The Comic Tales soon became notorious for their suggestiveness and depiction of loose morals. Wieland

222 reacted to the criticism by toning the texts down for later editions, but his reputation of being a somewhat frivolous poet stuck to him for the rest of his life. He had to bear particularly severe criticism from a circle of young German poets called the “Göttinger Hainbündler” who waged a campaign against him, accusing him of being a corruptor of moral standards and literature. His friends also commented upon the sensual and exciting character of his writings. Wieland’s friend, the doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann, reported to him in a letter about the anecdote of a celibate priest who became so lecherous after reading Wieland’s work that he had to ask for medical assistance (Starnes 224f.); to modern readers, this suggestiveness seems rather harmless. But what is remarkable about Wieland’s texts is the progressive portrayal of his female characters. Thomas C. Starnes already sees in them the precursors of the modern emancipated woman (222). In our survey we will also take a look at Wieland’s verse narratives from this angle of gender roles. Having been written in the 1760s, the short narrative Aspasia oder die platonische Liebe (Wieland, Werke 170–180) (Aspasia or Platonic Love) was only added to the Comic Tales in the edition of 1784. The plot is as follows. The twenty-five years old Aspasia is so beautiful as to appeal both to the eye and the heart (171). She is banished from the arms of her lover to become a priestess to the virginal goddess Diana where in their luxurious temple priestesses are opulently supplied with the best wines and dishes. Even so they are not perfectly content: The chaste priestesses are unable to sleep well at night due to the lack of one special sensory stimulus. In vain they try to gain, with the help of the other senses, what their sexual sense is missing. Aspasia is aware of the cause of her dissatisfaction but she is not able to suppress the lack. In a philosophical sideswipe the narrator comments that, according to the Stoa, we are able to do what we want to do. While male priests would be able to alleviate their pains by the consumption of alcohol, there is no such medicine for the lonesome priestess. But fortune comes to Aspasia’s assistance in the form of Alkahest, a young, beautiful, and zealous scholar sent to the temple. He brings the priestess relief from her complaints with the help of his philosophy. He initiates Aspasia into the platonic world of ideas. After this, all material things seem to her only a reflection of the real and ideal world. The truth cannot be perceived through the senses, and so the philosopher teaches her the art of seeing without eyes as it were. To reach the state of perfect spirituality and disembodiment Alkahest arranges a special ceremony. One midsummer night, in the park under the moonlight, they experiment, phase by phase, with a withdrawal of the mind from the senses. The first phase consists of putting the mind in a state of idleness. Freeing the mind from such desires that make human beings similar to animals constitutes the second stage. However, the experiment fails before Aspasia and Alkahest reach the third step. The narrator warns about the risks

223 involved in any attempt to change completely – it is the very arrangement of the test that causes the threat. And indeed, the spiritual ecstasy turns into a physical one. Descriptions of the spiritual communion turn into a metaphoric depiction of a male sexual pipe-dream, while Alkahest enjoys ‘immaterial’ delights at Aspasia’s bust. As reported by the narrator, what happens further remains unknown due to a gap in the manuscript. The morning after shows the couple overcome with remorse. Aspasia now realizes that their platonic rapprochement was doomed to failure from the beginning. By way of coming to a conclusion, the narrator addresses his “friend”, the reader, giving him some advice how to “Platonise” the right way: If the fair reader wishes to relieve himself, he should at least do it while being alone. The very last stanza refers again to the confrontation that determines the whole tale. Refusing to draw any other rational lesson from this case, the narrator asserts that everybody who has a “nose” will find it by himself. And those who do not have a “nose” do not need to learn the lesson. By reflecting the contradiction between a philosophical edifice of ideas that invalidates physicality and sensibility and the demands of the senses themselves, platonic philosophy is shown as incompatible with human nature. Those who want to adopt it will inevitably become the victim of self-deception. It is from the portrayal of this self-deception and the floundering of this philosophy on its own unrealistic demands that the comic effects of the poem arise. The sensory organs are present throughout the whole text in a metaphorical as well as in a literal sense. With respect to its insinuating the deceptive character of sensual perception the idealistic philosophy is attacked. This insinuation is revealed to be the reason for the self-deception of those who follow this philosophy. Thus the conflict between a rationalistic philosophy and the revaluation of the senses is portrayed in Wieland’s verse narrative. The poem takes sides in this argument in intellectual history by making the idealistic party look ridiculous. We should now cast an eye on the presentation of gender and sex ratio in Aspasia. Remarkable for the poem’s time of production is the fact that Aspasia is shown as the bearer – not merely the object – of sexual desire and that there is no question of any moral condemnation. The relation of Aspasia and Alkahest to their own bodily demands and between each other is nearly symmetrical. Although, the reader is, at one point of the narration, left in doubt whether Alkahest’s arrangements for the platonic-spiritual ceremony under the moonlight constitutes a planned manoeuvre of seduction. Ultimately, both protagonists are overwhelmed by their desire in the same way, and neither the man nor the woman is condemned for moral infringement and failure. Quite the opposite: rejected are the religious and philosophical regulations that invalidate the senses and deny sexual demands. Wieland’s Comic Tales included four verse narratives in the first edition: Das Urteil des Paris (The Judgement of Paris), Endymion, Juno und Ganymed

224 and Aurora und Cephalus. All these verse narratives are set in an ancient Greek world and toy with a myriad of literary allusions. They are travesties which endow ancient gods with very human habits. The first verse narrative in the collection is The Judgement of Paris. As in the ancient myth, Paris is instructed to decide which goddess is the most beautiful: Juno, queen of the gods; Pallas, goddess of war and wisdom; or Aphrodite, goddess of love. Initially the goddesses are portrayed using contemporary stereotypes about women. They are presented as vain, talkative, and quarrelsome. Paris asks them to undress completely under the pretense that he would not otherwise be able to come to a fair judgement about their beauty. The goddesses are forced into a humiliating situation. They have to present their naked bodies to the examining eyes of the male: Sie sollten ihre heilgen Leiber Vor Männer-Augen so entweihn? Sich kritisch untersuchen lassen, ob nichts zu groß, ob nichts zu klein, Zu lang, zu kurz? Ob alle Teile fein Symmetrisch in einander passen, Durch gute Nachbarschaft einander Reize leihn, Schön an sich selbst, im ganzen schöner sei’n? (Werke 85). Should they expose their bodies so divine, To be profaned before the eyes of men? Subject themselves to critical inspection then? Is nothing there too small or bulky in design? Too long, too short? And do the pieces all combine To fit together in symmetric curvature? And juxtaposed provide each other new allure? Each piece apart sublime, together twice so fine? (Musarion 96).

Elisabeth Boa aptly remarked that by this scene one is reminded reluctantly of “the atmosphere of beauty competitions and strip shows” (200) of our current era. Paris seems to enjoy his position of power, and he insists on them taking off even the very last garment. In the face of the beauty of the naked and divine bodies, he craves to dissolve himself completely in his sensual perception: “Beim hohen Zeus! sie funkeln wie die Sterne!/ Wie reizend alles ist! wie glatt! wie fein!/ Wie voll! wie rund! hier möcht ich gleich vom Zehen/ Bis an den Kopf ein einzigs Auge sein!” (Werke 88) (‘Oh, Zeus!’ he cries delightedly,/ ‘Oh! let me stand forever here, a post implanted,/ To be all eyes, with this the only sight I’d see!’”) (Musarion 98). Paris wants the goddesses now to reveal themselves to him one after the other. Each one profits from the situation by bribing the juror with a promise. Juno offers power and rule to him. But, with an unambiguous allusion, he makes her understand that, in view of her beauty, his desires are veering

225 towards a much more specific aim. After this impudence the wife of Zeus flies into a rage. In this state Paris no longer finds her face to be beautiful. The next goddess is requested. Pallas promises military glory to Paris if he will grant her the award. He confesses, however, that he is much more interested in flirting than in fighting. Thus he now demands to see the goddess of love. It is Aphrodite’s bribery to make the beautiful Helen his wife, but Paris brooks no delay in having his desires satisfied. He offers Aphrodite the award on condition that she spends that very night with him. At first she refuses, in accordance with the usual rules of conduct for a woman in such a situation of seduction. Paris, however, is breaking the rules of his gender in an exceptional manner. He weeps to make Aphrodite render herself, successfully so. The punch line of this end of the story can be grasped in its complete sense only within the context of the ancient myth. It was there that Paris accepted Aphrodite’s offer to make Helen his wife, abducting her to Troy. This abduction resulted in the Trojan War, and so the discrepancies in Wieland’s poem account for the great difference in the ensuing course of mythical events. Paris’s lecherousness and Aphrodite’s surrender prevent war and the destruction of Troy. This is achieved because both, Aphrodite and Paris, transgress the pattern of their gender role. She, in that she is not as highly moral as the other goddesses, and he in behaving unmanly in several situations. The whole poem is “antiheroic in mood” (Boa 202). Paris has no interest in political power and military glory. He is governed by his emotions. In The Judgement of Paris we see the conflict between sexual desire on the one side and moral and gender conventions on the other side. The point is that, as a consequence, the triumph of desire over morality is presented as the triumph of peace and humanity over hatred and destruction. Endymion (Wieland, Werke 100–118), the second of the Comic Tales is, like all of the others, also placed in the mythical world of ancient Greece. The poem conveys the image of a carefree and natural state before social corruption came into the world. There is neither violence nor poverty, there are neither class differences nor morals, because there is no need for morality in this natural state. The beautiful shepherd Endymion lives in a community of free love with the nymphs: “Joyful sensuality, the highest good enjoyed by mankind, is innocent in this prelapsarian paradise” (Boa 196). Most noteworthy in this connection is the equal relation between the sexes. Sexual pleasure is not only shown as “natural and universal in both sexes” (197). But to “make his point Wieland reverses traditional motifs” and gender roles (ibid.). The stunning boy Endymion has the passive part in this sexual romp. His presence is much desired, the girls spoil him with their serenades and nosegays, and he is glimpsed naked while bathing. But the passionate idyll is to be interrupted. Diana, the chaste Queen of the nymphs and goddess of the hunt, catches wind of these goings-on. She is opposed to carnal pleasure, being austere and

226 morally very strict. At first she imposes harsh sentences on her subjects. Then she accuses Cupid of making human beings as well as gods foolish and lascivious by his arrows. She challenges him, convinced to be the only one not to be overcome by his arts. Some nights later Diana comes across Endymion sleeping in a grove under the moonlight. Drunk with his beauty the desire awakes in her to touch him. Her body reacts to the sight of the boy, her sexual urges arouse, and a strange fire inflames her body. She does not know herself anymore; she feels herself to be a woman for the first time in her life (Werke 113). “The reversal of conventional roles reaches a comic climax as the young boy lies passively dreaming of the obscene and holy mysteries under the kisses of the all too active goddess” (Boa 198). In her besotted state Diana is not merely content with kissing. With a literary reference to Plato’s Symposion, it is said that in producing Eros, they did what Penia and Poros did in the garden of the gods. Unfortunately the couple, while enjoying each other, were watched by a faun. The strict goddess is now blackmailed by this ugly, half-human, half-animal creature. Either she will be compliant to his sexual desires or he will make her indiscretion public. Caught in her own moral claims Diana has no choice but to surrender. Here again it is the body that imposes itself when confronted with unnatural moral strictness. At first Diana loosens her morals because her sexual desires demand their rights. Actually, this fact is not disadvantageous to her. Yet it is her own public insistence on chastity that prevents her now from satisfying the demands of her senses without punishment. It is Diana’s morality that makes her a victim of the capriciousness of somebody else, not of her lust. So it is the incompatibility of these moral standards with the demands of the body that makes them turn against their advocates. Actually a serious subject, it is presented in a comical manner by showing the protagonist entangled in her own self-deception ideals. The following narrative Juno and Ganymed was perhaps the most scandalous in its time. It was erased from the Comic Tales in some later editions. There seems to be some connection with the open presentation of homosexual aspects unusual in other arrangements of the Ganymed motif in eighteenth century literature. The poem begins with the clichéd depiction of the nuisance of a nagging wife. However, this motif is marked as a literary shaped stereotype that can be traced back as far as to Homer. In this narrative it is Juno who is putting a strain on her husband Zeus with her constant reproaches about his flirtations with other goddesses and nymphs. It is, however, intimated that her Puritanism – even in the marriage bed – is driving him into the arms of other women and not only of them. One day while on a trip to the Earth, Zeus spots the beautiful shepherd boy Ganymed. At the earliest opportunity he makes him his cupbearer on the Olympus. Because of the way in which Zeus behaves, his infatuation with the boy is perceived by the

227 whole host of gods. Therefore, Juno again reproaches him. It is through her accusation that the homosexual character of the relationship between Zeus and Ganymed becomes very clear indeed: Damit dein lüstern Aug an einem nackten Jungen Sich täglich weiden kann. Wie weit treibt ihr das Spiel so gar am Götter-Tische? Wir essen nie vor euch in Ruh, Stets währt das Tendeln und Gezische, Man lacht, man winkt, man wirft sich Küsse zu; Und soll dein Nektar-Punsch dir schmecken, So muß dir Ganymed den Becher erst belecken. Kaum setzt er an, so reißest du Den Kelch ihm aus der Hand, die Spur hinwegzusaugen, Wo er den Mund im Trinken hingedrückt, Und siehst ihn schmatzend an, und rollst entzückt, Wie ein Bacchant, die liebestrunknen Augen. Ja heute scheutest du dich nicht, Vor unser aller Angesicht Ihn gar zu küssen und zu herzen (Werke 129). Poor Hebe’s forced, unheard, from her employ, So you can feast your lusting eye Each day upon some naked boy. How long before this table-play is stopped? Because of you we cannot even eat in peace! The whispers and the flirting never seem to cease, The kisses thrown, the laughs and signals swapped! And nectar, if it’s now to suit your thirst! Then Ganymede must lick the beaker first! He barely starts, you seize it in a wink And suck away the traces from the cup He left there where he tried to drink. You smack your lips; your eyes roll up As would a bacchant’s, wildly amorous! Today, indeed, you didn’t even shrink, In view of each and all of us, From kissing him up close against your breast (Musarion 79).

Juno becomes increasingly jealous in the face of these love-birds. Zeus, however, justifies his behaviour towards his wife with a philosophical excuse. On Juno’s accusations, he confesses that he used to be “an epicure, a swine” (80) in former times. But recently, he had become acquainted with the philosophy of Plato, and thus came to know the true and incorporeal kind of love. And that is what he is practising with Ganymed. Their kisses are only “metaphysical, abstract” (81), Zeus tells his wife. In consequence of this, Juno feels not only cheated but mocked as well. As a revenge on her husband, she decides to seduce Ganymed herself. With the help of other goddesses, the boy is taken to

228 Juno who seems surprised while having a bath. In the following love play, the goddess and the shepherd boy are interrupted by Zeus who is returning from a journey. In the argument developing between them, Zeus points out once again that his love to the boy is a platonic one that is only for the soul: Ich sagt euch ja, daß ich hiebei Den Sokrates zum Muster mir erwähle, Und schöner Knaben schöne Seele Allein der Gegenstand von meiner Liebe sei (Werke 142). For all that I have told you is the truth, I’ve taken Socrates to be my guide; The lovely souls alone and handsome youth Are now the goals to which my love will strive (Musarion 90).

Juno is quick to answer. With a surprising turn she resolves the situation, noticing that there is not any conflict between her and her husband. If his love is for the spiritual part of the boy alone, she will make do with the more physical parts: Ganz gut, mein Herr, es steht euch frei An ihren Seelen euch nach Herzenslust zu weiden; Ich gönn euch diesen edeln Trieb, Und nehme, wie ihr seht, bescheiden, Mit ihrem gröbern Teil vorlieb (Werke 142). That’s fine, my lord, to you I leave it free To feed upon their souls and sate your hearts; I gladly grant to you this very noble drive, While I, quite modestly, as you will see, Shall be contented with some baser part (Musarion 90).

With her provocative assertion of belief in the assets of physical love, Juno catches Zeus in his own hypocritically philosophical attitude. It is remarkable that her confession is not morally punished in the poem. On the contrary – she triumphs over the false moral standards of the man who remains not only cheated in the end, but intellectually inferior, too. After all, this is a complete reversal of the traditional gender stereotypes. While the man is forced to take a hypocritical moral attitude as an excuse for his sexual demands, the woman enjoys the desires of the flesh without being punished for it, and in addition, she is shown to be the intellectually superior. The last narrative in the first edition of the Comic Tales, Aurora and Cephalus is not too fruitful within the context of our questions, so that we can pass it over. We will focus on another poem instead. The verse narrative Combabus was written in the 1760s, too, and it was added to the Comic Tales in an edition of 1784. The problem with this poem regarding our subject matter

229 is that, in long sections, it is not comical at all. But the conflict between moral virtue and the nature of the body is taken to extremes. The poem is introduced by a confrontation in the shape of a dialogue between different philosophers concerning their views on virtue. The narrator confesses that he himself feels rather helpless about this issue. He would not be able to give the reader any advice which point of view to take: “Die Tugend ist, wenn wir die Weisen fragen,/ Ich weiß nicht was; – sie mögen’s selber sagen!” (Combabus 137) (“Now virtue, if we ask the wise of yesteryear,/ But I don’t know – go see what you yourself may hear”) (Musarion 107). Like all the other Comic Tales the story is also set in the ancient world. An aged king has just married the young princess Astarte who is as beautiful as she is virtuous. On the wedding day she took a vow to build a temple for the goddess Juno in a remote place. The king tries to dissuade her from doing so, because he does not want to be separated from her. But in the end he has to give in to his wife’s wishes because she is getting ill. He orders his intimate follower Combabus to accompany Astarte, both as a guardian and a moral watchdog. The young and beautiful bachelor is not in a position to disobey his lord’s order, in spite of his premonition of the outcome. He fears he is not strong enough to withstand the attractions of the young woman; even more so, he doubts her strength to resist him. He fears that, in the end, the desires of the flesh will be stronger than virtue. And the young wife would not go easy without the pleasures of her state: Sie ist – O! was ihr wollt! von allen möglichen Frauen Die beste, fromm und keusch wie eine Priesterinn, Ganz Unschuld! – Aber doch – (mir selber im Vertrauen Gesagt) stets eine Frau, und eine Königinn! Hat Fleisch und Blut, wie andre junge Schönen, Und wird sich, sind erst drey, vier Monden hin, Von Hymens Trost nicht ohne Müh’ entwöhnen (Combabus 143f.). She is indeed the finest woman ever seen, Is like a priestess, pure and pious in her duties; But still, she is a woman and a queen, Has flesh and blood like other youthful beauties, And will, before too many moons can intervene, Find that it’s difficult to give up Hymen’s cheer (Musarion 111).

He suspects that she will seduce him and that he will succumb because his moral weapons are not strong enough in the battle against her natural appeal: Für dich kämpft Ehr’ und Tugend nur, Ihr helfen Schönheit, Reiz, und Wollust, und Natur! Die Uebermacht auf Amors Seite Ist allzugroß in solchem Streite! (Combabus 145).

230 For you your honor and your virtue fight alone; She’s helped by lust and beauty, charm and nature’s art. The clear superiority on Cupid’s side Is all too great in such a battle-zone (Musarion 112).

After long consideration Combabus hits upon a fatal idea to save both his virtue and his loyalty to his king. In this hopeless situation he cannot but think of one, terrible, solution. The narrator even refuses to call it by its name. Combabus emasculates himself: In dieser äußersten Gefahr Stellt seinem Geist sich ein einzig Mittel dar. Es ist entsetzlich auszusprechen, Allein, es sichert vor Verbrechen. Er geht nicht lang mit Fleisch und Blut zu Rath; Tiefseufzend wendet er die Augen, nicht zu sehen, Was zitternd seine Hand – Sie ist, sie ist geschehen, Die heldenmüthige, die große, schöne That! (Combabus 147f.). In danger here extreme and most intense He sees within his mind but one way out: An awful one it is to speak about, But one to keep him safe from criminal offense! With flesh and blood he thus does not confer, But sighing, turns his eyes so sight will not deter His hand at work. And now it has become a fact: The great, the beautiful, the bold, heroic act (Musarion 113f.).

The first euphoric praise of his deed in the text will become very dubious in the course of the pursuing narration. Here it is important to note that Combabus’s mutilation is explained as a result of the mind’s disregard of the body. His mind took the decision without first asking flesh and blood. Before the departure, Combabus gives a little box to the king, requesting him to keep it until his return. During the period of several years required for the construction of the temple, Astarte succumbs to the excellence of Combabus’s character and to his physical beauty. After many futile attempts to seduce him, she tries to do so very vigorously, one day in her chamber. What she did not know, however, is that her attempts must fail due to the man’s physical state. In this situation Combabus, who has fallen in love with her, too, tells her what he has done to himself to prevent them from being unfaithful to their King, respectively her husband. The narrator now treats Combabus’s deed with irony: “erzählt der arme Platonist/ Von seinem Heldenthum die klägliche Geschichte” (Combabus 155) (“The wretched Platonist commences to repeat/ The doleful tale of his heroic feat”) (Musarion 118). But Astarte is very moved by his devotion and moral strength and there develops the most intimate friendship between them. After their return to the king’s court. Some

231 courtiers inform the king that Combabus and his wife spent day and night together while residing in their foreign quarters. Combabus, unable to deny this, is sentenced to death. To prove his innocence in spite of the appearances to the contrary, he requests the king to open the box he gave to him before his departure. So does the king, and to his – and all the witnesses’ – great surprise he pulls out the irrefutable evidence of Combabus’s innocence: “Denn, Siehe! von Combabens Unschuld wir/ In Nesseltuch gehüllt und köstlich balsamiert,/ Ein unverwerflicher Gezeug hervorgezogen!” (Combabus 164) (“For lo! Behold! Extracted from Combabus’ chest,/ Impeccably embalmed and wrapped in byssus-rolls,/ Is proof of innocence which no one can contest!”) (Musarion 123). Combabus, exculpated on the instant, henceforth lives as the king and queen’s most intimate confidant. After this more unnerving than comical story, it is not before the very last stanza that the poem tips over into the ridiculous. Envying Combabus for his privileged position, all courtiers make the same carnal sacrifice that he made. The narrator comments on this, again, with irony. While no judgement had been passed on Combabus’s deed before, here in the last stanza the imitators of his behaviour are distinctly made ridiculous: Die Wuth sich zu combabisieren Ergriff sie insgesammt. In kurzer Zeit bestand Der ganze Hof aus einer Art von Thieren, Die durch die Stümmelung das einzige verliehren, Um dessentwillen man sie noch erträglich fand (Combabus 166). The rage to get combabacised became a fad And seized them as a group. Before much time expired The court consisted of a type of creatures Which had by mutilation lost the only feature On whose account they’d ever been admired (Musarion 124).

Again it is the confrontation between moral and carnal desires that constitutes the punch line of the story. Here the conflict is shown quite explicitly, not to say brutally. Combabus is able to live up to the moral standard only by mutilation of his body. And through the senseless behaviour of his imitators this morality is shown to be a hollow gesture, self-destructive on top of it. All the rococo tales treated here have in common that they deal with the conflict between the demands of the body on the one hand and a metaphysical philosophy that refutes these demands on the other hand. All of the poems show sexual desire to be indomitable and sensual appeal to be irresistible. Those who try to do so, no matter how well instructed by philosophy and certain concepts of morality, are made to look ridiculous. Their plans always turn against themselves and their belief in metaphysical concepts and theses is revealed to be a kind of self-deception. In the characteristic manner of the

232 genre of rococo verse narrative, human weaknesses are presented in a satirical but not denouncing witty manner. The assertion of physical desires against puritan morality is not merely a philosophical statement. Moreover, the use of erotic motifs adds a new and seductive appeal to literature itself. Wieland distinguishes himself from other authors of his time by the way in which he handles gender stereotypes. He attains some of the comic effects in his poems by a reversal of traditional gender roles. In the Comic Tales mostly women take the seductive part in the loveadventures and men succumb to their allure. Both sexes take an equal stance towards their desires and giving in to them is not punished within the story. On the contrary, those who try to suppress or deny their sexual desires, man or woman, look quite ridiculous in the end.

Works Consulted Boa, Elizabeth: Sex and Sensibility. Wieland’s Portrayal of Relationships Between the Sexes in the Comische Erzählungen, Agathon and Musarion. In: Lessing Yearbook 12 (1980). Pp. 189–218. Panajotis Kondylis, Panajotis: Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1981. Petersdorff, Dirk von: Wieviel Metaphysik braucht die Aufklärung? Christoph Martin Wielands Musarion. In: Merkur 667 (2004). Pp. 1009–1019. Starnes, Thomas C.: Wieland und die Frauenfrage – Frauen und die Wielandfrage. In: Wieland-Studien. II. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke 1994. Pp. 221–248. Wieland, Christoph Martin: Combabus, Comische Erzählungen, Der verklagte Amor. Hamburg: Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur 1984. —. Musarion and Other Rococo Tales. Trans. by Thomas C. Starnes. Columbia: Camden House 1991. —. Werke. Vol. 4. Ed. by Fritz Martini. München: Hanser 1965.

Birte Giesler

Social Satire, Literary Parody, and Gender Critique in French and German Fairy Tales of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger This chapter investigates a French- and a German-language fairy tale of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Queen Fantasque (1758) and Friederike Helene Unger’s Prince Bimbam (1802). Both parody the formal shape of the French conte de fées, while debating gender identity in the context of the emerging modern ‘bourgeois’ culture. They deal with literature as a subject matter and reflect on social norms. While Rousseau focuses on the miraculous and offers a concept of ‘nature’as a predetermined category, the interpretation reveals the tautological structure of the narrator’s argument and gender concept. In contrast, Unger attacks gendered literary patterns. The ideas of originality and identity dissolve into an endless reflection of (poetic) images. The chapter investigates the intertextuality of both texts, and demonstrates how storytelling functions as a means of mediating and questioning gender identity. While both make the fairytale genre a subject of irony, Unger’s text simultaneously works as a parody of the genre of the Bildungsroman.

The idea that mankind is ontologically divided into two incommensurable sexes gained acceptance during the eighteenth century and is thus part of the history of thought of the Modern Age (Hausen 369f.). This way of thinking about sexual difference took the place of the former “one-sex model” which considered the boundaries between male and female “of degree and not of kind” (Laqueur 25) while understanding the female body as “a lesser version of the male’s” (ibid. VIII). As is generally known, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the prominent Enlightenment pedagogue and philosopher, played a major rôle in the development of the philosophy of two incommensurable genders, explaining them as being part of “nature” and “natural” determination (Kofman 11f.). Rousseau’s gender philosophy has influenced the Western history of thought about gender relationships in a fundamental way during the last 250 years (Kleine 162). It is based on the images of two fundamentally different sexes with two specific gender characters and incorporates the idea that this ontological difference is “natural” (Felden 225f.). At the same time, Rousseau describes the female character as completely fixated on the male (Murphy 759f.). Thus, following Rousseau’s gender concept, the two gender characters appear not only incommesurable but also complementary (Bovenschen 164–181). The relationship between nature and the supernatural or miraculous, or rather the relation between reason and imagination, was a central topic of the philosophical and aesthetic debates in the eighteenth century (Nelle 170–173). Consequently, the fairytale genre enjoyed increasing popularity in the literature

234 of the Enlightenment, the Weimar classical period, and – above all – Romanticism. Novalis even conceived of the fairytale as “Canon der Poïsie” (449) (“canon of poetry”). However, philosophers of the French Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, used and transformed the genre of the French conte de fées into a satiric mixture of genres to parody that of the contemporary conte de fées itself (Wührl 35). In the context of German-language literature, Christoph Martin Wieland brought the French conte de fées to the German-speaking (and -writing) world (Wührl 36). Influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Wieland used ironic citations of the French conte de fées for poetological considerations of the relationship between imagination, fancy, and reason (Schaefer 146–156). In the following, a French and a German parodistic fairytale dealing with sex and gender issues will be discussed and analysed from a gender-critical perspective: La Reine Fantasque (The Queen Fantasque) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, first released in 1758, and Friederike Helene Unger’s Prinz Bimbam. Ein Mährchen für Alt und Jung (Prince Bimbam. A Fairytale for Old and Young), published in 1802 but only recently taken notice of by researchers in literary studies (Thiel 51–99; Giesler 245–281). Although both works parody the genre of the French conte de fées and its typical narrative techniques, by using aesthetic forms and stylistic devices of the comic such as irony, parody, satire, transgression of norms in shape and content, breaching levels of fiction, and significant names, the propositions given by Rousseau’s and Unger’s texts are quite different. The following gender-critical reading of both texts reveals the underlying assumptions and indirect statements of both works: In Rousseau’s text, the physical act of the narration itself is brought into the fictitious world and used as an ironic means to interrupt and subvert the cited genre (Runte, The Paradox 52f.). While ‘nature’ serves as a reference point for the narrator who is part of the fiction, female stubbornness is a major target of the mockery. Friedmar Apel has argued that Rousseau’s satire of the fairytale was an ironic “Versuch einer märchenhaften Widerlegung der Märchenform” (71) (“attempt at a fabulous refutation of the shape of the fairy tale genre”)1 in order to prove that the genre of the traditional fairytale (predicated on imagination and the marvellous) is inappropriate to question reality and culturally-given conditions and norms. From a gender-critical perspective, however, the female protagonist of Rousseau’s fairytale evinces some revolutionary aspects (Murphy 759) while the narrative structure of the text questions the prevailing culture by demonstrating that its ostensible affirmation is in fact a subjective statement of male speech from a male standpoint. On the contrary, in Unger’s satiric fairytale the

1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original.

235 inescapable and somewhat irrational cultural ‘wickerwork’ of denotation and meaning – ‘culture’ but not ‘nature’ – becomes the intransgressible reference point. Unger’s text turns out to be an aesthetic play of literary references parodying literary and gender norms and the cultural process of gendering itself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Queen Fantasque (1758)2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself called his satirical fairytale The Queen Fantasque a very gay and funny philosophical fairytale.3 Runte has argued that in this “parody of a fairy tale [. . .] pierced by irony” (The Paradox 48) Rousseau ridicules the aesthetic shape of the contemporary voguish French contes de fées which were mainly characterized by their combination of the miraculous and the aristocracy. In early examples of the genre the importance of status is such that all protagonists are members of the higher nobility (Dammann 133; Mayer and Tismar 23–27). Mocking the French conte de fées, Rousseau indirectly criticizes and ridicules royalty and aristocracy in The Queen Fantasque (Launay 41). Thus his text is a parody of the French conte de fées and a social satire at the same time (Runte, La Reine 159). Rousseau’s fairytale narrates the story of a good-natured king called Phoenix and his rebellious and capricious wife Fantasque, who quarrel constantly. After a long period of childlessness, the queen falls pregnant. While the king and most of the members of the royal household long for a son (and heir to the throne), the queen wishes to give birth to a daughter. Discrète, the fairy responsible for giving newborns their character, tries to comfort the parents by telling the king that it will be a son, while secretly assuring the queen that she is going to have a daughter. In the end, the queen delivers twins – a daughter and a son – who look very much alike. Hence, they are dressed the same (Rousseau 309). The ongoing dispute between the king and queen is intensified when Discrète asks with which attributes they wish their children to be endowed. The king feels the responsibility they have to bear. He will not allow his capricious and moody wife to make such an important decision. Since they cannot come to an agreement, Discrète proposes that the king select the son’s character and the queen the daughter’s. Phoenix picks up his son, and looks pityingly upon his second child. Nevertheless, he feels comfortable with this compromise because it seems to protect the heir to the throne against the 2

All original citations are taken from: La Reine Fantasque, conte. In: Collection complete des oeuvres, tome treizieme, contenant le IIIe. volume des “Mélanges”. Genève: Du Peyrou 1782. Pp. 293–324. All English citations are taken from the translation by Jack Zipes. 3 In a letter to Jacob Vernes dated the 28 March 1756 Rousseau called his “conte philosophique” La Reine Fantasque “si gai et si fou” (Launay 40).

236 queen’s capricious wishes (317). However, Fantasque is offended and picks up the other child, declaring “je demande pour celui que je tiens, tout le contraire de ce qu’il demandera pour l’autre” (ibid.) (“my wish is that the child I hold receive the exact opposite of that which he asks for the other”) (Zipes 168f.). Phoenix is appalled that Fantasque apparently hates her daughter. Anger overwhelms him. Against the will of his wife he wishes his daughter to be perfect, so he demands his son be similar to Fantasque. He immediately regrets having said this but it is too late: the children are “doués sans retour des caractères demandés” (Rousseau 318) (“endowed forever with the traits that were requested”) (Zipes 169). The child in the king’s arms receives the name Caprice and the other is called Raison. Thus the crown prince seems destined to be adorned “de toutes les perfections d’une jolie femme” (Rousseau 318) (“with all the perfections of a pretty woman”) (Zipes 169), while his sister possesses “toutes les vertus d’un honnête-homme, and les qualités d’un bon Roi” (Rousseau 318f.) (“all the virtues of an honest man and the qualities of a good king”) (Zipes 169). In the end, the embarrassment is solved by the narrator who explains that the king had mistaken his daughter for his son because of their great similarity, and Discrète had deliberately used this mistake “pour douer les deux enfants de la maniere [!] qui leur convenoit le mieux” (Rousseau 323) (“by endowing the two children as would suit them best”) (Zipes 171). So, after all, the princess is named Caprice and the prince Raison. Regardless of the Queen’s caprices “tout se trouva dans l’ordre naturel” (Rousseau 323) (“everything found its natural order”) (Zipes 171).

Different Levels of Fiction and the Comic in The Queen Fantasque The main elements of the comic in Rousseau’s tale are its ironic narrative style and the issue of mistaken identities. Runte argued that the characters never speak directly in dialogue, thereby rather fulfilling certain narrative functions (The Paradox 52f.). The text consistently breaches the fictional illusion, a main criterion of stylistic irony (Müller 49, 53). At the beginning, the story about to unfold is introduced explicitly as a fairytale narrated within the fiction: “Il y avoit autrefois un Roi qui aimoit son Peuple . . . Cela commence comme un conte de Fée, interrompit le Druide? C’en est un aussi, répondit Jalamir. Il y avoit donc un Roi . . .” (Rousseau 295) (“Once upon a time there was a king who loved his people –”/ “That’s the way a fairy tale begins,” the druid interrupted./ “Well, that’s what it is”, Jalamir responded.// So once upon a time, then there was a king . . .” (Zipes 160).4

4

Punctuation marks as in the English translation; while “/” indicates a word wrap and “//” stands for a break.

237 In this fictitious opening conversation the status of the narrated text is explicitely called into question (Runte, The Paradox 51). Stating that the following narration in fact is a fairytale ironically signals social criticism as it points out that a king who loves his people would not be part of the real world but of a fairyland. The fairytale of Queen Fantasque and her husband King Phoenix is only one part of Rousseau’s text. It is presented within the fiction as a fairytale that Jalamir tells to “the druid” (Zipes 160). The conversation of Jalamir and the druid forms the framework of this second embedded fairytale. The two interlocutors even mention the possibility that the fairytale could be published some time (Rousseau 308). Rousseau’s The Queen Fantasque shows the four “symbols of ironic fiction”: 1) The multi-layered work has an auctor in fabula as the author of the intra-fictional narration that is part of the fictitious plot. As he thinks about a future printing of his text, the fictitious events also point to the empiric author, reader, and system of literature. 2) The work comprises also a lector in fabula since the druid functions as an intrafictional audience. 3) The liber in fabula (the book itself being part of the fictitious world) is implied the moment the figures of the background story talk about publishing the fairytale to be narrated. 4) The opus as a whole consists of the fabula in fabula since a further fiction is embedded in the (background) story (Müller 59). All these symbols of ironic fiction function as signals which break the reader’s illusion. The subrealities interfuse due to the breaking down of the different fictional levels and frames. Forty years after Rousseau’s tale was written this method of composition was carried to extremes by the early Romanticism of the Jena circle. The symbols of ironic fiction produce the aesthetic figure of ‘romantic irony’. As Friedrich Schlegel argued in his Lyceum fragment 48, “Ironie ist die Form des Paradoxen” (153) (“irony is the form of the paradox”), he conceives of irony as an art of writing or rather a way of philosophizing characterized by a constant alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. In his Athenäum fragment 51 he points out: “Naiv ist, was bis zur Ironie, oder bis zum steten Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung natürlich, individuell oder klassisch ist” (172) (“What is naïve is what is natural, individual, or classical, to the extent of irony or to the extent of constant change of self-creation and self-annihilation”). In The Queen Fantasque another instrument of breaking the reader’s illusion is the drawing of the reader’s attention to the very act of story-telling itself. The druid again and again interrupts the narrator to discuss the fairytale and its continuation. The intra-fictional narrator and the listener change rôles when the druid pretends to be as able as Jalamir to complete the fairytale. The druid then describes his vision of a state ruled by a capricious king. He points out that unfeminine Princess Raison would be a new wonderland heroine. The people would demand to change the system of succession to the throne but the jurists

238 would emphatically try to prove that the most stupid man would be better than the most brilliant woman, even if the first-born were a monkey or a wolf. The original narrator Jalamir is amused by the druid’s excitement and complains that the druid would make a political essay out of his conte de fées. It is the hinting at incongruity and inappropriateness that makes the calling into question of the status of the narrated text ironic and comic. Jalamir declares that there could be no lack of endings and that he is going to present one of them in four words. He then completes his fairytale by elaborating on the solution of the mistake mentioned above. However, criticizing lawyers who “prove that the most stupid man would be better than the most brilliant woman, even if the first-born were a monkey or a wolf ” tends towards criticism of the patriarchal system of succession to the throne and patriarchy in general. Inside the intra-fictional narration, the fairytale, the figures bear significant names, a traditional instrument in the comedy of types. Rousseau’s queen is called “Fantasque” (“Capricious”). Since her daughter ought to be like her, she is named “Caprice”. The prince is named “Raison” (“Reason”), standing for the attribution of rationality, sanity, and intellect to the male, a basic element of the philosophy of gender employed since antiquity. The character-endowing fairy is called “Discrète” (“Discreet”). In accord with her descriptive name, she is close-lipped whenever a member of the royal household insists on knowing whether the Queen is expecting a girl or a boy. However, her name is ironic since she is not really close-mouthed. Rather, she blabs out half-truths to everyone. Overall, the topic and its presentation are ironic. The whole story about the idle royal couple is rather laughable. The sublime of the aristocratic wonderland and the noble motives of the royal sovereigns are turned into the common and the low and reduced to carnality. At the same time, it is obvious that women in particular are mocked in the intra-fictional tale (Runte, The Paradox 50). Due to the bawdiness of its humour, Sarah Kofmann considers The Queen Fantasque a burlesque, a type of text associated with the farce and the antic. She interprets its main assertion as follows: Die Burleske La Reine Fantasque zeigt mit den Mitteln der Komik, daß die Männer immer die Frauen von der Macht ausschließen und den dümmsten der Männer, ja sogar ein Tier, ‘einen Affen oder einen Wolf’, der Weisesten aller Frauen, die sich immer deren Wünschen unterordnen muß, vorziehen (Kofman 13f.). The burlesque The Queen Fantasque uses strategies of the comic to demonstrate that men always exclude women from power and that they prefer the most ignorant man and even ‘a monkey or a wolf’ to the wisest of all women who always must submit to their wills.

Kofman argues that humour in The Queen Fantasque works by exaggeration and thereby as an indirect (ironic) critique of male behaviour that keeps women in a weak position. However, Rousseau’s text itself uses patriarchal discourse

239 and metaphors to exclude women from power. To identify the relevance of gender and the different ‘cultures’ of the supernatural and the ‘natural’ it is useful to distinguish between the different levels of fiction. As feminist readings using linguistic deconstruction have concluded, Rousseau undermines his own intention in his novels (Garbe, Die weibliche List; Fiktionen; Kleine 163–168). Due to the performative effects arising from romantic irony in The Queen Fantasque, the author is not master of his speech. Obviously the stylistic irony of Rousseau’s fairytale as a whole subverts his gender discourse likewise the fiction in his novels.

The Supernatural, Gender, and the Comic in The Queen Fantasque Wellington states that Rousseau’s The Queen Fantasque is a text on the relationship between fancy and reason (173). The fictitious conversation explicitly quotes a main criterion of the fairytale genre. One part of the text is presented as a fairytale. Even the figures of the frame story have names from Oriental fairytales (such as Jalamir) or Celtic myths (the druid). The explicit discussion of the miraculous – a main criterion of the genre of the fairytale genre – breaks the reader’s illusion as well. The reader, expecting a typical fairytale, is already disillusioned before the tale is begun because of Jalamir and the druid’s conversation. Jalamir chooses as a central theme the difference between the spheres of wonderland and reality. He reminds his intra-fictional auditor, the druid, that the story is set in a fairyland and explains that this wonderland comprises a mix of cultures and religions (Rousseau 312–314). It is the text itself that creates the expectation that the opposition of the two genders is a product of the supernatural, since it is a fairy who attaches supposedly ‘natural’ qualities to each child in a situation of mistaken identity. It is the doubly-fictitious queen in the fictionwithin-the-fiction wonderland who creates this expectation as she is not asking for any particular qualities to be given to each gender but simply for the opposite character. Nevertheless, in the course of the background story and in the course of the embedded fairytale, it becomes obvious that Jalamir and the druid have a ‘rational’ conversation, creating the interior fairytale while telling and listening to it. Thus the intra-fictional story is explicitly presented as male speech. The ‘rational’ male discourse emerges as an omnipresent and self-referential system of communication that implies a certain concept of ‘nature’. Although Jalamir and his listener allude to the construction of ‘reality’ by discussing the smooth transition between ‘history’ and ‘story’, Jalamir refers to the ‘natural order’ to explain the gender-specific division of sanity, freakishness, and the right to power. Considering the aesthetic shape of The Queen Fantasque as a whole, ‘nature’ emerges as a male axiom. Instead of confirming any ‘natural’ qualities, gender identity proves to be created through narrative while being simultaneously deconstructed by the narrative structure of the whole text.

240 Friederike Helene Unger, Prince Bimbam (1802) Friederike Helene Unger translated the famous Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into German. She can be considered a contemporary expert on Rousseau (Felden 196f.). As Felden points out, her reception of Rousseau’s works shows a “kühle Distanz” (34) (“cool distance”). Where Rousseau’s philosophy of gender is concerned, this distance is especially remarkable. It is particularly noticeable that Unger mocks the contemporary philosophy of gender in her fairytale about the laughable hero Prince Bimbam. The eponymous hero of Unger’s Prince Bimbam. A Fairytale for Old and Young is the young and spoiled son of a fairy called Quatscheline. One morning he awakes from wondrous dreams about girls and bewitched cherry stones. Spontaneously he declares that he will marry one particular girl in his dreams. Quatscheline shows her son a crystal mirror that features all the princesses of the world so that he can identify the sought-after girl. The chosen one is called Zenobia. She is an aesthete who keeps company with other aesthetes and critics. Bimbam has to complete an exhausting voyage through the history of culture and literature to win her over. However, his main task and test is to catch a cherry stone between the rotating sails of an enormous windmill and hand it over to the princess to gain self-assurance after having achieved this. Bimbam departs accompanied by Invalido who is supposed to supervise his education. After a little while Bimbam encounters Kronos who is introduced as the gravedigger of literature. Bimbam passes through different epochs of the history of literature, such as the singing of alexandrines and German poems in antique style. Finally he reaches the forest of current literature and philosophy. There among other fairytale figures he meets a tomcat wearing boots whom the reader – but not Bimbam – recognizes as Puss-in-Boots (Unger 80f.). While observing the marvels he encounters, Bimbam feels like a silly boy. This is the moment when he gains self-knowledge. He merits a change of name. Thenceforward he is called Luminos. Bimbam-Luminos now appears “in männlicher Schöne” (100) (“as the epitome of male beauty”). When he hands over to Zenobia the cherry stone he had caught earlier in his travels, an illuminated inscription with the words “Wahre Lebensweisheit” (ibid.) (“Genuine Worldly Wisdom”) appears on all the palace walls. Zenobia explains that she was only an instrument of Bimbam’s Bildung (that is, education, character formation, formative education). She declares that she has now returned to her “eigenthümliche Weibesnatur” (101) (“inherent female nature”). Nevermore will she be an “ästhetisches Weib” (ibid.) (“aesthetic female”). Luminos and Zenobia live happily ever after. Unger’s satiric text is emphatically toying with the ambiguous German term Bildung which denotes ‘education’ in general as well as a certain idealistic and classicist concept of ‘character formation’ in particular. Pedagogy and character

241 formation play a major rôle in philosophical and aeshetical concepts of the late 18th and early 19th century philosophy and aesthetics. By repetitively using the term Bildung and its derivatives like the verb bilden (to educate, form, develop), Unger explicitly sets her fairytale Prince Bimbam in the context of both, in the context of contemporary philosophical theories and concepts of character formation, subjectivity, and personal identity as well as in the aesthetical context of the literary genre of the Bildungsroman (novel of formative education).5 It has been argued that the traditional fairytale of magic does not fall into the category of the comic (Röhrich 23). However, Friederike Helene Unger ironically takes up the aesthetic cultural asset of the European folktale tradition and the form of the voguish French conte de fées and, making use of literary strategies of the comic, turns her fairytale into a literary satire of literature, focusing on education, character formation, and gender.

Humorous Elements in Prince Bimbam As Matthias Morgenroth points out, satire is an aggressive attitude of writing (36). Unger’s satire of literature is at work on all levels of the text. It attacks several concrete works, aesthetic ideas, literary patterns, genres, as well as the modern business of literature itself. Lukács’s definition of the satiric can be applied to Prince Bimbam: “Die Satire ist eine ganz offen kämpferische literarische Ausdrucksweise. Es wird in ihr nicht bloß das, wofür und wogegen gekämpft wird, sowie der Kampf selbst gestaltet, sondern die Gestaltungsform selbst ist von vorneherein unmittelbar die des offenen Kampfes” (Lukács 87) (“Satire is a quite blatantly angry and aggressive form of literary expression. In satire not only what the battle is for and against is depicted, as well the anger and aggression itself, but the very form of the depiction itself is from the start that of combat”). The laughable hero is one of the main comic elements in Unger’s Prince Bimbam. According to Hans Robert Jauß the laughable hero acts comically due to the disproportion of his efforts and returns (103). He either works too hard or not hard enough. Unger’s Prince Bimbam is a laughable hero who acts comically by working too little. The strenuous voyage turns 5

The term Bildungsroman has not been coined until 1820 (by Karl Morgenstern), though, yet the literary phenomenon existed already in the late 18th century. The Bildungsroman can be roughly described as a subgenre of the coming-of-age novel focusing on mistakes and crises experienced by the protagonist during his identification process before he integrates more or less successfully into society. However, a clear definition of the genre as well as the connection between the literary genre of the Bildungsroman and contemporary philosophy of Bildung cause prolonged controversy in literary studies (Jacobs 230; Titzmann 7–9). The same applies to the fact that the genre is often considered a specific German peculiarity in the history of literature (cf. Kontje).

242 out to be a ridiculous trip. Moreover, Bimbam oversleeps most of the journey, lying on Kronos’s trolley of books. Actually, Bimbam is pushed to Zenobia’s royal household (Unger 37). Furthermore, he seems blissfully ignorant, since he does not recognize his well-known travelling acquaintances. The whole plot of Prince Bimbam is organized around the contrast between the sublime and the low. The narrative is full of social criticism and derides the aristocratic fairyland. Bimbam is described as a lazy and bigheaded slacker: “Mein Gouverneur hat mir gesagt, es gäbe da draussen, wo die Menschen wohnen, Mädchen, die Prinzessinnen heißen; sie thun, so wie ich, den ganzen lieben langen Tag hindurch nichts, als tändeln und tanzen” (7). “Erringen! mühsam![”] wiederholte Bimbamchen erbleichend. [“]Heißt das nicht arbeiten und sich anstrengen? Für was wäre ich denn ein Prinz? und wozu wären denn die gemeinen Leute da?” Freilich hatte das arme Kind bei dem bloßen fatalen Worte: Arbeit, schon immer Blut und Wasser geschwitzt (13f.). “My governor told me, outside where the humans live, there would be girls called princesses; like I do, they do nothing but flirt and dance all day long”. “Achieving! with an effort!” repeated little Bimbam, turning pale. “Does not this mean to work and exert oneself? What would I be a prince for? And what would the common people exist for?” Of course, the poor child always used to sweat blood and water at the mere word: labour.

The figures are also mocked by their expressive names. For example, “Quatscheline” can be understood as “nonsense talker”, “Invalido” paradoxically emphasizes Bimbam’s tutor’s invalidity, his ineffectuality, while he is supposed to control and guide Bimbam. The name of the eponymous hero indicates that the text deridingly deals with sex and gender issues. The onomatopoetic “Bimbam”, suggesting the sound of a large hanging bell, was in the early 19th century a bawdy German slang word for male genitalia (Küpper 108; Bornemann 1: 73). Thus the narrative creates a decidedly gendered atmosphere right from the start and clearly shows that it is ridiculing the male. The whole story can be considered a satire about gender relationships. According to Wolfgang Preisendanz, satire functions by deformation using metonymy, synecdoche, or hyperbole (413). The significant name of Bimbam functions as a synedoche for all males. Humour in general succeeds by metaphorically generalizing an idea or a group. This is particularly true as far as sex and gender are concerned: “Auch die Geschlechtsidentität bietet ein gutes Beispiel für eine metaphorische Totalisierung, denn auch hier steht jeweils ein Bild ‘Frau’ und ‘Mann’ nicht nur für eine Gruppe von vielfältigen und differenzierten Ausdrucksweisen von Geschlechtsidentität, sondern darüber hinaus für eine illusionäre Konstruktion” (Uecker 45f.) (“Gender identity too offers a good example of a metaphorical generalization, since here too the image of ‘woman’ or ‘man’ stands for a group of manifold and differentiated expressions of gender identity but, beyond that, for an illusionary construction”).

243 The story of Prince Bimbam clearly focuses on gender because it is set in the sphere of fairies – the fairy being traditionally female (Wolfzettel 946). Prince Bimbam obviously is an oafish milksop who is spoilt by his mother and several foster mothers. The story also demonstrates socratic irony while also using the motif of the riddle, very popular in myths and fairytales. Otto Betz points out that the German word for riddle “Rätsel” is etymologically connected with “Rat” (213) (“advice”) since in Early New High German the German term for “Rätsel” was “Ratfrage” (“request for advice”) (Grimm 195). Unger’s Prince Bimbam not only accepts advice. He explicitly obtains worldly wisdom. Prince Bimbam uses the motif of the riddle combined with Socratic irony. The laughable hero has to achieve self-knowledge by catching a cherry stone. The cherry stone, however, can be understood as a metaphor for the core of his ego. It is Socratically ironic that his self-knowledge consists precisely of his realizing his own ignorance. Unger’s fairytale produces a variety of humorous effects in form and content, many generated by strategies of intertextuality. The narration also cites shapes: it uses “Formzitat” (Böhn 21f.) (“quotation of form”). The plot can be considered a humorous parody of the fairytale genre in general and the subgenre of the “Bildungsmärchen” (“fairytale of formative education”) in particular, with the protagonist being self-conscious about his own status as part of a marvellous fairyland as he is explicitly hoping to be rescued by his mother’s “Feerei” (Unger 14) (“fairy trade”). Furthermore, Unger’s text as a whole can be considered an ironic citation of the genre of the classical German Bildungsroman. Recent gender-oriented research in narratology has argued that the gerne itself is the most gendered (male coded) narrative pattern (Erll and Siebel 195). Ridiculing the cited genre, Unger’s text – as women’s adaptations of the Bildungsroman generally tend to do – reveals the impact of gender on the pattern that is being cited: “Female appropriations of the Bildungsroman [. . .] make apparent what was previously unseen – namely, that these books offer an imaginative construct that is almost entirely male-centred” (Eagleton 253). Despite recounting the coming of age of an individual male, the narrative pattern of the Bildungsroman shows the construction of both sexes and, in its ending, the (re)confirmation of a heterosexually organized culture. Recent research has argued that the two sexes constructed in the classical Bildungsroman are part of the theatricality of everyday life (Schreiber 1–10).

Prince Bimbam as a Gender-critical Parody of the Bildungsroman Unger’s text places itself in the context of the contemporary pedagogical philosophy of German idealism and its specific educational ideal by explicitly using the term Bildung. Prince Bimbam is not only supposed to win the princess over, he explicitly also has to learn something in order to become

244 educated: “Sie treten hier in Ihre Bildungsschule ein.“ (Unger 38) (“You are entering your school of formative education”). The term “school” indicates that the development of Bimbam will be motivated by an extraneous cause. Nevertheless, his inner life also contributes to it as the thirst for knowledge awakens in Bimbam: “Der Bildungstrieb war in [. . .] ihm erwacht” (49) (“The thirst for knowledge awoke in him”). It is also explicitly stated that the fairy Mme de Klingklang “halte den Prinzen für eine ganz artige kleine Erscheinung, bei welcher der Bildungstrieb erwacht zu seyn schiene” (53) (“considers the prince a quite good little figure whose thirst for knowledge seems to be awakened”). The impact of the inner drive on personal development and character formation is a crucial point in those stories being subsumed under the genre of the Bildungsroman. Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is being considered a paradigm of the genre. The paradigmatic eponymous hero declares in his central statement: “Daß ich dir’s mit Einem Worte sage: mich selbst, ganz wie ich da bin, auszubilden, das war dunkel von Jugend auf mein Wunsch und meine Absicht” (290) (“To put it to you in a few words, it was my wish and intention in a vague way from childhood onwards to develop and educate myself, entirely as I am”) (Waidson, Wilhelm Meister’s Years 79). The system reference between Unger’s fairytale and the German Bildungsroman is marked by several allusions to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. For example, it is quite remarkable that Zenobia allows Bimbam to make his own mistakes and errors (Unger 59) while having a finger in the pie from the beginning of Bimbam’s educational journey. Apparently she acts on the same concept of education as that of the tower-society in Goethe’s novel. Furthermore, the oracle considers Bimbam’s disposition as “der Götterfunke“ (21) (“the spark of God”). Wilhelm Meister uses the same metaphor to reflect his desire of selfdevelopment, “daß in den Menschen ein besserer Funke lebt, der, wenn er keine Nahrung erhält, wenn er nicht geregt wird, von der Asche täglicher Bedürfnisse und Gleichgültigkeit tiefer bedeckt und doch spät und fast nie erstickt wird” (Goethe 55) (“there is in human beings a brighter spark which, unless it is nurtured and fanned, will be more deeply covered by the ashes of daily needs and indifference, and yet will be stifled so late, indeed almost never”) (Waidson 54). The classical ideal of Bildung aims to harmonize individualization and socialization, since the individual ought to integrate himself self-confidently into society. Unger alludes to the classical ideal by mocking it. Bimbam’s Bildungsschule (school of formative education) mainly consists of his admiring himself and disparaging others (Unger 38). Women have a specific function in the Bildung of the male protagonist of the classical Bildungsroman. The female acquaintances of the male protagonist in Goethe’s novel also represent different levels of the history of art (Schlaffer

245 277–281). Unger’s parody of the classical Bildungsroman mocks this motif. Bimbam meets a beautiful damsel who personifies German literature. She turns Greek and becomes frivolous which can be considered a reference to Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Römische Elegien) (cf. Unger 75–79). Moreover, canonized novels of the genre also recount the solution of the conflict between Eros and Logos. Unger’s fairytale makes fun of this motif too by playing with words. Obviously women have a function in Prince Bimbam’s formation: “Sie treten hier in Ihre Bildungsschule ein: nie gerieth ein Mann, den nicht ein geliebtes Weib bildete” (38) (“You enter your school of formative education here: no male not cultivated by a woman ever succeeded”). Hence, Bimbam develops a definite interest in women: Der Bildungstrieb war in dem Grade in ihm erwacht, daß er sich unablässig Gasse auf und Gasse ab umhertrieb, das edle Werk zu fördern. Einst war er einer der tausend einzeln und Gruppenweise in Residenzen umherschwirrenden transparenten weiblichen Gestalten nachgeeilt (49f.). The drive to achieve learning had awakened in him to the extent that, without letting up, he was driving up and down the alley to further the noble work. Once he hurried after one of the thousand transparent female figures swirling around singly or in groups in the cities.

The narrator sarcastically describes how Bimbam starts his education by energetically living up to his name by gaining sexual experience. As mentioned above, he merits a name change after having solved the riddle. His new name “Luminos” indicates his luminosity. His educational journey leads Bimbam from his fixation on carnality to the light of reason: he turns from ‘Prince Genital’ into ‘King Genius’. The simple fact that Bimbam merits the coveted princess at the end of the story not only alludes to the fairytale genre’s major motif, marrying the soughtafter person. It is also a basic part of ‘becoming a man’ in the context of the Rousseauist philosophy of the complementarity of gender. Jean-Jacques Rousseau elaborated on this in his paradigmatic novel of education Emile ou de l’éducation: “Im fünften und abschließenden Kapitel der Musterbiographie erreicht der junge Held Emile den Gipfel und den Lohn seiner Bildungsgeschichte: ‘Sophie oder Das Weib’” (Lange 415) (“In the fifth and concluding chapter of the paradigmatic biography, the young hero Emile reaches the summit and reward of his story of education: ‘Sophie or the Woman’ ”). Unger’s Prince Bimbam explicitly demonstrates a statement of the recent gender-oriented reading of the Bildungsroman. In the classical Bildungsroman women figures are fixated on the male protagonist and function as instruments for his education: Luminos erschien ihr in männlicher Schöne; sprechend war seine Miene und denkend sein Auge. Mit edlem Anstande überreichte er ihr den Kirschkern, der beider

246 Schicksal lösen sollte. Kaum hatte ihre warme Hand ihn berührt, so zersprang er mit Kraft, und auf allen Seiten des Saales war mit Feuerschrift zu lesen: Wahre Lebensweisheit. Und in der ganzen großen Residenz war der Wiederschein: wahre Lebensweisheit. “Mein theurer Prinz,” sagte jetzt Zenobia mit herzgewinnender Freundlichkeit: [“]Diese, nicht ich, war des Strebens werth; denn auch ich sollte Werkzeug Ihrer Bildung seyn. Der Zauber ist dahin; ich bin in meine eigenthümliche Weibesnatur zurückgetreten, und werde nie wieder, weder ein ästhetisches Weib werden, noch zur Thiergestalt der Mäusefänger herabsinken” (Unger 100f.). Luminos appeared to her the epitome of male beauty, his countenance was expressive and reasoning his eye. With noble grace he handed her the cherry stone which was meant to resolve their fate. Scarcely had her warm hand touched it when it split and on all sides of the hall could be read in fiery letters: Genuine Worldly Wisdom. And throughout the whole great court was the reflection: Genuine Worldly Wisdom. “My dear Prince,” Zenobia said with heart-winning friendliness, “This, not I, was worth the striving; since I too was supposed to be an instrument for your education. The magic is over; I have gone back to my inherent female nature and shall never again become either an aesthetic woman nor ever sink to the character of a mouse hunter”.

At the same time, Unger’s fairytale demonstrates the function of the female as a metaphor in the symbolic order. The female is excluded as the Other, serving as a projection screen to create male identity. Thus, the female is an effect of a process of repression. In Prince Bimbam the woman explicitly functions as a man-created imago and mirror image. Zenobia emerges in the mirror when Bimbam looks at his reflection at the beginning of the story (8f.). At the same time, Bimbam receives his ‘masculinity’ by averting and removing his female attributes by washing himself: “Hier müßt Ihr baden, und das weibische Wesen abthun, das Euch nie zur Kraft gelangen läßt” (67) (“You have to take a bath here and remove the womanly character which keeps you from becoming strong”). The womanish Prince Bimbam is a contradiction of moral and social gender norms and expectations. Hans Robert Jauß points out that a parody working with a laughable hero might aim at the norms which the laughable hero contradicts (105). According to Wolfgang Preisendanz, in general a main function of laughter is the calling into question of rules by ridiculing them (411). Bimbam-Luminos obviously shows the “Komik der Gegenbildlichkeit” (Jauß 105) (“humour of opposition”) which renders gender identity moot. This becomes particularly clear when one takes a closer look at the protagonist’s name: Being provocatively named after the male genitals, Prince Bimbam does not stand for the upright phallus as the powerful male organ for giving life. His name rather sarcastically points at the weak and ‘unmanly’ pendent organ. In Unger’s Prince Bimbam, gender identity is called into question on two fictional levels. Firstly, the narrator mocks the laughable unmanly protagonist. Secondly, the gender-focused system of narration as a whole ridicules Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and the bourgeois gender relationship since Goethe’s Bildungsroman narrates “die Bildungsgeschichte des Bürgertums schlechthin”

247 (Koopmann 183) (“the history of the development of the middle class per se”). Jauß argues that the parody might work with the discrepancy of the high and the low in form and content (104). Unger’s fairytale addresses aristocracy and gross physicality as well as the socially high and low. Although BimbamLuminos receives the coveted girl at the end, the story satirizes the motif of achieving aristocracy, found in fairytales as well as in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Novalis called Goethe’s novel “die Wallfahrt nach dem Adelsdiplom” (646) (“the pilgrimage to the diploma of aristocracy”) whereas Unger’s fairytale belittles Goethe’s protagonist by leading her successful protagonist from aristocracy to a civic life according to bourgeois gender rôles.

Mediating and Undermining Culture by Ridiculing Literary and Gender Norms Each text, Rousseau’s Queen und Unger’s Bimbam, is a satire of the French fairytale, focusing on the human body, sex, and gender. Satirizing feudalist society, both demonstrate the close relation between physicality and humour. Apart from the comic element of the significant names of the characters, both texts work with ironic intertextuality. In both cases the texts create their own genre identity by explicitly quoting one or several literary genre(s). Especially the narrative structure of the fairytale-within-the-fairytale of The Queen Fantasque shows that the aesthetic generation of a (humorous) genre itself is a performative act. Remarkably, in both texts gender identity itself is created by acts of citation. In Rousseau’s Queen the son and the daughter each come into life as simple copies of the parent of the same sex, and the text plays with the postnatal labeling of gender characteristics. In the case of Unger’s protagonist, the masculinity he aims to achieve turns out to be a performative product of quotations and adaptations of literary patterns. Both texts create their comic effects by explicitly reflecting on the deviation from and transgression of poetic and cultural norms: incongruity and indirectness are here crucial for the comic. Talking about literature and reflecting on social norms, both texts demonstrate how literature functions as a means of mediating and questioning social reality by reflecting on given cultural conditions and alternative possibilities. Both texts use the form of the conte de fées in a humorous way to make different statements about the relation between gender, rationality, and the supernatural. Rousseau’s The Queen Fantasque focuses on the miraculous and offers a concept that conceives of nature as an axiomatically predetermined category. A gender-critical reading analysing the different levels of fiction reveals the tautological structure of the narrator’s argumentation and his concept of gender. In contrast, Unger’s Prince Bimbam shows a thoroughly ironic and sarcastic gender-critical art of writing. The story is suggestive of the power of

248 imagination and poetry both strongly contributing to the construction of cultural and social reality. With literary allusions, the narration straightforwardly attacks gendered literary patterns. The ideas of nativity, originality, and identity dissolve in an endless reflection of (poetic) images. Due to the name of the protagonist, in Prince Bimbam the ridiculed main signifier of sex and gender is itself lost in a cabinet of mirror images.

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249 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Vol. 7. München: dtv 1988. —. Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship. Vol. 1. Trans. by H. M. Waidson. London: Calder 1977. Hausen, Karin: Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’ – Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben. In: Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Ed. by Werner Conze. Stuttgart: Klett 1976. Pp. 363–393. Hillmann, Karl-Heinz: Wörterbuch der Soziologie. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Kröner 1994. Jacobs, Jürgen: Bildungsroman. In: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. 1: A-G. Berlin – New York: de Gruyter 1997. Pp. 230–233. Jauß, Hans Robert: Über den Grund des Vergnügens am komischen Helden. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 103–132. Kleine, Inge: Der Mann, die Frau, ihre Maske und seine Wahrheit. Zur Maske bei JeanJacques Rousseau. In: Maskeraden. Geschlechterdifferenz in der literarischen Inszenierung. Ed. by Elfi Bettinger and Julika Funk. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 1995. Pp. 154–168. Kofman, Sarah: Rousseau und die Frauen. Tübingen: Gehrke 1986. Kontje, Todd: The German Bildungsroman. History of a National Genre. Columbia: Camden House 1993. Koopmann, Helmut: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96). In: Goethes Erzählwerk. Interpretationen. Ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler and James E. McLead. Stuttgart: Reclam 1985. Pp. 168–191. Küpper, Heinz: Wörterbuch der deutschen Umgangssprache. Stuttgart: Klett 1988. Lange, Sigrid: Nachwort. In: Ob die Weiber Menschen sind. Geschlechterdebatten um 1800. Ed. by Sigrid Lange. Leipzig: Reclam 1992. Pp. 411–431. Launay, Michel: A propos de la “Fiction ou morceau d’allégorie de la révélation” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Essai de lecture croisée de “la Fiction” due “Discours sur l’inégalité” et de “la Reine fantasque”. In: Littérature et société. Recueil d’études en l’honneur de Bernard Guyon. Ed. by Jean Bastaire. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer 1973. Pp. 39–46. Laqueur, Thomas: Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge (MA) – London (UK): Harvard University Press 1990. Lukács, Georg: Zur Frage der Satire. In: Werke. Vol. 4. Neuwied: Luchterhand 1971. Pp. 83–107. Mayer, Mathias, and Jens Tismar: Kunstmärchen. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 1997. Morgenroth, Matthias: Formen und Funktionen des Komischen in Büchners “Leonce und Lena”. Stuttgart: Heinz 1995. Müller, Marika: Die Ironie. Kulturgeschichte und Textgestalt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1995. Murphy, Patricia: Fantasy and Satire in Rousseau’s La Reine Fantasque. In: The French Review 47.4 (1974). Pp. 757–766.

250 Nelle, Florian: Versuch über das Wunderbare. In: Weimarer Beiträge 43.2 (1997). Pp. 165–186. Novalis: Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1968. Preisendanz, Wolfgang: Zur Korrelation zwischen Satirischem und Komischem. In: Das Komische. Ed. by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning. München: Fink 1976. Pp. 411–413. Röhrich, Lutz: Das Märchen und das Lachen. In: Witz, Humor und Komik im Volksmärchen. Ed. by Wolfgang Kuhlmann. Regensburg: Röth 1993. Pp. 23–44. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: La Reine Fantasque, conte. In: Collection complete des œuvres, tome treizieme, contenant le IIIe. volume des “Mélanges”. Genève: Du Peyrou 1782. Pp. 293–324. —. The Queen Fantasque. Trans. by Jack David Zipes. In: Spells of Enchantment. The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. Ed. by Jack David Zipes. New York: Penguin 1991. Pp. 160–171. Runte, Roseanne: “La Reine fantasque” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: une subversion littéraire. In: Man and nature/L’homme et la nature 10 (1991). Pp. 159–164. —. The Paradox of Virtue. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and La Reine Fantaque. In: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994). Pp. 47–54. Schaefer, Klaus: Christoph Martin Wieland. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 1996. Schlaffer, Hannelore: Frauen als Einlösung der romantischen Kunsttheorie. In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 21 (1977). Pp. 274–296. Schlegel, Friedrich: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. by Ernst Behler, Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner. Vol. 2.1. München – Paderborn – Wien: Schöningh 1967. Schreiber, Anne: The Theatrical Construction of Identity in Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” and “Die Wahlverwandtschaften”. Ph. D. Thesis. University of Iowa 2003. Thiel, Anne: Verhinderte Traditionen. Märchen deutscher Autorinnen vor den Brüdern Grimm. Ph.D. Thesis. Georgetown University Washington D.C. 2001. Titzmann, Michael: Die ‘Bildungs-’/Initiationsgeschichte der Goethe-Zeit und das System der Altersklassen im anthropologischen Diskurs der Epoche. In: Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Lutz Danneberg and Friedrich Vollhardt. Tübingen: Niemeyer 2002. Pp. 7–64. Uecker, Karin: Hat das Lachen ein Geschlecht? Zur Charakteristik von komischen weiblichen Figuren in Theaterstücken zeitgenössischer Autorinnen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2002. [Unger, Friederike Helene]: Prinz Bimbam. Ein Mährchen für Alt und Jung. Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger 1802. Wellington, Marie: L’imagination, la raison et l’esthétique personnelle de Rousseau dans “La Reine Fantasque”. In: Moderna Språk 87.2 (1993). Pp. 173–179. Wolfzettel, Friedrich: Fee, Feenland. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Ed. by Kurt Ranke. Vol. 4. Göttingen: de Gruyter 1984. Pp. 945–964. Wührl, Paul-Wolfgang: Das deutsche Kunstmärchen. Geschichte, Botschaft und Erzählstrukturen. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider 2003.

Ellie Kennedy

“But I’m a Lady!” Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy The two BBC radio comedies Little Britain and On the Town with the League of Gentlemen present a quirky view of turn-of-the-millennium Britain where gender and sexuality are perpetually in crisis. This paper explores the characters “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard” and Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual cab driver. A theoretical base is provided by Andreas Böhn’s “imperative of flexibility”, which he posits as a new paradigm for subversive post-modern comedy. This base is supplemented with Judith Butler’s concept of “undoing gender” and Marjorie Garber’s class-focused reading of cross-gendering. Through this combined theoretical lens, I read Barbara’s hyperbolic flexibility and Emily’s hyperbolic inflexibility as comic and subversive devices which expose the crises in gender, class and sexuality at the core of contemporary ‘Britishness’.

Radio comedy in the UK enjoys a tradition perhaps unrivalled anywhere, largely due to the investment of public broadcasting. For some sixty years, the BBC airwaves have been a testing ground for comic strategies considered too avant-garde for television, from satire through absurdist deconstruction to tongue-in-cheek topical commentary.1 Since in recent years the fashionable topics of gender and sexuality have tendered rich comic material, contemporary BBC radio comedy provides an ideal site at which to analyse intersections of gender, laughter, and media. Furthermore, aural comedy’s home within – and indeed its status as – a national institution means that such analysis inevitably yields insight into constructions of British identity. The two BBC radio comedies Little Britain and On the Town with the League of Gentlemen present a quirky view of turn-of-the-millennium Britain where gender and sexuality are perpetually in crisis. Two characters in particular, “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard” and Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual cab driver, test the limits of gender flexibility. Andreas Böhn, in this volume, posits “the imperative of flexibility” as a new paradigm for subversive 1

Successful television comedies which began life on BBC radio include Hancock’s Half Hour, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Room 101, Have I Got News For You (based on Radio 4’s The News Quiz), the ground-breaking Anglo-Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me!, the impressionist satire Dead Ringers, and the science fiction comedies Red Dwarf (inspired by Son Of Cliché) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which became a television series, a novel pentalogy, a feature film and, recently, an internet encyclopaedia. The Goon Show in the late 1950s introduced the British public to the intelligent, off-the-wall style of humour that was later developed to its full potential on television by the Monty Python team.

252 post-modern comedy. Böhn draws on Henri Bergson’s notion of laughter as a corrective to inflexibility (Bergson 21), but suggests that laughter in contemporary comedy has a more complex function than simply bringing non-adherents into line with dominant ideologies. He further argues that the binary paradigm of ‘laughing at’ versus ‘laughing with’ is insufficient for an understanding of laughter as subversive. If we laugh at those who do not conform to a particular norm, we merely reiterate that norm; however, if we laugh with a non-conformist at the norm, we acknowledge and thereby re-affirm the power of that norm. Thus, if both laughing at and laughing with the norm serve to uphold the norm, true subversion is barely possible. In search of a more enabling theory of the comic, Böhn posits flexibility as the new “super-norm”. In contemporary societies, Böhn argues, identity is context-dependent rather than fixed within a stable hierarchy, so that behavioural norms must continually adapt to changing circumstances. Furthermore, in a post-PC world where simplistic black/white divisions are frowned upon, and a degree of personal flexibility is required vis-à-vis most norms, we might laugh at those whose individual performatives are too flexible, or are not flexible enough. This notion could, in fact, serve as a paradigm for analysing most of the comedy in Little Britain and League of Gentlemen. Focusing on the two gender-bending figures Emily Howard and Barbara, this paper argues that their gender flexibility precipitates identity crises, not in themselves, but in fixed notions of gender, class, nation, and indeed the stability of ‘identity’ itself. Such destabilizing potential, I contend, makes Emily and Barbara subversive characters. The theories of Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber prove useful for exploring the subversive potential of gender bending. As Judith Butler has written recently in Undoing Gender, norms of identity can be undone: under certain conditions seemingly fixed identity categories will reveal their instability and lay themselves open to potential resignification.2 While Butler is not writing specifically about transvestism here, her notion of “undoing” is a useful supplement to Marjorie Garber’s 1992 text, Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Garber argues that the function of transvestite figures in art and literature is to indicate a “category crisis”. In the face of certain gender-flexible acts, seemingly impermeable boundaries between categories such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ prove to be permeable after all. This permeability constitutes a crisis in ‘fixed’ identity categories such as gender. Garber laments that scholars writing about transvestism tend to fixate on the biological sex of the body underneath, rather than on the multi-faceted totality

2 Although Butler has previously written specifically about ‘drag’ and subversive laughter in Gender Trouble (1990), her recent thoughts on ‘undoing’ identities prove more fruitful for the present study.

253 of the identity performed. She argues that gender theorists need to look at rather than through transvestite figures in order to explore their subversive significance. Transferring Garber’s premise to an aural medium, this paper listens to the transvestite. Since cross-gendering in radio requires more imaginative techniques than simple costume, the term “cross-gendering” will be used in preference to Garber’s “transvestism”. The former term is in any case more appropriate for discussing a character such as Barbara, whose very body is cross-gendered. With these minor alterations in terminology, Garber’s thesis lends itself superbly to an analysis of League of Gentlemen and Little Britain. Most importantly, Garber notes that the appearance of a cross-gendered figure in a text can indicate a category crisis elsewhere. A crisis on the axis of race or of class, for example, is frequently displaced onto the axis of gender. In Barbara and Emily, norms of gender, class, sexuality, and Britishness collide, outdoing and, in Butler’s terms, potentially undoing each other. In Undoing Gender, Butler suggests that “becoming gendered [. . .] is always, to a certain extent, becoming gendered for others” (25, emphasis added). In other words, it is in the space between self and others that gender is formed and continually re-negotiated. In this space, identities get done, undone and redone, but so, too, do the social norms which determine the limits of identities. Before turning to Little Britain and League of Gentlemen, I want to take apart the relationship between a self, the identity performed, and the audience – that is, those with whom one interacts. I propose three modalities of doing identity, which I shall call performance, passing, and performative.3 We use all three of these, especially performative, every day in negotiating our own identities.4

3

It can be difficult to differentiate between ‘performative’ and ‘performance’ when the former is used as the adjectival form of the latter, as frequently occurs in works on performative theory including Butler’s own (for example Gender Trouble 139). In order to differentiate clearly between the three modalities of doing identity discussed in this paper, I shall use all three terms as nouns. This usage has a precedent in speech-act theory (for example, Gould 22) as well as identity theory (for example, Digeser 662) and in Butler’s own work (for example, Burning Acts 203, 205). 4 The notion of “performativity” originates in speech act theory from the late 1960s, which posits that speech does not always simply describe, but sometimes it does. For example, the statement “You’re fired!” does not describe a situation, but actually brings about that situation at the moment of its utterance. Throughout the 1990s, Judith Butler developed a theory of gender as performative, arguing that gender is not something we are but something we do. It is constructed and maintained through a series of social acts on the part of every individual. Once we understand gender norms as socially constructed, we can inquire as to whose interests they serve. For Butler, subversion means doing gender in a way which exposes and disrupts the political motivations underlying dominant gender norms.

254 Although the boundaries between these modalities are fluid, for the sake of clarity I will treat them as entirely distinct in the following elaboration. Identity performatives are executed in the mode of self-belief and seek to elicit belief from others. We all carry out performative acts unreflectively and habitually, including some which re-affirm norms of gender, ethnicity, and class. If you are a teacher, then a student’s request for an extension on an assignment and your response – whether yes or no – are both performatives which affirm your authority to grant the extension and therefore your identity as the instructor. If on one occasion, however, you dress up as a historical figure – say, Charlie Chaplin – to teach a class, you are giving a performance. Your costume and adopted mannerisms are calculated to increase the pedagogical effect of your lesson, but you do not self-identify as Chaplin, nor do you intend your students to believe that you are he. Thirdly, if you project an identity with which you do not identify, but succeed in convincing others of its validity, then you are passing. Like performance, passing can involve impersonating someone else or adopting an entirely fictional identity; however, in contrast to performance, passing aims to elicit belief. Passing is not always a calculated deception; sometimes we pass by default if we appear to fit a particular norm. If the people around you do not know that you are Jewish, aboriginal, gay, transsexual, disabled or bald – to name but a few examples – then you are passing. This distinction between performative, passing, and performance is helpful for the study of cross-gendered identities. Acts of cross-gendering open and close certain possibilities for subversion depending on the modality in which they are operating, as the following explanation will show. Many drag acts are primarily performance: a great deal of their entertainment value lies in the audience’s appreciation that underneath the Cher wig, Streisand sequins or Minnelli lashes is a man performing the femininity of a glamorous diva. Performance, then, implies separation between actor and act, and a persona that can be adopted and discarded at will. This separation can be used to confirm existing norms and assumptions; for example, the glamorous diva as alter ego of the ‘flaming’ protagonist in the 1996 film The Birdcage affirms a particular stereotype of gay men. British comediennes Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, on the other hand, use performance in a more political way: their portrayal of the average British tabloid newspaper reader as a flabby, middleaged, horny, sexist, beer-stained, low-achieving male is subversive precisely because it is a performance – because we know that underneath the latex beer guts and bad comb-overs are two feminist women. Passing, too, implies a separation between actor and act. However, while performance requires audience awareness of this distinction, passing demands that the separation be meticulously concealed from the intended audience. A celebrated example of cross-gendered passing is the biologically female jazz musician Billy Tipton, who passed successfully as a male both on stage and at

255 home for over sixty years.5 Passing is most likely to have a subversive effect at the moment it ends and the separation between self and persona is revealed. However, such a revelation may compromise the personal safety of the individual concerned. For example, Brandon Teena, the 21-year-old Nebraskan made famous through the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, was raped and murdered by his girlfriend’s family when he was exposed as female. Passing as the opposite gender, then, sometimes re-affirms gender norms, rather than subverting them, for in order to pass, one must assiduously reiterate social norms for the identity adopted.6 Unlike passing or performance, a cross-gendered performative implies a self who identifies with more than one gender, and who seeks affirmation of the same from an audience. Vancouver drag king Devin, for example, identifies as neither male nor female, and elects to be referred to with the plural pronoun ‘they’. The result is linguistic gender trouble, as this excerpt from a review demonstrates: “For Devin, drag is a chance to explore gender critically. They perform both masculinity and femininity, and use their performances to break down gender constructs of all types” (de Silva). The use of the third person plural here is jarring not only because of its rejection of both traditional genders (‘he’ and ‘she’), but also because of its insistence on plurality; by forcing audiences to associate this individual with multiple genders, Devin’s chosen pronoun destabilizes notions of gender as binary. Through living in opposition to normative gender expectations, Devin blurs boundaries between performance and performative. Audiences cannot assign a single gender to Devin, nor can they ‘look through the transvestite’ to separate performer from persona. Devin is – or are – a living category crisis, requiring audiences both public and private to respond in a flexible way towards seemingly inflexible norms. Performative, then, like performance, contains greater subversive potential than passing. Emily Howard and Barbara, too, eschew passing and, in doing so, confound stereotypes associated with transvestism. Instead of passing, they use cross-gendered performatives to force a flexible response from audiences and thereby destabilize fixed notions of gender and other norms. The following analysis reads hyperbolic (in)flexibility in these characters as a comic and subversive device which exposes the crises in gender, class, and sexuality at the core of contemporary ‘Britishness’. The League of Gentlemen, a four-man comedy troupe, initially created their character-based sketches as a stand-up act in the mid 1990s. Their blend of 5

Tipton has recently become a popular subject in the literary world. Cf. for example Diane Middlebrook’s 1998 biography, Jackie Kay’s Tipton-inspired novel, Trumpet (also 1998), and Grace Barnes’s stage adaptation of the latter (2006). 6 The safest and most effective way to wreak subversion through passing is to keep the immediate audience in the dark and involve a secondary audience who is ‘in the know’, for example through fiction, biography or reportage. This might explain the literary interest in Billy Tipton described in the previous note.

256 sketch comedy, sit-com, and gothic grotesque has become highly successful since its transfer to television and cinema, but it was with a radio show that the group first achieved national recognition. The six-part series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1997, introduces us to the fictional town of Spent and its eccentric residents. One immediately notices an ironic contrast between the show’s glamorous title, On The Town With The League Of Gentlemen, and the unsophisticated, spooky, small Northern English town in which the series is set.7 This dissonance is rarely discussed and yet it contains the key to the Gentlemen’s particular mode of undoing class and gender. The League comprises three writer-performers, Steve Pemberton, Reese Shearsmith, and Mark Gatiss and one non-performing writer, Jeremy Dyson. All four were born, raised, and educated in the North of England, a region stereotypically associated with working-class culture. The four writers self-identify as Northerners, speak with Northern accents, and place their work in a Northern setting. At the same time, they are from squarely middle-class backgrounds. This internal disjunction is further compounded by the upper-class nomenclature with which they refer to themselves in the series’ title. Their ostentatious appropriation of ‘gentlemanliness’ is thus an unstable identity performative, and one which foregrounds the instability of class divisions in contemporary Britain.8 This threefold equivocality in the writers translates into a fundamental instability in the town of Spent and its denizens. Steve Pemberton describes the place as “somewhere isolated and surrounded by bleak countryside, [with] a feeling about it that something [isn’t] quite right” (Interview). Similarly, much of the show’s dark humour results from an unsettling duality or mutability within the characters: local nun Sister Meg is a small-time con artist; Spent’s minor repair jobs are carried out by a blacksmith-cum-oracle; the town’s twin mayors speak largely in unison, alternating between agreement and mutual contradiction; and the toad-obsessed Harvey Denton attempts to transform his nephew into a human-amphibian mutant. 7

The name “League of Gentlemen” is taken from a 1959 action movie in which war veterans perform a daring bank heist. 8 The appropriation of ‘gentlemanliness’ also links the writer-performers to a long, class-based tradition of female impersonation. Writing of Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Marjorie Garber identifies “a kind of boys-will-be-boys transvestite theater” (65) found in exclusive and powerful all-male circles, in which crossdressing rituals “serve as confirmations and expressions of [. . .] the power of the ruling elite” (66). By naming themselves the League of Gentlemen, then, these middle-class Northerners appropriate the gender-bending privilege traditionally associated with a British performing elite that includes the Oxbridge-educated Monty Python team. Clearly, such a mode of representing women is replete with misogynistic potential. However, the present analysis focuses on a more complex level of cross gendering in On the Town which proves a productive source of gender trouble.

257 The uncanny locality of Spent proves the ideal location for what Marjorie Garber would call “an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin” (17). Garber’s remarks are exemplified by Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual taxi-driver. Barbara encapsulates the town’s essential mutability in that she embodies gender ambiguity while also transgressing class boundaries. On the one hand, her forthcoming penectomy connotes emasculation anxiety – not for Barbara, who eagerly anticipates the surgery, but for Spent itself. The very name Spent implies lost or exhausted virility, and evokes, despite the present-day setting, the emasculated, Thatcher-era North of mass unemployment in which the show’s creators grew up.9 On the other hand, Barbara’s liminality suggests new possibilities for identity beyond restrictive social binaries. Passing as either traditional gender is out of the question for Barbara, since masculine and feminine elements collide brashly within her identity. On the stage or TV, this effect can be achieved through visual clashes such as frilly clothing coupled with a muscular build, a swagger or a moustache. In this radio show, three vocal devices are employed to signify Barbara’s dual-genderedness: first, incongruity between a gruff, masculine voice and the feminine pursuits it describes; second, reactions of other characters to the cross-gendered cab driver and third, Barbara’s graphic descriptions of her forthcoming sex reassignment surgery. These devices combine to make Barbara’s a gently humorous performance and simultaneously a complex, gender- and class-destabilizing performative. From the point of view of radio listeners, Barbara’s identity is a performance, as it involves a man (Pemberton) playing a female-identified character. In episode 1.3,10 for example, the sound of Barbara’s gravelly voice discussing dress shopping occasions hilarity from the studio audience on the recording. The perceptual separation between actor and character renders Barbara’s crossgendered identity performance unthreatening and humorous to the external audience. Conversely, from the point of view of Barbara’s immediate audience – the residents of Spent – her identity is not a performance but a performative, and a gender troubling one at that. Although Babs presents as a woman, in episodes 1 and 2 she is still biologically male, so that she does both genders at once.11 This situation requires a flexible response from friends, neighbours and 9

This notion is emphasized by recurring scenes such as the Restart course in which a class full of long-term unemployed men is presided over by a tyrannical female course leader. 10 In references to episodes of League of Gentlemen, the number preceding the period refers to the series, while the number following the period refers to the episode; in this case, series 1, episode 3. 11 ‘To present as’ one gender or the other is standard terminology when discussing transgender issues. Cf. for example Goodrum 2.

258 customers in her taxi. While the eccentric townsfolk are often verbally abusive to one another, they are extraordinarily accepting of Barbara.12 In their daily interactions with the local cab driver, they find themselves having to change gender tack in midstream. The ice-cream vendor apologizes at one point: “Oh sorry Bob – I mean Barbara! I didn’t recognise you” (2.6). The hospital receptionist, where Barbara checks in for sex reassignment surgery, performs the same salutational flip-flop in reverse (from “Can I help you, madam?” to “Oh, I’m sorry, sir”) on hearing the patient’s voice (2.17). Even after her vaginoplasty, Barbara’s gruff voice necessitates continued flexibility from the townsfolk. Their linguistic oscillation culminates in speechlessness during Benjamin’s polite rejection of Babs’s sexual advances: “Look, you’re a lovely – ” The lack of a concluding, gender-specific noun here can be read in two ways: a) Barbara is neither male nor female and therefore not human; or b) Barbara is both/and, so that a gender possibility beyond the male/female binary is opened up, if currently inexpressible. As Judith Butler writes in Undoing Gender, “[i]t is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living” (219). The both/and reading of Barbara – suggested by Benjamin’s positive adjective “lovely” and by the locals’ accepting attitude – opens up a moment of optimism for inclusiveness, and for livable lives beyond the tyranny of the hegemonic male/female dichotomy. Barbara’s vocal disruption of binary gender involves not only voice quality but also subject matter. We, along with the customers in her taxi, are forced to listen to the transsexual, whose conversation largely comprises details of the bodily changes wrought by her hormone treatments and graphic descriptions of the surgical procedures she is about to undergo. Here, at the embodiment of gender liminality, class boundaries also potentially come undone. Barbara’s voice is not only gruff and masculine, but her speech is coarse and working-class, and her subject matter inappropriate for polite society.13 In episode 1.3 the radio audience, and the visiting Benjamin, encounter “Babs Cabs” for the first time: Cab driver’s gruff voice with Lancashire accent: Where to, pal? Benjamin: Er, Swan Mills Estate, please. Driver: Ooh, very nice! You, er, got family up here, have you? Benjamin: Yes, my auntie and uncle. Driver: Well, it’s a nice part of town, is Swan Mills. Lovely shops! 12

Only the cynical Bernice is scathing towards Barbara, calling her “Widow Twankey” and “Mr. Woman”. This attitude serves only to emphasize Bernice’s maliciousness and has no effect on the sympathetic way others treat Barbara. 13 For example, when Barbara, in typical uncanny Spent style, begins to menstruate, she uses the following stomach-turning metaphor to describe the experience: “I woke up this morning and me bed was like a butcher’s slab!” (2.11).

259 Benjamin: Oh. I might have a look around, then – buy a new shirt. I’ve got an interview first thing tomorrow morning. Driver: Oh, well, you wanna go to Bang Bangs. That’s where I get my dresses from! [Audience laughter] Benjamin: Oh. Driver: Yeah, they’ll sort you out. Just tell ‘em Barbara sent you! [Laughter] So erm . . . what’s this interview for? Benjamin: Oh, I’m not sure. It’s up at the plant. Driver: Oh well, you’ve done well getting seen even! I got laid off from there, you know, once me bust started showing. [Laughter] Benjamin: Can you see, look? [Laughter] I’ve only been on the ‘ormones eighteen months and me nipples are like bullets! [Laughter] You can feel ‘em! They won’t come off! Benjamin: No, I . . . [embarrassed pause] Driver: Go on, have a try! Go on! Go on! [Laughter] [. . .] Driver: I was offered a trip to Casablanca last Christmas but I’d have been butchered. Besides, you’re not supposed to fly after the implants – there’s a danger of the bust imploding. [Laughter] Driver: Yeah, it’s quite straightforward, what they do. Basically, they make an incision just below the leg and then they use the flap of skin to – [fade out].

The comic effects in this scene are created in three ways: first, surprise, when what appears to be a man starts talking about buying dresses and calls ‘himself’ Barbara; second, incongruity between Barbara’s coarseness and the middleclass Benjamin’s attempts to retain his composure; and third, discomfort at Barbara’s frank descriptions of her forthcoming operation. These bold citations of her liminality notwithstanding, Barbara’s fondest wish is to erase her difference and become a ‘real woman’. The final measure she undergoes to this end is voice-altering surgery, after which, in the climactic scene of the series (6.14), she makes a grand entrance into the town’s Christmas party. This is a key scene because here Babs’s voice is provided not by Steve Pemberton, but by a guest actress. It is the only scene in the entire series in which we hear a woman speak, thus emphasizing the enormity of Barbara’s transformation. Here, the ‘completed’ Barbara with her sultry, feminine voice becomes a source of male sexual attention. Furthermore, the coarseness is gone from her speech: she no longer drops her h’s, and her vowels, though still recognizably Northern, are middle-class. At the end of the series, then, Barbara’s transition is complete, thus restoring the gender binary and erasing the cross-gendered character. At this point, Spent is wiped out in a nuclear accident (6.16). This violent erasure, I believe, is the result of a threefold category crisis. Butler writes in Undoing Gender, “I think that when the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place. The norms themselves can become rattled, display their instability, and become open to resignification” (27). In fact, “resignification” describes the initial situation in Spent

260 rather than the final one: when Barbara is a transitional, cross-gendered figure, she represents Butler’s “unreal”, and her living among the citizens of Spent is an instance of “the unreal laying claim to reality”. During this period, Barbara is accepted for what she is, and the townsfolk’s flexible reaction becomes a new norm – one which constantly negotiates and thus calls attention to the gender binary. At the same time, the new norm excepts this mutable figure from the dominant binary, never forcing her to ‘be’ either male or female. Conversely, when Barbara ultimately does attempt to assimilate into prevailing norms, a cataclysm is unleashed. At the end of the series, Barbara has explicitly crossed boundaries of both gender and class. Moreover, in attaining sexual attention from the town’s menfolk, she throws the men’s own sexuality into question: when one neighbour responds to her with a mixture of lust and incredulity, for example, his wife cautions, “Don’t be filthy, Charlie, remember what she was”. Barbara’s crossing exposes the fundamental instability of norms of gender, class, and sexuality and the whole town – for which she stands synecdochically – comes undone. Despite League of Gentlemen’s local setting, the inclusion of characters with West Country, Cockney, Geordie, and Welsh accents affords Spent a certain global locality, suggesting that it stands for small, self-contained regional communities throughout the nation. The two series of Little Britain, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2001 and 2002 respectively, are even more unequivocally pan-British. The setting is a cornucopia of fictionalized locations in the Scottish Highlands, rural Wales, the tranquil English countryside and the nation’s less tranquil inner cities. The tone is set by a narrator, played not by the show’s young writer-performers, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, but by established actor Tom Baker. The use of Baker as front man aligns the show instantly with two British institutions: the classic science fiction series Doctor Who, in which Baker played the title role from 1974–1981, and BBC television, home of this series for its quarter-century run (1963–1989). The British public has responded by making Little Britain, at least in its televised form (as of 2003), a national institution in its own right. Lucas and Walliams’s quirky characters have clearly struck a chord with contemporary Britons, as evidenced by the popularity of Little Britain merchandise and the inclusion of three of the show’s most familiar lines in a national poll of the best comedy catch-phrases of all time (Bennett). The narrator provides more than cultural capital for the programme; indeed, his part reveals what is “little” about Little Britain. In an educated, authoritative baritone tinged with the slightest edge of lunacy, Baker opens each episode – to the strains of pompous orchestral music – by praising “the people of Britain”. Baker acts as our guide to a parallel Britain, where institutions are named after has-beens from popular culture14 and place names, such as Lower Doodley, Wiggly Down, and “Britain’s capital city of Sneddy”, are simultaneously cute and smutty. 14

For example, “Feargal Sharkey Stadium” (2.1.1).

261 Between sketches, the narrator makes ridiculous understatements (“we’ve had running water for over ten years” 2.3.1), ironic assertions (“those lucky enough to be admitted to hospital are treated like kings” 2.1.5) and nonsensical boasts such as “we invented the cat” (2.3.1). Delivered in Baker’s grandiloquent style, these ‘facts’ evoke and simultaneously parody the posture of national glory implicit in the name ‘Great’ Britain. Little Britain, then, appears to celebrate British idiosyncrasy while in fact satirizing a peculiarly British nostalgic vanity. Although clearly influenced by On the Town with the League of Gentlemen, Little Britain has a campier and less sinister feel. While the sketches in the former are connected by a slender narrative thread, the latter eschews narrative development entirely in favour of repetition. As a result, whereas the League of Gentlemen use flexibility to destabilise normative social categories, Lucas and Walliams’s Britain is characterized by an excess of inflexibility. The dramatis personae are odd-ball figures, who persist in their own delusions, eccentricities or socially inappropriate behaviour no matter how many problems this creates for themselves and others. Characters will inevitably repeat the same behaviour, and the same catch-phrases, in every new situation. This inflexibility is at its most pronounced – and gender troubling – in the unconvincing transvestite Emily Howard. For the external (radio) audience, Emily is a humorous performance: it is David Walliams putting on a silly voice for our entertainment. For most of Emily’s immediate audience, too, there is a degree of perceptual separation between the performer (apparently a man) and the identity projected (a ‘lady’). Whether or not that same separation exists in the mind of the character is unclear, however: is this a man seeking admiration for his burlesque performance of the role of Emily, or is it a man trying to pass as Emily? Or is this a performative act by someone who really identifies as Emily? Whatever the intent, the execution appears unsuccessful, for Emily continually undermines her ‘femininity’ through hyperbole and through intermittent reversion to a masculine persona. This discontinuity is emphasized through a variety of aural devices: the narrator arouses certain expectations by introducing her as “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard”; the character speaks in falsetto, so that she sounds like a man parodying femininity; and there is a pronounced discrepancy between Emily’s self-proclamation “I’m a lady” and the reactions of other characters, who respond to her as “pal” and “mate”, and occasionally even recognise her as “Eddie Howard, who used to work down the docks”. The following scene demonstrates these discrepancies: [Balletic-style incidental music played on a piccolo]. Narrator: People in Britain do all manner of things for kicks: some lick stamps, others sit on chairs. I, myself, like to pass electric currents through small animals. This fellow, who calls himself Emily Howard, likes to dress up as a lady. Takes all sorts, I suppose. Emily Howard in high-pitched voice: Ah – parlez-vous anglais?

262 Landlord: Yeah. EH: I should like to purchase a drink, please. A – a lady’s drink, that a lady would drink, for that’s what I am: a lady! [Audience laughter] Landlord: Right you are, mate. What can I get ya? Male customer, lecherously: I’d like to buy the lady a drink. EH: Pardonnez-moi? Customer: I said I’d like to buy you a drink if that’s all right. EH: Er – but I am a lady! Customer: Yeah I know! A very beautiful lady, and I’d like to buy you a drink, if I may. What can I get you? EH: Oh! I’m a lady! Customer: Yeah. EH: Oh, a drinkie-poopoo! Well, it would have to be a lady’s drink. Mmm – I’ll have a pint of – um – stout! [Audience laughter] [. . .] Customer: So, er, what’s a pretty lady like you doing in a pub like this? EH: Well, I wouldn’t normally come to a rough tavern such as this with its clientele of truck drivers and construction workers. I just stepped in from the rain. Customer: It’s not raining. EH, hastily: Ah – come along with those drinks! Landlord: There you go. Customer: Thanks. Cheers! EH: Chin chin! [emits a series of gulping sounds followed by a deep belch] [audience laughter]. EH: So, do you like the operettas, the ballets imaginaires? Customer: No, but I, er, I like you! EH: You must know that I’m a lady! I wear petticoats and bonnets and little lace booties! Customer: Yeah and you look lovely! EH [silly, prolonged laughter] [audience laughter]. Customer: You, er, actually remind me of my late wife. EH: She was a lady? Customer: Yeah. I’d very much like to take you out one night. EH: Well I shall have to check my engagement book: lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, Friday. I’m very busy every day doing lady’s things. Customer: What are you doing later? EH: Erm – I’m having scones. Customer: And after that? EH: I’m bathing in rosewater! Customer, lecherously: And after that? EH in deep voice: I’m watching the match, all right? Customer: Sorry, mate (Little Britain 2.3.6).

The preceding scene demonstrates the importance of audience reception in identity construction. The pub landlord attempts to construct Emily Howard as a man, but she resists this construction, repeatedly insisting, “I’m a lady!”. Whereas Barbara elicits an unusually high level of flexibility from those around her, Emily is associated with an excess of inflexibility: neither she nor the landlord relent in their respective perceptions of Emily’s gender. Then, when the lonely male customer does respond to her as to a lady, Emily maintains her

263 vociferous iterations of this status, as if to reassure herself rather than him. However, in this sketch, as elsewhere, she ultimately fails to uphold her ‘lady’ performative, reverting to a deep voice and expressing a preference for the ‘unladylike’ activity of watching Britain’s national sport. Despite – or because of – her inflexibility, then, Emily’s identity performative is unstable. Emily’s adherence to a patently untenable identity is typical for characters in Little Britain. Daffyd Thomas, for example, repeatedly insists that he is “the only gay in the village” while remaining oblivious to the pervasive queerness all around him, and Matthew Waterhouse is indefatigable in his attempts to sell his pitiable ideas to a string of disinterested business managers. Such doggedness makes these characters inflexible in Henri Bergson’s sense, for they exhibit “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being” (1.II). Bergson theorizes that “[t]his rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective” (ibid.). In the case of Little Britain, rigidity certainly “is the comic”, but the effect is not correction of the kind Bergson has in mind, where the individual re-adapts constantly to conform to ever-changing social norms. Instead, Emily Howard’s inflexibility threatens to undo norms of sexuality, gender, nation, and class. In terms of sexuality, Emily’s unstable identity performative undoes a common and often erroneous conflation of transvestism with homosexuality. Marjorie Garber argues that such a “conflation is fueled by a desire to tell the difference, to guard against a difference that might otherwise put the identity of one’s own position in question” (130, emphasis added). Two factors in particular confound this potential conflation where Emily Howard is concerned. In terms of performance, Emily is played by David Walliams, rather than by his openly gay comedy partner, Matt Lucas. Moreover, Emily’s identity performative contains internal contradictions that prevent either her immediate audience or radio listeners from categorizing her as a ‘gay man’. In the sketch presented above, she ventures into a “rough tavern [. . .] with its clientele of truck drivers and construction workers”, yet refuses all the advances of an actual male suitor. In another episode, she imagines with relish “swooning into the arms of a guardsman”, yet dismisses a gay paramedic as a “poof ” (2.4.14). In this way, Little Britain – probably unintentionally – advances Judith Butler’s objective of “displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality [to] help us appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and desire” (151). As a performance, “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard” threatens the stability of gender itself. Emily repeatedly cites the paraphernalia of femininity as evidence of her femaleness: “I’m [. . .] a lady! Regard my parasol and petit lace gloves [. . .] I have a handkerchief!” (1.3.1). When her credibility is challenged

264 she replies, “Oh but the handbag, the painted face, the waft of talc!”. This vocal citation of ‘feminine’ accessories suggests the disproportionate role played by surface appearance in identity construction. It also potentially reveals to an external audience the artifactuality of gender. Marjorie Garber writes of David Henry Hwang’s cross-dressed M. Butterfly: “What is really at stake here [. . .] is a subconscious recognition that ‘woman’ in patriarchal society is conceived of as an artifact – and [. . .] the logical next step is the recognition that ‘man’ is likewise [. . .] constructed, made of detachable parts. This is the anxiety that lies beneath the laughter” (249). Similarly, if Emily Howard can don the accoutrements of femininity and still not achieve femaleness perhaps maleness is equally untenable. While gender is a key aspect of Emily Howard’s unstable identity performative, her peculiarly British identity crisis cannot be understood fully without reference to class: like Barbara in League of Gentlemen, Emily marks a crisis on the axis of class displaced onto the axis of gender. This displacement is evident in Emily’s lexical choices, most strikingly in her vociferous insistence that she is a “lady”. “Lady” is not simply a polite term for ‘woman’ here, but is coded as upper-class – even aristocratic.15 Emily attempts to bolster this image through repeated descriptions of her fancy clothing and accessories, for example: “I put on my gloves and bonnet and lady’s parasol” (4.14). However, these attempts to cross a class boundary expose the internal instability of her identity. Her habits and accoutrements – such as “little lace booties” and “bathing in rosewater” – invoke what might be called a golden age of British ‘greatness’, but a past age which cannot be revisited. Clearly, Emily’s fantasy of femininity involves crossing boundaries not only of gender, but also of class and even of time. Indeed, Emily’s hyperbolic construction of imperial Britain perhaps never existed save in the ironic comedies of Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde. Emily’s performatives of class and gender thus prove all the more phantasmatic through their association with an unattainable ‘golden era’. In the same way, the ‘golden era’ proves as illusory and fanciful as Emily’s identity as a “lady”. Although fantasy is a major component of Emily’s identity, this does not imply that she is ‘fake’, nor that former dockhand Eddie Howard is ‘authentic’. Rather, Emily’s periodic ‘exposure’ as a blue-collar male causes her to cross and re-cross boundaries of gender, class and time. In this way, Emily’s identity does not come undone once and for all, but repeatedly. The audience laughs as her performative comes unravelled, safe in the knowledge that the “lady” will return next week and the process will begin again. In their enjoyment, though, listeners may miss the way in which this ‘little Briton’s’ perpetual identity crisis might mirror one of their own. In fact, like Tom Baker’s introductions, Emily’s mutability parodies nostalgic notions of ‘national glory’. Emily 15

‘Lady’ can, of course, also be used as an aristocratic title.

265 Howard, the unconvincing transvestite, embodies an uneasy duality present in turn-of-the-millennium (white) British notions of self:16 her identity performative stubbornly harks back to unrecoverable ‘glory days’ of the British Empire while simultaneously incorporating norms of contemporary British ‘laddishness’ involving homophobia, watching football, drinking pints and belching loudly in public. Little Britain’s ostentatious delight in the latter forms of behaviour might be viewed as puerile. Indeed, at the Kingston “Gender – Laughter – Media” workshop (2005), participants noted a frequent association between comedies of masculinity and infantilism. To a certain extent, these radio shows do provide an infantile opportunity for privileged white men to affect silly voices and poke fun at marginalized groups. The recent television version of Little Britain in particular has been accused of “class tourism”, as well as “mocking the weakest people in Britain [such as] the disabled, poor, elderly, gay or fat” (Hari).17 Valid as this reading surely is, it must also be noted that the show has a strong fan base among all these traditionally under-represented groups, many members of which may feel validated by their inclusion in this tongue-in-cheek tour of British society. Furthermore, many sketches feature inflexible bigots, forced to interact with members of minority groups, as the butt of the joke.18 In the case of Emily Howard, the humour is complex, for the paradoxical situation of the inflexible gender bender is employed to confound stereotypical expectations based on sexuality and gender and, most subversively, to deconstruct a national self-image based on class snobbery, nostalgia, and self-delusion: Little Britain thus undoes ‘Great’ Britain precisely through characters such as Emily Howard, who represent contemporary British ‘yob culture’ thinly veiled by a fantasy of bygone national glory. If the charge of infantilism sticks to Emily, then it sticks to all who cling to obsolete notions of British ‘greatness’. This reading of On the Town with the League of Gentlemen and Little Britain has aimed to ‘undo’ gender bending in these two radio shows and thereby reveal crises in gender, class, and sexuality to be a foundation of contemporary ‘Britishness’. The subversions I have read into the characters Barbara and Emily may or may not be intentional. However, in closing the second and final Little Britain series, Tom Baker performs an explicit subversion when he directly addresses “you, the people of Britain”. In this way, he situates the BBC radio audience itself among the ‘little Britons’ portrayed in the preceding sketches. 16 Cf. for example Pool. Such attitudes are also frequently reflected in mass entertainment media. 17 For specific criticism of the show’s treatment of the working class cf. also Harris and Thorpe. 18 Fat Fighters leader Marjorie Dawes, for example, regularly utters anti-obese and racist remarks and thereby makes herself a figure of fun, while listeners’ sympathy is generally with her ‘victims’.

266 Hyperbolically flexible and inflexible behaviour, crises in gender and sexuality, and national self-delusion thus jump the divide from a fantasy ‘little’ Britain into contemporary ‘Great’ Britain. Any accusations of homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism and xenophobia levelled at the show bounce back via the airwaves into the laps of listeners, as one more seemingly impermeable boundary – that between radio performers and their audience – comes undone.

Works Consulted Barnes, Grace: Trumpet – Stage adaptation. Skeklers Theatre Company. Glasgow: 4–8 October 2005. Bennett, Steve: Comedy Blog: First in Lines. 12 January 2005 – 20 February 2007. ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk⬎. Bergson, Henri: Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1901). Trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan 1911. Butler, Judith: Burning Acts. Injurious Speech. In: Performativity and Performance. Ed. by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge 1995. Pp. 197–237. —. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge 1990. —. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge 2004. De Silva, Charmaine, and Susanna Allevato Quail: Deconstructing Drag: Gender Performance and the Art of Masculinity. In: The Peak, vol. 119, issue 7, 21 February 2005. 12 November 2006. ⬍http://www.peak.sfu.ca⬎. Digeser, Peter: Performativity Trouble. Postmodern Feminism and Essential Subjects. In: Political Research Quarterly 47.3 (1994). Pp. 655–73. Dyson, Jeremy, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, and Reese Shearsmith: On the Town with the League of Gentlemen. BBC Radio 4. 6 November – 11 December 1997. Own transcript. Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge 1992. Goodrum, John Alexander: Gender Identity 101. A Transgender Primer. Tucson: Southern Arizona Gender Alliance 2003. ⬍http://www.hawaii.edu⬎. Gould, Timothy: The Unhappy Performative. In: Performativity and Performance. Ed. by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge 1995. Pp. 18–44. Hari, Johann: Why I hate “Little Britain”. In: Independent Online. 21 November 2005. 12 November 2006. ⬍http://comment.independent.co.uk⬎. Harris, John: Bottom of the Class. In: Guardian Unlimited. 11 April 2006. 12 November 2006. ⬍http://arts.guardian.co.uk⬎. Interview: League of Gentlemen Official Home Page. 12 November 2006. ⬍http://www.geocities.com⬎. Kay, Jackie: Trumpet. New York: Vintage 1998.

267 Lucas, Matt, and David Walliams: Little Britain. Series 1. BBC Radio 4. 27 February – 27 March 2001. Own Transcript. —. Little Britain. Series 2. BBC Radio 4. 12 February to 5 March 2002. Own Transcript. Middlebrook, Diane: Suits Me. The Double Life of Billy Tipton. London: Virago 1998. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Eds.): Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge 1995. Pool, Hannah, Emma Brockes, and Claire Phipps: Defining the Nation. Quotes on Britishness. In: The Guardian. 20 January 1999. Reproduced on ⬍http://elt.britcoun. org⬎. British Council 2003. 11 March 2007. Thorpe, Vanessa: Anarchy in the UK. In: Guardian Unlimited. 2 January 2005. 12 November 2006. ⬍http://observer.guardian.co.uk⬎.

Peter Stear

Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy This paper examines the influence and function of fictionalized fly-on-the-wall/ pseudo-documentary techniques employed in recent British television comedy, in particular with regard to the first series of The Office. The phenomenal success of the Gervais/Merchant BBC series, nationally as well as internationally, is analysed and accounted for by using approaches adapted from television, cultural and gender studies, post-structuralism as well as comedy and reader response theory. The essay argues that the comic impact of the series can be read as a complex interaction between the duties and pleasures concomitant to both making and viewing British television comedy, i.e. predicated on ambiguous notions of masculine anxiety, augmented by a media and in many ways culturally specific ‘anxiety of influence’, as well as dependent on foregrounded notions of generationally specific media literacy.

With the performer/writers Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen, British television comedy is currently enjoying a level of international acclaim perhaps not seen since the late 1960s to mid-1970s with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. Both performers have now come to epitomize the kind of “Creative Britain” that the New Labour government was calling for in the late 1990s when it symbolically rebranded the Department of National Heritage into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,1 thereby ushering in a more modern, forward-looking notion of British culture and identity that came to be encapsulated, however briefly, in the slogan “Cool Britannia”, a revamped and as it turned out largely over-hyped turn-of-millennium version of the Swinging Sixties. While media interest, both national and international, in the two other notable strands of this recent cultural trend, Britpop and Britart, that is popular music and contemporary British art, has waned, the “Britcom” boom as one Guardian critic dubbed the phenomenon in 1999,2 has gone from strength to strength. 1

Cf. New Labour MP Chris Smith’s Creative Britain (1998) and Driver and Martell for an incisive overview and analysis of the “attitudes, values, and ways of life that New Labour is promoting in its New Britain” (461). 2 Cf. Gibbons, the focus of whose article is the phenomenon of British television comedy writers turning to the ‘big screen’ in an attempt to conquer the US market: “We’ve had Britpop and Britart, now Britcom is attempting to sweep the world in their wake. Spurred by the success of Richard Curtis – who wrote the television classic Blackadder and has rocketed into the Hollywood A-list with the films Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill – a host of British comedy stars are working on their own movies”.

270 Gervais and Baron Cohen represent only the tip of the iceberg regarding the quantity and quality of current British comedy acts. With a view to the constraints of the present format, a paper surveying the entire range of even alternative contemporary British comedy would of course, if I might somewhat adaptively make reference to Gerry Palmer’s seminal work on film and TV comedy,3 be a logical absurdity. I shall therefore, apart from a few contextualizing remarks at the beginning, be restricting my comments and analysis to one representative recent BBC programme only, the hugely successful first series of The Office.4 Further, and although I have somewhat deliberately ‘over-egged the pudding’ with my reference to contemporary British TV comedy as “mockumentalism”, the idea is not to suggest that the representative status of The Office is predicated on its eventual monumental international success per se, nor is it to suggest that there is a new monumentalist bent à la Cecil B. De Mille to contemporary TV productions, pushing the limit with regard to the BBC’s set and wardrobe departments. Far from it: much of the essence of what is new in terms of British comedy is precisely its minimalism, which can be viewed as a product of traditional so-called British gritty realism, a revitalized fly-on-the-wall documentary quality and, of necessity, the budgetary constraints pertaining to most TV productions. What I do want to suggest, however, is that there is a ‘monumental’ quality to British TV comedy and that it consists of a monumental body of work pressing down on contemporary British comedy writers, an anxiety of influence which is perhaps unmatched elsewhere, at least outside the US. Further, that this anxiety of influence is a double-edged sword, at once unleashing enormous self-referential, intertextual possibilities, but also seemingly condemning much TV writing to the dead hand of endless, recycled sitcom formats. There is often, in other words, a sentimental, anodyne quality – which the media theorist John Tulloch has ascribed to the “familial paradigm” (258), whereby the “discursive tension of the sitcom is contained by the family” (253) – that is eschewed by the best of contemporary British situation comedy. Or, as the TV commentator and producer David Herman has noted: “From the 1960s to the 1980s, the classic setting for sitcoms and soaps was the family home [. . .]. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge cultural shift in television drama away from these settings to new loyalties and collective identities” (64). 3

I shall refer to Palmer’s theory later in this article. Although the focus of his study is largely British, in its theoretical framework it is abstract enough to receive consideration, for example, with regard to American film, cf. Horton. 4 The first series, consisting of six thirty-minute episodes, was broadcast on BBC2 Mondays, from 9 July to 20 August 2001, at 9:30 p.m., quickly achieving cult status. As the BBC’s The Office website claims: “The DVD/video release of the first series quickly became Britain’s fastest and biggest selling non-film title”.

271 It is precisely this post-familial paradigm, where TV drama is “now focused on work-based or social identities” (64), which I want to explore in The Office; its ability to cast its net wider than the more suburban, domesticated forms of situation comedies, the literally household names that are the staple peak-time viewing, and the mock-till-you-drop form of infantile-puerile humour epitomized by the more recent hit Little Britain.5 The Office, in contrast, and I might have chosen other examples such as I’m Alan Partridge or The League of Gentlemen,6 is, if only obliquely monumental though avowedly antisentimental, certainly ‘mental’ in at least three senses of the word. Firstly, it is cerebral. Secondly, it is anarchic. Thirdly, it is angry. These are the qualities I want to emphasize in the following analysis, and I shall begin with some remarks on the setting, the characters and the plot, as well as some contextualizing comments regarding its reception. The setting is the London satellite town of Slough, in a branch office of the fictitious paper merchants Wernham Hogg, where life is ‘stationary’. Four characters in particular are the primary focus of the show, which was shot in a mockumentary style, with no laugh track. The office is managed by David Brent, played by one of the series’ writer/directors Ricky Gervais, who propagates a comedy-driven style of management that appears modern, open and politically correct, but his chumminess and blokeishness all too often erupts into outright pettiness and chauvinism. David Brent, erstwhile musician and wannabe stand-up comedian, considers himself a man of many talents, but middle management certainly is not one of them. The straight man to Ricky Gervais’s maverick, bumbling manager is Gareth Keenan. The comic potential in this role derives from the sycophantic, devotional qualities he has as Assistant to the Regional Manager. His nerdy qualities are underpinned by his obsessive recounting of the exploits and training he has received as a lieutenant in the Territorial Army. In an intertextual reference to the Ian Fleming licenceto-kill action hero, one might say he is less gentleman officer material in the ‘my word is my bond tradition’ and more a ‘bonded labourer’. The third main character is Tim Canterbury, a university drop-out living with his parents and ‘slumming it’ in sales, who, unlike the above two characters, seems fully aware 5

Little Britain, starring Matt Lucas and David Williams and also a BBC production, was in 2006 in its third series. It was voted the best comedy act in the 2005 BAFTA awards, though it received mixed reviews. Cf. Gibson: “Bad taste bonanza takes top award for second year [. . .]. The best comedy award capped a stellar year for Williams and Lucas, who have taken Little Britain from cult appeal on Radio 4 to the mainstream on BBC1. [. . .] Little Britain last night proved that gags based around incontinence and projectile vomiting are no barrier to popular acclaim as it was named Britain’s best comedy for the second year running”. 6 The League of Gentlemen and I’m Alan Partridge are both recent BBC alternative comedy productions that ran for more than one series.

272 of the pointlessness of this ‘stationary’ office world and, within the diegetic constellation of the office, is viewed as unpretentious, witty, and likeable. Tim befriends the fourth main character, receptionist Dawn Tinsley, who is equally bored by her job as well as her private life. Her goal seems to be to escape from a dull, long-term relationship and Tim might present her with a way out. For the purposes of the present analysis, two further characters should be mentioned, though they are perhaps more types, in the sense that they lack the complexity of the above four: Chris Finch, the irredeemably boorish travelling sales rep, who is Brent’s drinking pal, and, Jennifer Taylor-Clarke, Brent’s resolutely professional boss.7 The overarching plot concerns Regional Manager David Brent’s seemingly futile attempt, once head office has dropped the downsizing bombshell in the first episode, to prevent the Slough branch being merged with its Swindon equivalent. We can follow his efforts through a series of sketches and set pieces that involve team meetings, training sessions, management confabs, as well as social events, such as after-work office parties and quiz nights. An additional, romantic sub-plot is the will-they-won’t-they office flirtation between Tim and Dawn. Originally screened in 2001 on BBC2 in the alternative comedy slot, sandwiched somewhere after the nine o’clock threshold and before the channel’s flagship late night current affairs programme Newsnight and the later minority interest Open University or adult learning-zone schedule, The Office filled the void for those more cerebral, twenty-to-thirty-something, graduate professionals looking to wind down after work or, more likely, after returning from the pub. BBC2 and Channel 4, the high-brow/minority interest channels, have traditionally catered for this type of audience in their eleven-to-midnight slots. The Office fulfilled both requirements: it was a situation comedy about work, where upwardly mobile young adults spend an increasing amount of their time, and, more importantly, it came in an engagingly disconcerting hybrid format. The opening sequences illustrate this particularly well. We are presented with a series of establishing shots of Slough, overlaid with the title and title track of the series. We then cut to the confined space of Brent’s own office, where he is interviewing a candidate for the job of forklift truck driver. The next scene involves Brent, after a brief direct-to-camera, talking head reality TV show sequence, taking us on a scene setting tour of the office, beginning with an introduction to the receptionist Dawn. What we have here is a more or less sophisticated metropolitan, or at least aspirational, middle-to-high-brow BBC2 audience being given a glimpse into everything they have ever, or indeed just that day, wanted to escape from: a

7 Cf. extensive official BBC website ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/⬎ and also, of course, ⬍http://en.wikipedia.org⬎ for unofficial links.

273 mundane office on a trading estate in Slough, probably Britain’s most notoriously unattractive satellite town. Those in the audience ‘slumming it’ in dull graduate jobs on Britain’s booming Westway/M4 corridor would have been intrigued by the all too familiar settings and any middle-to-high-brow viewer might have immediately been invited to think of John Betjeman’s notorious injunction to the Luftwaffe “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough”.8 What must however have struck any viewer is the mismatch between the establishing shots/title/sound track and the following opening scenes. We simply do not know what genre to expect: the establishing shots, with the overlaying of sentimental music, suggest soap or sitcom, while fly-on-the-wall format and talking heads in the next two scenes suggest documentary. The audience is left wondering whether they are still part of BBC2’s main late-night schedule or whether they have inadvertently entered the learning zone with a somewhat offbeat corporate trainee video on multi-tasking or health and safety in the workplace. Betjeman’s “bombs” have then already fallen in two senses. The establishing sequence, with its images of shabby 1970s new brutalism – bus stations, roundabouts, and trading estate – indicates a marginal metropolitan location, an inbetween space devoid of any human presence. Slough is made to stand for all the other booming, though soulless satellite towns that service the capital, the forgotten margins. The disconnectedness is further emphasized by the choice of bus station as opposed to train station, the latter of which might have evoked the commuter-belt status more usually associated with satellite towns. In a further reference to Betjeman’s poem, we then cut behind the functionalist façade into the sterile “bright and air-conditioned” space of the office, which will remain the location for most of the remainder of the series. The second “bomb” to have fallen regards the TV schedule: generic uncertainty de-familiarizes the viewer from the seamless narrative of the televisual experience. What is refreshingly new about The Office format is that it deliberately foregrounds the fact that “audience readings are bound not only by the text and their place in social relations, but also by their narrative competence to read” (Hay 360). What I want to suggest, and I shall explore this in more detail later, is that The Office works across, not either side of, the boundary of reading television programmes as discrete narrative texts and/or part of the flow (Williams) of the televisual experience.9 Viewers are challenged to mobilize different literacies, thereby themselves producing yet more texts, a process which begs the question to what extent the viewer of television is only ever just

8

Betjeman, John: “Slough”. Quoted on the inside cover of the BBC DVD edition of The Office. A further intertextual reference would of course be to the “Slough of Despond” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. 9 Cf. Williams, especially Chapter 4: “Programming: distribution and flow”.

274 a viewer of television.10 This is not, however, to suggest that the first screening exploded onto the scene as it were. During this period, The Office, though achieving minority cult status, was still essentially narrowcasting until wordof-mouth, repeats and DVDs helped spread the word. The programme reached critical mass in terms of audience ratings prior to the second series in 2002, eventually switching to the mainstream broadcasting channel BBC1 in 2003. After winning a BAFTA Award and spawning two Christmas specials, the series is now widely regarded as the most successful BBC programme of the last ten years, especially so since it has now been sold to broadcasters in over 80 countries worldwide. The format has been adapted for broadcast in the US and France, by NBC and Canal⫹ respectively, and in Germany by Pro7, who belatedly – after the legal implications became apparent – admitted that it was the inspiration behind their Stromberg series (cf. Chrisafis). To return to the British national context, another way to conceive of the reception process is in terms of media theorist John Corner’s notion that “television is a device that acts, culturally, both centripetally and centrifugally” (262). With regard to the former, television “is involved in a virtually continuous, selective ingestion of ingredients from the wider culture – drawing from fashion, magazines, films, music, sports, embedded elements of local and regional culture, occupational and leisure subcultures, shifting attitudes and emerging values” (262). The Office’s writer/director team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant certainly have the “hunter-gatherer voracity which producers 10

Cf. Hay, who in juxtaposing reader-response and cultural studies modes of analysis, poses precisely this question, suggesting that the former approach often “fails to explain television viewing in contextual terms”, while the latter “must [still] analyse an audience through its production of discourses about television” (361). For an extensive bibliography and detailed discussion of the applicability of reader-response theory to television, cf. Allen. Hay also raises the issue of transferring concepts from literary or filmic analysis to television with regard to psychoanalytical approaches: “Can psychoanalytical film or literary criticism ever come to terms with the fact that [. . .] television doesn’t demand the audience ‘gaze’ but rather may be ‘watched’ (or even listened to) in a state of distraction?” (Ibid.). An analysis of a further successful recent BBC (Granada) docu-comedy series, The Royle Family (1998–2000, 2006), would be especially revealing with regard to the above discussions since its singularly minimalist format (featuring a group of ‘couch potatoes’ where family viewing literally is the subject) would appear to parody, critique and even interrogate notions connected to distractive viewing habits, contextualization and audience-produced discursive interventions. Cf. Lewisohn’s BBC website description: “The Royle Family is set in a humble council house somewhere in Greater Manchester; the camera position was usually fixed, rarely leaving the sitting room and never once leaving the house. The characters mostly sat, and sat, and sat, and their television was rarely switched off, providing a permanent background drone to the conversations, and a convenient filler when dialogue had lapsed or become too tense or awkward”.

275 of television typically display” (262). Most of the scenes demonstrate a deliberate awareness of and pleasure in contemporary media fashions. Yet over and beyond this they also contain instances of what John Tulloch has, with regard to working class re-appropriations of official culture, termed “ ‘marauding’ and ‘guerrilla’ activity”, where “ ‘official’ history”, “conventional wisdoms”, and “truisms” are parodied in order to produce oppositional cultural values (261–262). Alongside the language of corporate newspeak – David Brent is regularly seen to address the viewer directly with fumbled attempts at management speak: “The point is, you talk the talk, you do not walk the walk” (Gervais and Merchant 20) and “a company runs on efficiency of [pause] communication” (28) – there are frequent knowing references, usually inadvertently ironic and cheesy if Brent and Keenan are involved, to advertising and other contemporary popular cultural artefacts. Brent refers to himself as the “Brentmeister general” (20) and uses the mockney, estuary English “Wassaaaap?”(25) greeting, both allusions to a popular German beer promotion campaign. The fact that Slough is one of the infamous, so-called lager-towns – a typical media panic beloved of the popular press – is referenced in Gareth’s attempt to bond with Tim by performatively inventing a Sun-style tabloid headline: “Oh no! Oh God! ‘Boss and team leader in drunken night out shock-horror’, it says here” (ibid.). That Tim and the rest of the staff, as well as presumably the documentary crew, are not impressed does not seem to stop Keenan, Brent or his drinking pal Finch from indulging in and, more importantly, bragging about such activities. In one of the more grotesque scenes, Brent is seen to amble up to Dawn, who is reading a comic novel by the then already hugely successful ‘real’ comedy performer and scriptwriter Ben Elton. Brent proceeds to fill the awkward pause after he has asked her what she is reading by recounting a rather offensive mock anecdote about a trip to the doctor’s for testicular cancer, all the while seemingly playing pocket snooker as he knowingly, yet awkwardly interacts with Dawn and the documentary crew. Brent’s attempt – and we should remember that he is himself performing for the documentary crew present in the office – to look for sympathy and/or shock is of course meant to be repellent. But the meta-textual anxiety-of-influence dimension is all too apparent. Brent has, as it were, disqualified himself twice over in terms of his dual persona as boss and comedian. Further, viewed in terms of Brent being played by Ricky Gervais as one of the director/script-writers, we might choose to read this scene extratextually, or indeed Oedipally, as an attempt to castrate a rival, established comic writer. In the first instance, we laugh at the verbal gaffe, but the metatextual dimension can also be read as an attempt by the scriptwriters to bond ironically with the audience by ‘poking fun’ at rival comedians. Viewers are subtly implicated in a game of self-reflexive one-upmanship, where the sitcom genre’s intradiegetic organizing principle of “unresolved and contending generational discourse” is itself parodied at an extradiegetic, meta-textual level

276 (Tulloch 263). Whether one can ultimately view this, as Tulloch does with reference to fellow media analysts Philip Hayward and Jane Feuer, as yet another instance of the “commodification of reflexivity”,11 that is “aimed at delivering ‘quality’ (high culture) audiences to advertisers, rather than being politically subversive” (248) is, since the BBC is licence-fee funded and therefore free of advertising constraints, an issue that perhaps only arises with the later commercially driven re-makes outside of Britain. Further, one can argue that The Office is both quality and radical TV since it directs “its satire at television as an institution” (Feuer qtd. in Tulloch 248). This is for example shown in a scene featuring Tim and Keith Bishop, an ultimately dull colleague from the accounts department, in which the act of television consumption is itself parodied. In one of Tim’s most impressively funny contributions, he brutally cuts short Keith’s attempt to bond over favourite TV programmes: Keith: What did you watch on telly last night? Tim: I didn’t watch telly, I watched a video. Keith: I watched that ‘Peak Practice’. Tim: Yeah, I’ve never seen it. Keith: Bloody repeat. Tim: That’s annoying, isn’t it? Keith: Not for me, I hadn’t seen it. TIM REACTS. PAUSE. Keith: Boring isn’t it? Just staying in watching ‘Peak Practice’ with your life. Tim: Mmm, yeah. Keith: Not for me. I like it. Tim: Yeah. I just stayed in, had a big wank (Gervais and Merchant 205).

The Office therefore makes use of parody and pastiche, subverting the corporate sub-culture of change management and continually and parasitically feeding off a whole range of popular media cultural discourses. In a “separate but related phase”, the period of its mainstreaming, The Office can also in Corner’s sense be seen to have worked “centrifugally” (262). Rescheduled repeats and a second series, Christmas specials, and the complete series on DVD, with an exclusive documentary and deleted scenes added, indicate that it has “project[ed] out to the widest edges of the culture its own mix of original and reworked cultural experience (attitudes, jokes, styles, personalities, looks, situations, types, ways of speaking)” (ibid.). In an earlier television age this process would have been merely imitative and monolithic, top-down and overnight, but due to both official and unofficial websites, and the foregrounded pleasures of performing the popular that are enacted in the series, a changing sense of the national is constructed when viewing The Office as a peculiarly British popular cultural event. In this sense the programme can be 11

Unless otherwise noted, all emphases are according to the original.

277 viewed as formally and aesthetically presaging on the level of media history more recent open access videoblogging phenomena such as MySpace and YouTube, which can then themselves be viewed as a further nail in the coffin of New Labour’s vision of “Creative Britain” as a national and institutionally based project that can be instrumentalized for party political purposes. Taking a more historical, residualist perspective, Corner has also argued that, regarding British television’s “culturally formative activities”, it has helped “significantly to construct not only the ‘official’ life of the nation but also its private popular pleasures (its jokes as well as its heritage)” and, in so doing, has displayed two overriding characteristics (263). Firstly, it has shown a “strong sense both of national self-consciousness and confidence” (ibid.). In the broader context of Corner’s assessment this is “a characteristic that is predicated largely on the imperialist history of many British cultural institutions” (ibid.). Secondly, he notes, that British television “was for a very long time institutionalized as a public service system in which the consequences for the national culture were not just the by-product of a commercially profitable transaction between producers, advertisers, and viewers but were the primary corporate goals of the system” (ibid.). This deliberate emphasis of the public service legacy and the British culture it has helped to shape, has, in Corner’s view, bequeathed to British television a “wholly distinctive set of protocols about ‘duties’ (responsibilities, standards, missions to inform, requirements to educate, etc.) and also about ‘pleasures’ (tastes, brow-levels, the dangers of ‘triviality’, etc.)” (ibid.). With a view to the above, we might choose to read The Office, and the character of David Brent in particular, symptomatically as both a product of and a comment on British television’s two overriding characteristics. Brent, as emblematic of the post-imperial British male, in the sense of displaying both confidence and self-consciousness, uses British humour as a compensation, but his overweening pride in surrogate national heroes – he prefers comedians: “If you were to ask me to name three geniuses, I probably wouldn’t say, Einstein, Newton . . . you know. I’d go, Milligan, Cleese, Everett . . . Sessions” (Gervais and Merchant 69) – only functions to magnify his inadequacies, since his own performances are so woefully inadequate. If we read Brent as symptomatic of the legacy bequeathed by the institution of public service television, he appears torn between, on the one hand, his managerial duties and responsibilities, which often appear less driven by the requirements of commerce than a perverted Reithian sense of paternalism, and, on the other hand, his obsessive insistence on pleasure in the workplace, that is ‘having a laugh’ or ‘poking fun’. One sequence in episode four illustrates this particularly well. It is staff training day at Wernham Hogg and an outside facilitator has come to educate the Slough branch about customer care. Brent has spent all morning undermining the sessions by using them to showcase his own musical talents. After the lunch

278 break the two of them, Brent and the facilitator, are left standing beneath what we can presume to be a portrait of either Mr Wernham or Mr Hogg, the founders of the company. Pointing at the portrait, Brent indulges in some idle banter in an attempt to ease the situation by brazenly stating: “Imagine him in a band” (179). Being as follicly challenged as the elderly founder in the portrait, however, the facilitator’s smile soon evaporates with Brent’s inopportune follow up comment: “Bald old git . . .” (180). The comic incongruities and ironic juxtapositions in this iconic scene can be viewed as symbolic of emergent and residual cultures: the portrait enunciates a former paternalistic entrepreneurial generation. Located in the present, Brent and the facilitator in this reading stand for diverging approaches to business: the one alternatively chummy and abrasive, hopelessly ‘old school’, the other representing the newspeak of change management. Yet this iconic mise-en-scène can also be read self-referentially as an example of a mise-en-abîme. In this sense, the portrait on the wall is that of Lord Reith, the BBC’s founding father, and the competing residual/emergent cultures personified by Brent and the facilitator stand for competing television production values inherent to the BBC as a national institution in a climate dominated by the profit motive. We are further encouraged in this self-referential reading by the ironic inclusion of a mise-en-abîme in the form of a rather dated 1980s corporate training video into the training session that precedes this sequence. Brent’s failure to engage with the facilitator on any appropriate terms, his stammering and eventual gaffe, are on one level symptomatic of his inability to complete the Oedipal trajectory and accept the emergent symbolic order of economic Darwinism in the about-to-be downsized office: that is on the level pertaining to his role as inherently comic within the diegetic functioning of the narrative. But the mise-en-abîme also functions at another level, the level of the writer/director Ricky Gervais as performed by David Brent, where BBC production values and the anxiety-of-influence that is part of the legacy of British television comedy are the site of a struggle between emergent/residual comic symbolic orders or disorders. The Office’s success can then be viewed as more than a by-product of its ability to provide a snapshot of the British television experience at any given moment. In many senses not unique, The Office contained two key themes that were already dealt with in Men Behaving Badly and The Brittas Empire: masculine assertion and anxiety as well as the new managerialism afflicting British culture. I do, however, want to suggest that much of what is particularly interesting in The Office derives from its foregrounding of the media making process. While anti-illusionistic devices in comedy, such as directly addressing the camera are not new in themselves – Woody Allen has long made use of them in his film comedies – the creators of The Office, rather like experimental filmmakers, seem more interested in what is behind the camera rather than what is in front of it, parodistically shifting between deconstructing and dismissing

279 televisual conventions. As such, the textual and generic literacy of the viewer have become the area of contestation in this reading of the programme. In the diegetic world of the office, the characters, in a mise-en-abîme with the viewer/reader of the programme/text, perform gap filling operations by playfully engaging with the signification process. Hence, I will conclude this part of my paper by suggesting that The Office is cerebral, that is mental, not in the high-brow sense as a value judgement indicative of high culture, but that it is so in the sense that it requires an awareness of code-switching and a heightened sense of media literacy, that is the viewer’s constant alertness to the selfreferential and intertextual possibilities of television. Having established generic overdetermination as essential in framing any reading of The Office, I shall now focus on its anarchic qualities, and in this sense ‘mental’ needs to be viewed as already part of popular culture, that is pronounced with a mockney/Estuary English glottal stop, as it indeed is by one of the characters in the series and also by the co-writer Stephen Merchant in the ‘making-of’ documentary included on the DVD. The aim is to establish the more generically conventional sitcom qualities inherent to the programme and to consider how these function or are embedded in the text. In so doing, I shall refer to Gerry Palmer’s model of the “logic of the absurd” to establish a generically preferred reading of The Office. It is of course a situation comedy, but I would also emphasize, and I hope this will become clear in the following discussion of sequences in the first episode, that it is important to bear in mind the inter-, meta- and extra-textual dimensions that frame the text. The scene or gag sequence in episode one in which Brent’s boss Jennifer Taylor-Clarke drops the downsizing bombshell depends on a classic concatenation of circumstances, arising from Brent’s larkish instruction to Dawn the receptionist to dispose of an important fax (as it transpires dealing with the issue of downsizing) from head office right at the beginning of the episode, and culminates in Taylor-Clarke’s instruction to “keep a lid on this for the time being” and Brent’s assurance that “under this regime, Jenny, this will not leave the office” (Gervais and Merchant 32). It will probably come as no surprise that in the scene that immediately follows the entire office is abuzz with rumours of redundancies and mergers. Palmer’s analysis is useful here in that it explains how a series of improbable coincidences – Murphy’s Law that ‘if it can go wrong, it will’, as often portrayed in sitcoms – functions like a farce and that in that sense it is clearly comprehensible in terms of a logic of the absurd. But let us analyse this sequence of jokes or gags, that is the verbal or visual gaffes, more closely. The first aspect to note is that the informality of the mise-en-scène would tend to suggest consensual values. Higher and middle management as well as receptionist are sitting in a relaxed manner in an informal seating area, thereby indicating empowering, horizontal management structures. Brent has, however,

280 in an aside to the camera prior to the meeting already signalled his defiance towards his female boss. In a typical piece of sarcastic chauvinism he has established an Us-and-Them structure by labelling Taylor-Clarke as the enemy within: “I call her, er . . . Camilla Parker-Bowles – not to her face . . . but not because I’m scared of her”( 27). The reference to Prince Charles’s consort may seem banal or dated – Parker-Bowles has since undergone a successful PR makeover – but to the contemporary British audience versed in tabloid gossip on the royals, she stood for the man-eater that had destroyed the ‘fairytale’ marriage of Charles and Diana. By inference therefore, Taylor-Clarke is established in Brent’s perspective as doubly threatening: as the boss about to downsize the office and as the embodiment of the monstrous feminine. If we now concentrate on the exchange of dialogue in the actual meeting, we can see a classic pattern that starts with gentle humour building to more problematic forms. As Palmer notes, his “logic of the absurd is based on the notion that humour is essentially a process in which various discourses are brought into contact with each other in a particular way” (152). The “discourses defining permitted levels of rudeness”, in our case in business meetings, are “highly contentious, in the sense that breaches of them are deeply felt” (139). Brent’s increasingly abrasive sarcasm in the form of residual bigotry towards his female boss, especially in the context of an emerging discourse of emancipation and its concomitant discourse of political correctness, is felt to be extremely threatening. This in Palmer’s model comprises the first moment of the gag, whereby the more incongruous the intersection of the discourses, the greater is the peripeteia, “a shock or surprise that the narrative constructs for us” (43). The second moment, and as Palmer emphasizes “the two moments of the gag are in practice absolutely inseparable”, “unleashes the process of reflection” (ibid.). This consists of a “spontaneous, intuitive reaction” whereby the spectator estimates “the gag as simultaneously plausible and implausible” (ibid.). The key requirement here is “the simultaneous presence of both modes of reasoning, which are maintained in tension, or balance with each other” (ibid.). To counter-balance such gross implausibility some massive countervailing plausibility is essential. As Brent has already told us, he wouldn’t call his boss Parker-Bowles to her face, wouldn’t insult her directly. Therefore it is certainly plausible that he should use a mildly disrespectful form of sarcasm – silly voices and impersonations – in response to his own gaffe with the fax. The sequence culminates with him directly insulting his boss, in effect calling on her to be sacked: “I certainly wouldn’t wish [redundancy] on my men. Or Women. Present company excepted” (30). The effect of this escalation is made plausible by Brent’s grotesquely absurd “starving kids” comparison in the preceding talking head sequence. All three of Brent’s verbal gaffes in turn prepare the way for the second improbable coincidence: Chris Finch’s deeply offensive “massage” on the answer machine.

281 As well as the verbal gaffes, we should now turn our attention to the visual gaffes, and one gaffe in particular: Brent’s ogling of his boss’s legs at precisely that point where Finch tells him not to look up her skirt. To what extent is this comic success or is it merely silly, predictable, offensive? I would suggest that on one level Brent’s action appears highly implausible, yet viewed in the context of Finch’s extreme provocation – “I hear you’ve got a hangover, you big poof ” and “Give her one from me, son” (32) – as well as his own preceding outburst about starving African children, his action has a certain measure of plausibility. As Palmer argues, it is the balance between plausibility and implausibility that makes the peripeteia, “the [narrative] construction of a shock or surprise” (40), into comic surprise: In this perspective, the essential point about the logic of the absurd is that its insistence upon the relationship between plausibility and implausibility necessarily involves placing the comic moment in a specifiable relationship with a narrative which has criteria of plausibility, and yet at the same time uses the element of implausibility, which also derives from the narrative structure, to show how the enunciative mechanism emerges within the flow of the narrative (147).

A further complicating factor in this scene, which intensifies the moment of surprise, is the contradiction of discursively defined expectations regarding the camerawork. The camera angle adopted by the documentary crew shifts to a low-angle medium shot looking up past Taylor-Clarke’s legs towards Brent. The spectator’s attempt to decode this gaffe or gag is balanced between comic surprise and horrified surprise. The former would perhaps entail reading archpractical joker Finch as the directorial instigator of this shot. This has some plausibility with a view to his manipulative, controlling interventions via the answer machine. The latter notion of horrific surprise abandons any notion of comic insulation, that is some reassurance that the suffering is not real or serious, by constructing the (male) spectator as voyeur. Without the conventional laugh track, the sequence escalates: “his [in Palmer’s example Basil Fawlty’s, in ours David Brent’s] lack of control is monstrously implausible, especially normatively – such a collapse is felt to be extremely threatening. To counterbalance such gross implausibility, some massive countervailing plausibility is essential” (139f.); and in this sequence this is achieved via Finch’s intervention and the self-reflexive, mockumentary narrative framing device. The abrasive, edgy quality often ascribed to The Office is, I would suggest, to a large extent dependent on the incongruous and self-referential intersection of discourses, that is it works on the level of both formal and social disruption. As Palmer notes: “Nothing is naturally surprising, it is only surprising in relation to the norms and values of a given culture. And in relation to such norms a given attempted peripeteia may be either excessive or inadequate” (135). The cultural specificity of The Office is instanced, for example, by the producers of

282 the American series seeing the need to play down the incompetence of the David Brent character for American audiences in order to make the humour appear neither excessive nor inadequate. Yet the culturally transgressive quality or process inherent to comedy needs to be viewed diachronically as well as synchronically, since this meta- and inter-textual form of comedy, which “shows the frame in the picture when most television is showing the picture in the frame” (Dennis Potter qtd. in Tulloch 276), clearly caters for and depends on ever more media literate generations who are able to discern humour in the ironically subtle juxtaposition and layering of gags or jokes that are “perceived [as funny] but not permitted” as well as those that are “permitted but not perceived as funny” (Mary Douglas qtd. in Palmer 140). We can also discern certain affinities between the logic of the absurd and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, and in this sense the sequence from The Office discussed above can be viewed as an instance of liberating humour, even a celebration of excess. While Tulloch, quoting Fiske, in his analysis of television drama is careful to point out that “the Rabelaisian licence that Bakhtin describes of indulging ‘to excess in the bodily pleasures of eating, drinking and sexuality’ is seldom granted by broadcast television”, they both nevertheless emphasize that “the parody, the travesty is still there” (266). Two further notable instances of Rabelaisian licence at work in The Office are, firstly, the trans-sexist pornographic montage featuring the head of David Brent, which is not shown to the viewer but is downloaded across the office and even viewed by the cleaning lady, and, secondly, Überstraightman Gareth Keenan’s apparent seduction into troilism after the office party. Normative binary discourses of political correctness/incorrectness, right/wrong, sense/nonsense, master/slave, male/female, even subject/object are thus seen to take on a more fluid, dynamic structure: the plausible/implausible logic of humour. As Palmer notes with regard to Todorov’s critique of Freudian theory: “one cannot summarize signifying systems in a binary way: between truth and its opposite – and by implication between effort and pleasure – lies the realm of the symbolic, which is characterized neither by truth in the empirical sense, nor by nonsense, and which while it may give pleasure certainly demands effort too” (37). I shall now, as a conclusion, consider very briefly the third notion of ‘mental’ mentioned above: that is anger, in the colloquial sense of ‘going mental’, in particular male rage. All the scenes we have encountered so far contain instances of male anger or rage. This has usually manifested itself in the form of offensive remarks or gestures, that is transparent attempts to shore up a fragile male identity. Viewed in isolation, they are instances of, or attempts at, controlling, not liberating humour. Examples of this are punning put-downs and insults such as: “please leave a massage” (Gervais and Merchant 31) or “[waking] up at the crack [viz. the female sexual organ] of Dawn” (21), or outright

283 insults such as: “Give her one from me, son” or “you big poof ” (32). Disregarding any cultural specificity, I think it is fair to say that within the diegetic world of The Office as expounded above they are marked as instances of comic failure. Within the diegesis of The Office, the response to Brent’s, Keenan’s and Finch’s massive provocations is boredom, incomprehension, embarrassment, offence but not anger or laughter. Hence the peripeteia or comic surprise on our part: our own discursively defined expectations are endlessly contradicted. In terms of the narrative trajectory and the semblance of resolution at the end of the series, Brent has implausibly, almost despite himself, saved the office from closure. By doing exactly what head office do not want him to do – employing more staff, leaking information – he has subverted the logic of the market with his own logic of the absurd. Part of the perverse logic of The Office is that in its relentlessly double-edged, that is selfindulgently pleasurable and dutifully bound, pursuit of (male) comic failure, it has perhaps achieved comic excellence.

Works Consulted Allen, Robert C. (Ed.): Audience-Oriented Criticism and Television. In: Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Television and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. by Robert Allen. London: Routledge 1992. Pp. 101–137. —. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Television and Contemporary Criticism. London: Routledge 1992. BBC The Office website. 16 October 2006. ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice⬎. Chrisafis, Angelique: “Vulgar, bigoted, cynical”. France warms to Le Bureau. In: The Guardian. 27 May 2006. ⬍http://arts.guardian.co.uk⬎. Corner, John: Television and Culture. Duties and Pleasures. In: British Cultural Studies. Geography, Nationality and Identity. Ed. by David Morley and Kevin Robins. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. Pp. 261–272. Driver, Steven, and Luke Martell: Blair and ‘Britishness’. In: British Cultural Studies. Geography, Nationality and Identity. Ed. by David Morley and Kevin Robins. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. Pp. 461–472. Gervais, Ricky, and Stephen Merchant: The Office. The Scripts. Series 1. London: BBC Worldwide 2002. Gibbons, Fiachra: “We’ve had Britpop and Britart, now Britcom is attempting to sweep the world in their wake”. In: The Guardian. 17 July 1999. ⬍http://www.guardian.co.uk⬎. Gibson, Owen: “Little Britain” still the big comedy act. In: The Guardian. 15 December 2005. ⬍http://www.guardian.co.uk⬎. Hay, James: Afterword. In: Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Television and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. by Robert C. Allen. London: Routledge 1992. Pp. 354–385. Herman, David: Smallscreen. In: Prospect. 6.6 (2006). P. 63.

284 Horton, Andrew: Comedy, Cinema, Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press 1991. Lewisohn, Mark: The Royle Family. BBC website. 3 December 2006. ⬍http://www. bbc.co.uk⬎. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins, eds.: British Cultural Studies. Geography, Nationality and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. Palmer, Gerry: The Logic of the Absurd. On Film and Television Comedy. London: British Film Institute 1987. Smith, Chris: Creative Britain. London: Faber & Faber 1998. The Office: The Complete First Series. Dir. by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. DVD. London: BBC Worldwide 2002. Tulloch, John: Television Drama. Agency, Audience and Myth. London: Routledge 1990. Williams, Raymond: Television. Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana 1974.

Christine Mielke

Couples and Friends: Comic Strategies and Social Structures in German and American Comedy Series German and American TV comedy series from the 1970s to the present are analysed with special attention to the social relations of their main male and female characters, ranging from the typical comic couple of the earlier German examples to the bunch of friends in current series, with changes in gender relations and other social areas as background. The historical view and the intercultural comparison are linked with observations regarding the transcultural influence of American TV comedy on German series.

Mass media in general and television in particular discovered comedy long ago, and realized that it was an indispensable element for television’s endeavours. As a comic TV genre, the sitcom (situation comedy) is a type of series that has been very popular of late. Like the soap opera, it is considered to be an originally ‘American’ genre deriving mainly from US-productions and spreading across the world. But in fact it has a long tradition that reaches far back into the realms of theatre, especially cabaret. In addition to political topics, gender issues always have provided a reliable source of audience amusement and a chance to reflect societal norms. Comedy and especially the social structures it depicts are signs of the psychological state of society and culture. Since the American style of comedy found its way into German programmes after 1984, my analysis will include an intercultural perspective, one that touches on the differences in American and German comedy concerning the social structure presented in TV series, interprets different models of character constellations, and finally that considers the influence American comedy had on the German genre. The first part of this essay will focus on the German tradition of sitcoms and their forerunners; the second part will analyse the reception of American sitcoms in Germany, as well as their treatment of certain social structures. My argumentation will proceed from the comic couple to the couple of friends, then to the American series of the eighties and early nineties, and then to the changing of the patterns in the late 90s until the present day to a structure of a family or a group of very close friends.

From Comic to Crazy Couples One of the dominant features of German TV comedy up to the mid 1980s is the comic couple. It marks an era of German TV culture that is characterized by jokes that follow a familiar pattern: long action – short reaction. Essentially, a long story is told, numerous steps lead to an announced end, and then, at least

286 in our contemporary perception, nothing happens. This comic pattern mirrors Kant’s 1790 definition that reads: “Das Lachen ist ein Affekt aus der plötzlichen Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts” (Kritik der Urteilskraft § 54) (“A joke is when concentrated expectations dissolve into nothing”.1 While his definition was not intended to be taken literally, until the beginning of the commercialized broadcasting system in Germany and the end of the state’s monopoly it was enough and, more than that, it was the right humour at the right time. German TV humour does not have a very positive image. As is set down in the German Constitution, German broadcasting has the duty to inform and educate – this is known as its ‘culture-duty’. So humour became both a serious state affair and serious. In addition, the German audience was very sceptical of complexity and latent ambiguity (the foundation of intelligent humour), largely as a result of mass media’s role as a means of propaganda during the reign of National Socialism, a time when many comedians were forced to emigrate or were killed. Thus, after 1945, they had to learn how to produce comedy from scratch. The comic couple’s popularity and frequent recurrence are symptomatic of the nostalgic vision of the two German post-war states, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The couple represents continuity and allegiance, and when the harmony becomes a little boring, it becomes a vehicle for safe experiments and a touch of salaciousness. Aside from the comic couple, we have the crazy couple. In the popular series Ein verrücktes Paar (A Crazy Couple, ZDF 1977–1980), the development concerning the emancipation of women in German society reveals how influential those contemporary events were. For example, laws were being modified, there were influential publications such as Der kleine Unterschied (The Little Difference) in 1976, and the abortion debate was on the table. But this is just one aspect of the programme, which can be also seen as a conservative reaction to the state of flux at the end of the seventies. The title mentions two equal actors, well known comedian Harald Juhnke as the central star of the series, and Grit Böttcher as his female counterpart. In A Crazy Couple Grit Böttcher shows a great ability to assert herself and to push aside mollycoddled men. Most of the time, the last laugh is on her side, although Juhnke remains at the centre of attention. To avoid putting off the less emancipated members of the audience, Böttcher acts in a highly sexualized way. It is a typical mixture we find at the end of the seventies: women can show a little bit of dominance and superiority, but as a means of reconciliation they have to be very attractive and must clearly show their sexual willingness on that visual level. In addition to A Crazy Couple, we have Didi Hallervorden and Rotraud Schindler in Nonstop Nonsens, Loriot and Evelyn Hamann in Loriot, and 1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

287 Dieter Krebs and Beatrice Richter (later on replaced by Iris Berben) in Sketchup, just to name the most popular crazy couples. If we look into the relevant studies dealing with German TV history, e.g. Knut Hickethiers Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (History of German Television), none of these comic series is mentioned, not even comedian Loriot, who is often seen as more cultured than the others. Males playing dominant roles, although obviously within the structure of the couple, can be found in two of the aforementioned productions: Nonstop Nonsense (ARD 1975–1980, 20 episodes) and Loriot (ARD 1976, 14 episodes). In a sequence of twenty episodes, Hallervorden and Schindler in Nonstop Nonsense portrayed a couple in various everyday situations, sometimes in historical or science fiction settings. Hallervorden also had other partners and sometimes acted on his own, but the couple was an enduring feature of the show. The span of situations and couple constellations was wide and involved several forms of gender confrontations ranging from those of accidental acquaintances or meetings to all sorts of comic couples (engaged, married, divorced, old, young etc.). The narrative structure of the sketches in Nonstop Nonsense was steady. It centred on the man of the couple and ended with a corresponding curtain line. In general the woman was a motherly or seductive – but always sensible – person who took care of the foolish man. Yet in the end, the fool always had the last word and was at the centre of attention. The sensible woman’s role was minor and supporting. The patriarch role model of the fifties is still visible here, but the head of the family – the man – is often dismissed. Arguably, the popularity of Nonstop Nonsense was inspired by a mixture of commiseration with the disturbed man and relief about him behaving in a way that is almost certifiably insane. Nevertheless, he dominated both the action and the woman. Another kind of domination with a similar model of undermined masculinity can be found in the series Loriot, which remains very popular to this day. Although the programme is called Loriot, most of the legendary sketches concern the typically comic couple performed by Loriot (Vicco von Bülow) and his partner Evelyn Hamann. Loriot and Hamann play petite bourgeois characters that often get into trouble with their social or material environment. What causes the trouble (and the curtain line) is either that they are holding firmly onto their principles in chaotic situations or that they have a desire for uncommon experiences, such as love affairs, etc.; but in such uncommon situations they tend to fall back into their habitual behaviour or act out stereotypes of behaviour they have only ever heard of. Thus they are a symbol for the old Federal Republic, citizens, who cannot get rid of the inner voice of the first chancellor Adenauer saying: No experiments! One of the last comedies that deal with the comic couple in the old-fashioned way is Sketchup (BR 3, 1984–1985, 35 episodes), which was well received by

288 a young and progressive audience. However, a look at the sketches from recent narration habits or entertainment standards shows a hotchpotch of outmoded jokes and a quite discordant handling of gender issues. Maybe we have to accept the attempt to reflect gender roles by humour, but the sketches (either too long or too short) sometimes depict both ‘sexes’ in insulting ways. Sketchup’s kind of humour is old-fashioned, sometimes even gloating, and, moreover, it is in some aspects sexist and racist. Unmasking these structures can be likened to the arrival of a new perspective on the 1968 student revolt in Germany. Today we know about the hidden oppression of women through a more subtle argumentation of emancipation and freedom – (hopefully) for the benefit of all.

From the Comic Couple to a Group of Friends The good old times of more or less boring, harmless, and not very complex sketches on ARD or ZDF came to an end when the high constitutional court decided to permit the commercialization of German television and radio in the year 1984. Commercialization heralded the end of the state’s broadcasting days and the beginning of an ongoing period of grave modifications within the whole system and its position and significance in society. Connecting those changes to the cultural-historical view, we later find similar structures and social upheavals at the reunion of the two German nation-states, an event which certainly marks the end of the sedate and comfortable ‘Republic of Bonn’ and the post-war period. The ongoing debate about the decline of German television culture can be compared with the never-ending debate over the loss of confidence and moral and financial security after the unification. The problems of the current German situation are reflected in the process of extended TV offerings from the mid-80s on. Suddenly there is competition, a clash of mentalities, role models and aesthetics, and an intensive altercation about the distribution of the obligatory charge for television programmes for every TV-owner in Germany. Today, the act of commercialization is considered a turning point with regards to the character of the German TV programme. Consensus opinion in the different discussions is that new broadcasting companies like RTL, SAT 1, Pro 7 and others caused a loss of educational and high cultural entertainment, giving way to a mix of fictional series and news, combined in docu-soaps and ‘infotainment’ (cf. Hickethier 414–492). Regarded more closely (and compared with the programmes of that genre before 1984) there has been considerable change and progress with regards to German humour, especially as represented in the more recent comedy shows of the new channels. When one considers the gender constellations of comedy programs since 1984, it is quite obvious that comic couples resembling the

289 Crazy Couple have nearly faded away. On the one hand there are mixed groups of comedians, often acting as people sharing their flat; on the other hand there is clear individualization and personalization with the primary stand-up comedian, be they male or female. There is also more going on than merely a change in character constellations (from a married couple to a couple of friends): It also is a way of making gender matter or not matter while the comedians act as a couple. Admittedly, showing sketches with men and women on TV does not naturally mean that gender is the main subject or that gender role models are reflected. Looking at the comedy series today we can state that changed genderconstellations in TV comedies are probably a result of changes in the society’s gender role models as they are represented on TV (considering the theories concerning mass media and the origin of their contents; cf. Adelmann; Fiske; Gauntlett and Hill), or are the product of the creative and innovative teams in Cologne, who stand for advanced and ‘avant-garde’ thinking and for progressive gender roles (most of the time, but there are certainly examples showing new gender roles, but new problems, too). In both cases we could identify a change in society concerning role models and, considering the quality of the contents, maybe a certain increase in emancipation. But we also have to take into consideration that commercial programs are forced to entertain the consumers more than state broadcasting was. From that point of view, and by taking TV-comedy as an indicator of emancipation, perhaps we can say that the younger viewers are often more liberal, the older ones more conservative. As Hickethier declares, entertainment at the end of the eighties was ironic and did not take itself very seriously, yet still claimed to form the basis for a new understanding of the world (cf. Hickethier 482f.). It is therefore not astonishing that the first months after the dissolution of the GDR were a friendly period of getting to know each other and of regarding each other with favour. This is how it is portrayed in the shows of the couple of friends and how the beginning of the reunion was like. Especially interesting and informative for the topic of the ‘comic couples’ is the show called Alles nichts oder?! (All Nothing, Is It?!) (RTL plus 1988–92) with Hugo Egon Balder (formerly known for his scandalous striptease-show Tutti Frutti) and the lesbian Hella von Sinnen. Both are comedians, but to say they represent a comic couple in the tradition of the ones named would be false and would neglect the satirical aspects of their actions. Actually, the content of their show was a curious game which always ended with the candidates throwing cakes in the faces of Balder and von Sinnen. But, to tell the truth, the content of the show was the exhibition of gender trouble as experienced in the eighties. The two presenters, the skinny, bad-tempered, melancholic-looking Balder and the strident, voluptuous, and outspoken lesbian von Sinnen staged an entertaining and furious battle of the sexes – and yet they in no way represented traditional gender

290 roles. Their jokes and their verbal battles were aimed at the well-known and established biases of society. And in order to differ from the traditional couple, they formally called each other “Herr Balder” and “Frau von Sinnen”. One disadvantage of that show was that both presenters were so busy showing their unconventional gender life that the lack of good jokes was often overshadowed by strident acting. From today’s standpoint, the merit of Alles nichts oder? is that it prepared the comedy scene for a new era; a culture became established in Cologne, which, somewhat akin to San Francisco, is famous for its gay and lesbian culture. The connections of the comedy culture to the homosexual scene are various. Many of the popular comedians are bound to it and originated from it. So today we have on the one hand comedians mentioning and emphasizing their sexual attitudes and on the other hand, there are many sitcoms dealing with the everyday life of homo- and heterosexual couples and friends. The immense popularity of such sitcoms means that they cannot be solely entertaining for homosexuals. Instead, it could be suggested that the entertaining element is that gay or lesbian people have quite different problems or experiences than heterosexuals. But apart from these experiences, their lives are still similar to those of the ‘hetero-normal’ citizen. The writers of the screenplay can thus show the mainstream audience an image of life that they can identify with, yet one mixed with the exotic adventures of queer habits that differ from mainstream (heterosexual) lives. A few years after the early and experimental times of commercialization, the comedy boom earnestly started with RTL Samstag Nacht, a copy of the American Saturday Night Life, and it was the beginning of the constellation ‘group of friends’ which replaced the comic couple. The forerunner of that new kind of show was the scandalous family-satire Klimbim (1973–1978) with its scantily-clad mother and sexually active grandfather on the one hand, and the serious satirical political revues like Scheibenwischer (Screen Wiper) on the other hand. Both formats are based on a group of people bounded by family ties, friendship, or a shared place of work. RTL Samstag Nacht presented a mixed group (four men, two women) of comedians. Popular comedians appeared on the show as guests, but their contributions did not emphasize gender topics in a conspicuous way. The same can be said for their main competitors, the Wochenshow (SAT 1 1996–2002) and Switch (Pro 7 1997–2000). Gender, it seems, no longer constituted an interesting and necessary content, although mixed groups seemed to be predestined for the treatment of such subjects. Now it was not the outer-medial reality of the audience that was topical; approaching the new millennium, it was the inner-medial reality, the loads of new programmes, and the plethora of new topics emerging alongside the radical changes in broadcasting in Germany that informed content. Traditional formats like the news or sports had changed their outfit. New formats like reality-TV

291 or afternoon talk shows had to be digested by an overtaxed audience. This situation – one nearly devoid of any real gender issues – went on for a few years. If we look at the comedy scene on TV today, we can mark the return of a tendency to deal with sex and/or gender. The reason for this is a change in genres to one that could be described as a mixture between family series or soap operas and comedies. The topics of self-reference are still present, but now the comedians are presenting them in framed scenes. They are acting not just as a group, but more like friends, sometimes hinting at a life and a story away from the sketches. Examples for that type of series are Die dreisten Drei – die Comedy WG (The Bold Three – the Comedy Apartment), Bewegte Männer (Men in Motion), Sechserpack (Six Pack) or Schillerstraße (Schiller Street). The gender topic is back, however, the shorter the sketches are, the more superficial the treatment appears. For example, there are harmless gender-based jokes in sketches lasting 8 seconds (short ones) or up to 1.5 minutes (long ones). The plot has just seconds to develop; the punch line must be clear and sharp (cf. Holzer). Concurrent to the emerging motif of the couple of friends was the influx of American comedy series on German TV and their enormous impact on the ‘domestic’ TV culture.

The American Impact With the beginning of commercialized TV in Germany, the channels bought a great deal of low budget action series and soaps from US-American producers to fill up their daily programming, especially in afternoon timeslots. The perception of ‘American reality’ in Germany – drawn primarily from TV – was a very strange one during this time. American society literally entered the living rooms and bedrooms of the German audience and, in this sense, was actually closer to the Germans than any European countries were. German viewers had come to know the Italians through La Piovra (The Octopus), the English through Upstairs – Downstairs and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but they did not know the French, Dutch, Scandinavians or neighbours in the east. Initially, German viewers came to know the Americans, as action heroes and melodramatic soap opera figures. After that first glut of series there came a second phase which undermined the stereotypes so common in Germany; new impressions of American society were produced, or rather forced, by mass media. I am referring to a kind of series with essentially conservative motifs, but with one dominating element of strangeness. This structure of ‘strangers are welcome’ corresponds to the end of the Cold War and a new open-mindedness towards the unknown, an attitude of being no longer hostile in the world. The embodiment of this new attitude was the titular character in the series Alf (1986–1990), the friendly alien from Melmac, who became a member of the Turner family. Other examples are the

292 series Who’s the Boss? (1984–1992), Golden Girls (1985–1992), Married . . . with Children (1987–1997) and Roseanne (1988–1997), all of which have two things in common: First, each one was and still is very popular in Germany, more successful than other, more ‘normal’ American series that were shown on German TV (cf. Evermann et. al.; Compart). Second – and most responsible for the marked success –, each of the named series is conservative with regards to its main topics and values, family life, material goods, being part of the society and so on, but each has one astonishing exception. Who’s the Boss? is an often told story of the lonely, abandoned or widowed man and his child looking for someone to care for their house, and after a while for their life, so that the structure of family is completed. However, in Who’s the Boss?, the gender roles are turned upside down: She is a top business woman, president of an advertising agency who hires as her domestics a good looking widowed Italian and his little daughter. After a long while of gender trouble, they unite as a patchwork family: he does the housework, and she is successful outside the home. Alf tells the story of an ideal ‘all American family’ that receives a visit by an alien life form and cohabitates with him, even though he threatens their cat and neighbours. They eventually ‘tame’ him by teaching him human manners and emotions. Golden Girls shows a few ‘girls’ sharing a flat like youngsters, a version of which will be seen in Friends, and sharing their sorrows, especially concerning love and their relationships with men. The exceptional element in the story-plot is that the girls are mostly about sixty years old, and the oldest one over ninety; these are their ‘golden years’. My last examples from this category are Roseanne and Married . . . with Children. The comedy Roseanne is named after its heroine and shows an underdog family with a very dominating, assertive, and contumelious mother – but without socio-critical intention. The actually deterrent role of the mother has the same function as Donna Reed in her self-titled show (but confusingly in the show the name of her role is ‘Donna Stone’), and all the mothers in the conservative series of the fifties and sixties. In former times we would see the patient housewife loving her family, caring for them day and night, and ignoring her own needs and desires. Roseanne does the same as Donna, but she serves up fast food to shorten cooking times and the real reason behind her having a family – a husband and four children – is to have victims to laugh at. Representing the average American family but with another principle of producing comic effects is Married . . . with Children. Here we have a male head of family working to provide his son, daughter, and the lady of the house with a dog, a car, and a house respectively. But in this comedy, each character is exaggerated: we have a dull, baseball-loving man, who habitually denies his wife sex and who loves nothing more than sitting on the toilet and reading pornographic magazines; a gaudily-dressed housewife who watches so much TV that she has a pseudo-social relationship with the apparatus; a son who

293 desperately craves his first sexual experience and whose best friend is an inflatable doll that is treated like a family member; and a daughter who is blonde, ditzy, and always lucky. A mix of all these series is the impression the German TV-viewers had of American society during the nineties: within the well-known patterns of life something strange intruded and gave the familiar and sometimes boring settings of family series a new facet. The structures are still solid, but now they are shown in their funny aspects – and the best method to show the well-known in a new dimension is to change one element in the system. This special element is generally one that transposes the genre from comedy to tragicomedy. With regards to gender, the series show even more: in all of these series it is obvious (but not necessary for the story) that men have lost their status as head of the family. Even so they are not presented as losers, but rather seem to be confident and liberated from a former male need for recognition. Beyond doubt it would be interesting to explore the relationship between societal developments in general and gender role models, as reflected in TV-series. After the great success of series like the ones mentioned above (as well as some others), there followed a new generation of comedies in Germany. The American principle was applied, but not in all respects. The genre of the comic family series was established. A story is told in several episodes as in the classic series, but it is combined with the elements of sitcoms. Examples of that type of comedy, which could be called ‘narrative comedy’, are Me and My Life (Mein Leben und ich), Rita’s World (Ritas Welt) and Nikola (cf. Holzer). Commercial channels broadcast all of these series, and each series has a main female character. Important elements were changed to present the well known patterns in a new light by way of a crabby daughter being lenient with her hippie parents and commenting on them with an odd sense of humour (Me and My Life); or a female head of the family and supermarket manager similar in disposition to Roseanne, forward, hard-boiled and emotional simultaneously, who is comforting to her boss but can still dominate him when needed (Rita’s World). A very similar plot can be found in the series Nikola; here, the main difference is in the location – this time a hospital and not a supermarket. Men are shown as emotional, often homosexual, and sometimes just one step away from being oppressed; it is not clear if the series fulfil their claim to represent everyday life or if it is just wishful thinking. On German TV today we have the ‘narrative’ comedy, which involves one strange element, the traditional sitcom, and also numerous series mixing up structures and motifs. Series such as Schillerstraße present a new concept of friendship: the figures are more and more often single or engaged in short-term relationships. They reside with friends who have the same or even a higher status in their lives than their family. Living with others in a shared flat can compensate for the lack of a partnership. Characters of this kind of comedy series can have

294 a stable social environment, people to live with and to rely on. To sustain this situation, they can neglect gender differences and can behave in an emancipated fashion. Behaviour may be quite different when they meet as possible sexual partners. The greatly successful forerunner of such constellations is the American series Friends. It marks a new upcoming type based on the ‘narrative sitcom’ and following the era of the ‘strange element’-series. Friends is the prototypical of the group-of-friends type, in which familial relations are replaced by structures such that the social support is rendered by friends living together, not solely by ways of cohabiting but also through sharing their lives and experiences (cf. Mack). Platonic friendships and sexual or partner relationships blur into one another, and running parallel to the short-term comic elements in each episode are long-term developments like love affairs or childbirth. Because of its mood, the series marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one: it shows the end of ‘one element is weird in a right constellation’-type. The basic constellation is not one of harmony and a status of completeness, in which something happens that opens a new perspective on the well-known features of everyday life and makes them a little more interesting and funny. In the new type of comedy the basic situation is characterized by the sense that something is fundamentally missing. The characters are seeking a state of completeness, one which they can never attain. More often than not it is a bitter and desperate laughter. Sometimes we laugh about the failure of the characters, which means we laugh at them, but most of the time we laugh with the characters in spite of the tragedies that occur. In Friends every character feels incomplete; each attempts to be successful at work and at love, or to manage life in general, and each is punished with a tragicomic development of the story line. The only reliable component is friendship. The pattern of the dramaturgy is as follows: a long phase of attempts and quests; a short phase of realizing how to operate; the announcement of a future happiness; a long phase of failure and depression, absorbed and alleviated by one’s friends. The ideal couple cannot come together because she hated him in high school; nevertheless they fell in love later on. After a short time of ideal love, she breaks it off. However, upon his marriage (to someone else) she realizes she loves him, but by now it is too late. A few months later, his wife acknowledges that she loves another woman and breaks off the marriage. He and his former girlfriend reunite and separate again, only now she is pregnant, and so on and so forth. The motifs resemble those of a soap opera, and so indicate the changed character of the comedies. Central topics are unemployment and lost love, which lend the series a melancholic undertone. Friends takes place in a relatively low-budget one-room setting and is filmed using a range of reductive techniques and cuts, simple lighting, and the

295 like. The sequences are short and develop in linear fashion towards the punch line. The simplistic settings of these sitcoms will be given up for the benefit of a more expensive and complex décor and environment that we find consistent with prime time series like two decades ago in Dallas, a series that wasn’t yet a sitcom or had sitcom elements at all. The sitcom elements from the ‘cheap’ programmes changed into expensively equipped programmes, but they took with them the bitter humour – missing in expensive prime time series before – and the melancholic touch. Examples of this are Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Gilmore Girls. In the centre of action we find groups of chummy people, or a quartet of friends in New York, or the housewives living in Wysteria-Lane, or a mother and daughter in their idyllic town. Each group represents the ideal constellation, true friendship, success, and especially a longing for a conservative world. Maybe that sounds strange if we look at the fancy, independent, and self-sufficient thirty-something women in Sex and the City, or at the not very respectable women in Desperate Housewives, or the unconventional pair of girls, both named Lorelai, in Gilmore Girls. But on second glance, and after analysing the episodes, it becomes clear that each character, missing something important in her or his life, is motivated to compensate for it. That lack is the impetus for their actions and the topic of the narration. Unable to enjoy their actual lives, each wants to marry and to have children and to no longer be a hipster. The environment of Sex and the City is hostile: New York City prevents them from being complete, but as the opposite way of life in Desperate Housewives or Gilmore Girls can show, the status of housewife is no more desirable. As housewives, the women try to change in an obviously impossible way, i.e. without disrupting their actual lives. Plagued by violent daydreams, the successful lawyer Ally McBeal becomes thinner and thinner with every episode. She has a faithful girlfriend but cannot find the right man. And as for the Gilmore Girls, their own family, the Gilmores, is the enemy, the hostile environment that tries to infiltrate their strenuously fortified life with their caring substitute family in Stars Hollow, an apt name, demonstrating cosiness and protection from the world outside. In this recent type of prime time sitcoms, it is interesting to note that men are not the main characters. Central instead is the busy, working woman, looking for a man but who is always incomplete. The series symbolize a new and hidden type of conservatism – women cannot return to the kitchen, nor can they attain much happiness outside the home. The series show us that an independent woman does not find a partner because her very independence makes her unattractive. US-Americans no longer give a warm welcome to strange elements in their sitcoms, elements that could give their familiar lives new dimensions. Today the strange appears to be dangerous again – at least it seems so, if we look at

296 the stories sold as comedies, which are actually tragedies. In Germany these series are very popular; perhaps it is that the Germans can identify with this sense of disillusionment.

Works Consulted Adelmann, Ralf (Ed.): Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft. Theorie, Geschichte, Analyse. Konstanz: UVK 2002. Compart, Martin: Von Alf bis U.N.C.L.E. Anglo-amerikanisches Kult-TV. Essen: Klartext 1997. Dalton, Mary M.: The Sitcom Reader. America Viewed and Skewed. Albany: State University of New York Press 2005. Evermann, Javan: Ulrike Elsäßer, and Michael Thiel (Eds.): Dallas, Denver & Co. Das große Lexikon der amerikanischen Soaps. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf 2002. Fiske, John: Television Culture. London: Routledge 2003. Gauntlett, David, and Annette Hill (Eds.): TV Living. Television, Culture and Everyday Life. London: Routledge 1999. Grote, David: The End of Comedy. The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition. Hamden/ CT: Archon Books 1983. Hickethier, Knut: Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens. Stuttgart: Metzler 1998. Holzer, Daniela: Die deutsche Sitcom. Format, Konzeption, Drehbuch, Umsetzung. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei-Verlag 1999. Kant, Immanuel: Kritik der Urteilskraft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2004. Klien, Anne: Kult-Switching. Beobachtertheoretische Erklärungen der unterschiedlichen Rezeption der TV-Serie “Ally Mc Beal” in Deutschland und den USA. München: Utz 2001. Mack, Melanie: Friends. Untersuchung zu einer populären Sitcom und ihre medienübergreifenden Vermarktung. 30 September 2003. ⬍http://opus.bsz-bw.de⬎. Morreale, Joanne (Ed.): Critiquing the Sitcom. A Reader. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press 2004. Schneider, Irmela (Ed.): Amerikanische Einstellung. Deutsches Fernsehen und USamerikanische Produktionen. Heidelberg: Winter 1992. The Development of the Audiovisual Landscape in Central Europe since 1989. Ed. by Europäische Gemeinschaften and Generaldirektion Audiovisuelle Medien, Information, Kommunikation, Kultur: Luton: John Libby Media 1998.

Frank Degler

Affirmative Humour in Bully Herbig’s Parody of Star Wars/Star Trek: (T)Raumschiff Surprise The depiction of gay males in Bully Herbig’s movie (T)Raumschiff Surprise is analysed in its ambivalence between an affirmation of the stereotypical gender roles and a subversion of the role models inherent in the parodied genre conventions. The crossdressers are laughed at, but we also laugh with them at male heroes who still want to save the world. This ambivalence is even more surprising as the movie clearly targets a mainstream audience.

Science fiction has often portrayed the utopia of re-gendering societies on distant planets.1 Bully Herbig’s offbeat parody of the Star Wars and Star Trek series also pushes typical gender boundaries, though the main source of comedy here is a quite simple change in the sexual attitude of the officers (cf. Bachmaier; Charney; Haider-Pregler). The brave Starfleet men (and later on brave women) who explore and penetrate the endless bounds of space are replaced by a gay crew who act with an exaggerated feminine attitude. And the Jedi Knights of Star Wars, who fight for the just Republican order and for galactic enlightenment, are also replaced – and parodied – by these ridiculous Surprise officers. On the one hand, this humorous strategy works because of the pre-existing suspicion that both of these male-dominated military organizations have a hidden homoerotic potential, one that has to be covered either by an exaggerated male attitude (in the case of the Starfleet officers) or by an exaggerated monastic one (in the case of the Jedi) (cf. Vaz and Hata 61). Such overdone heroic gestures attract parodies, and the Surprise crew fails to fulfil the requirements of assertiveness and enterprising strength normally expected of ‘males’. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the role models and sexual attitudes that (T)Raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (Germany 2004) is parodying are not subverted by its humour but rather work as the common ground that affirms the gender norms. Therefore, (T)Raumschiff Surprise seems to be a good example of a successful comedy that makes fun not of the gender norms but of those who differ from the norms. This could be described as an affirmative kind of humour and not as a subversive one. The movie depicts these differences, but even though the audience laughs at the gay men, they are still staged in a sympathetic fashion. We must therefore analyse whether the norm itself might also be laughed at. 1

Cf. Hahn; Kanzler 67–86; Koebner; James; Macho and Wunschel; Naha.

298 Dramatic Structures of the Comedy First of all, it seems suitable to analyse the dramatic structures of Bully Herbig’s comedy (T)Raumschiff Surprise, both its formal qualities and its plot-structure. However, in doing so it becomes clear that there are more difficulties in arranging the sequences than were first expected. A common way to start an analysis of a movie is with the division of the stream of pictures into logical units (cf. Faulstich; Korte). In the next step, these parts can be arranged and examined. (T)Raumschiff Surprise starts with a short introduction that takes place in a setting reminiscent of such mystery TV series as the X-Files. The second part begins with the caption “300 Years later”, and the setting here reminds the viewer of the typical Star Wars design. The movie then cuts to a long shot of the Starship Surprise, and is narrated by Kork’s off-stage voice: “Computer log of the Spaceship Surprise, Captain Kork. It’s a little bit too chilly for the current stardate. But my crew is in good health, only two of them caught a cold” (7⬘ 03⬙).2 This establishing shot is obviously a parody of the introduction of the Star Trek series. Indeed, the third part takes place inside a spaceship that looks remarkably like the original Starship Enterprise. The next part of the movie begins with the first journey of the time-travellers and ends when they manage to leave the middle ages. The fifth phase plays out in the Wild West and ends when they reach their destination in the present time. In the sixth part, the group destroys an alien and his spaceship (that has landed in Area 51) to prevent Mars from being colonized. The seventh and last part begins, when the group reunites in the future and ends with the closing credits. To summarize, at first glance the movie can be divided into seven distinct parts marked primarily by changes in time and by changes in space, setting, design, and genre: (1) 2004 ⫽⬎ (2) 2304 ⫽⬎ (3) 2004 ⫽⬎ (4) 1304 ⫽⬎ (5) 1878 ⫽⬎ (6) 2004 ⫽⬎ (7) 2304. Some of the transitions are additionally marked by inserts or subtitles that announce the seven stages. This episodic organization of the movie is mainly based on formal signals, and does not constitute a coherent functional structure (cf. Eick 52–75; Field 158; Vogler 56); the same is true for the aspect of formal tension, which in this movie does not lead to a visualization of the traditional dramatic three-act structure often found in Hollywood cinema. By analysing the formal structure of the conflicts, it becomes clear that there are some problems.3 The formal analysis alone is obviously not the sole key for a useful description (cf. Faulstich 9–58; Korte 17–59). Therefore, the next step should be to take a look at the dramatic structure of the plot and to 2

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Cf. graphic 1. The analysis of the formal tension in the parameter “Takes per Minute” does not lead to the anticipated result, which is a visual representation of the three-act-scheme. 3

Takes per minute

83:40 82:17 81:00 80:00 79:22 78:00 77:00 76:00 75:48 74:56 73:00 72:44 71:21 70:00 69:00 68:13 66:35 66:00 65:00 64:00 63:00 62:57 62:10 60:47 59:32 58:51 57:00 55:54 55:00 54:00 53:00 52:00 51:00 50:35 49:00 48:00 47:00 46:00 45:00 44:00 43:43 42:41 42:12 40:26 39:33 38:00 37:47 36:08 35:00 34:00 33:00 32:38 31:47 29:49 29:00 28:00 26:56 25:41 25:00 24:00 23:36 22:00 21:00 20:01 19:31 17:54 17:00 16:11 15:10 13:43 13:07 12:00 10:53 10:00 09:02 08:40 07:33 06:51 05:36 04:58 04:00 03:26 02:06 00:55

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Graphic 1. Visualization of the formal tension in (T)Raumschiff Surprise according to the parameter ‘takes per minute’.

299

300 analyse the conflicts that keep the story going. There is a strange inconsistency here; the principle action of the film is clearly the saving of Earth, yet the main characters – Spuck and Kork – are not the ones who accomplish this task. In other words, there is a discrepancy between the principle action and the principle characters. Even the accidental killing of H2O2 is a mere quotation of a common motif in comedies, namely that of the dumb character becoming the real hero by chance. It is obviously meant as a parody, since it was the ‘flying saucer’ that had to be destroyed and there was no need for killing the alien, who was staged as a harmless creature (e.g. there is an extreme worm’s eye view as a subjective camera shot). This raises the question of whether the battle between good and evil is really the most important conflict or whether there are alternatives. Although the conflict between Earth and its former colonies is at the centre of attention, there are other ‘candidates’. First, at the beginning of the story in sequence 2, we are confronted with a bundle of problems: There are disorders in space (there is an alien; we are in a secret military area), in time (there is a time-traveller, as we later come to understand), in national security (many high ranked army- and secret serviceofficials), and finally there is a character who is treated like a displaced person and put behind bars. This situation is meant to be a mystery to the audience as well as to the characters themselves: The prisoner is dressed in a cowboy costume, wears weird glasses, has pointed ears and a strange haircut, and speaks with an effeminate Bavarian accent. But at least some of the audience is able to recognize the person as a character from a German TV show: he is Mr. Spuck (Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig), a parody of Lieutenant Commander Spock from the original Star Trek Series (USA 1966–1969). But how does this gay ‘Vulcanette’ land in a secret prison in Area 51 in the year 2004? This mystery will be solved in the end, when the last sequence shows how this time traveller got himself into this trouble and also how he gets out of it. This is when the first (sub-)conflict of the movie is resolved and the frame comes to a full circle. But what first seemed like a disorder of time is at last revealed to be a direct result of the attempts of the good to stand up against the evil, which confirms the position of this constellation as the main conflict of the plot. But then there is a second part of the sub conflict (which as a whole is obviously meant as a parody of the important, yet ironic, battle between good and evil) where we can find the real motivation behind the Surprise crew’s acceptance of their task: If Mars were to defeat Earth, there would never again be a Miss Waikiki Contest. This ‘doomsday’ scenario must be prevented at all costs. And the sashes around the bellies of the winning team show that they have finally succeeded. The last take shows what the heroes had been fighting for – and it is a clever statement to confront the common reunion of a family with the reunion of this gay trio dancing and singing the same childish and indecent song with which the movie started. From the point of view of this sub-conflict

301 we have to state that the heroes aren’t real heroes at all – they only care about their own problems and, moreover, do nothing to accomplish their mission. Now we can propose the scheme of the frame, which is still the story of the main characters, though it is not the main plot. Act I: basic conflict, preparations for the Miss Waikiki Contest, endangerment of the contest, acceptance of the task; Act II: failed attempts, turning point: Kork becomes jealous; Act III: task fulfilled, separation, reunion, Miss Waikiki Contest. Here the great battle between Earth and Mars can easily be classified as the main conflict of the movie. Mars, which had once been colonized by Earth, now strikes back. This situation is established as a fundamental conflict between good and evil. There is no doubt that Earth (represented by a young beautiful woman in a white dress sitting in her sunny council room) is justice and that Mars (represented by an old, ugly man in a black/blood red hood sitting in a dark throne room) is the evil aggressor. Metapha’s official title, according to the bonus material of the DVD is: “Queen In Replacement Through Maternity Leave”). Nevertheless, her position is not as well established as it seems at first sight – she is the one who must save the world. She has to learn to do this by herself and not to rely on the help of strangers, especially not on the help of the Surprise crew. But she also has to realize that she needs some backup and that Rock is the right one to help. So their relationship functions like that in a common underdog/princess love-story, such as the relationship between Han Solo and Princess Leia. He is the one who has to fight, but she is the one who rescues them all when things go wrong. Metapha arranges the departure from the Middle Ages, as Rock is sleeping, and Kork’s only concern is finding a toilet. On the contrary, in the Wild West they work as a team, when she rescues Spuck and Kork from their duel and when Rock gets back the pocket laser. This cooperation leads them to their final victory. A sleight of hand is needed to accomplish this description of the plot-structure according to a three-act-scheme: namely, we have to leave out the framework story. When we do this, everything suddenly fits together. The internal story lasts from minute 2 (main conflict) to 68 (victory and first kiss) – a total time of 66 minutes: In this scheme, Act I ends at minute 18, and Act II at 55⬘ 30⬙, with the turning point coming at 33⬘. Act I establishes the status quo – in this case, the endangering of Earth through Mars and the necessity for Queen Metapha to react. Her attempts to get some help are finally successful, when Rock flies the crew towards Earth, although nevertheless it is Rock who is the one to escape the enemy with his space taxi. The middle of Act II (i.e. the turning point in this scheme) describes the exact moment when they are starting their first time-journey. So we can see that the lesson Metapha has to learn is that she herself has to fight – and also that it is Rock who is at her side. The end of the second Act brings the arrival in the Wild West. So after Metapha had rescued the whole crew, the resolution of Act III begins: Rock and Metapha as a

302 team manage to get back the time machine and the pocket laser; they manage to rescue Kork and Spuck, to fly to the future and to destroy the alien technology. And finally they become a couple; we see their first kiss and their mutual confessions of being both inept as lovers. If we have indeed managed to analyse the structure properly, we can see that from a certain standpoint this case is quite the reverse of the ‘normal’ hero story, and also that it is this frame structure that is responsible for all the confusion. The important task, the real danger, the serious relationship, and the difficult but successful efforts are all told in passing. On the one hand, there is the classical love story between the princess and the outlaw. They save the world and become a couple in the end. Yet on the other hand, the movie just does not care about this. Instead, it shows the story of a gay couple, of their strict refusal to be of any military relevance, of their childish efforts to win a Miss Waikiki Contest, and finally of their separation and eventual reunion. But even this sacrifice means nothing, because the main task is already accomplished. The only thing they are able to contribute is a deferment of a wish, and that is staged in a most melodramatic way. But this is also instantly revoked. The only thing Spock has to do is to wait. In a bonus sequence at the very end of the movie, we are told of what he did during the 300 years: Evidently, nothing much. A central comical strategy of the movie lies in the trapped expectations of the audience. Normally either the underdogs become the real heroes or the real heroes are mirrored by the irrelevant comic couple in a comic way. Neither the first nor the second expectation comes true here. The underdogs are the main characters even though they remain irrelevant – and the serious couple stays relevant and in the supporting role. Calculated or not, this seems to be an ambitious comic mechanism; the usual three-act-scheme is subverted by the simultaneity of the two plots. On the one hand, there is the framework story of the gay couple, or trio, and their unsettled relationship – one that lasts for more than 300 years. On the other hand, we see the internal story of the heroine who comes to realize that she must not rely on too much help from the outside, but rather that Rock alone is the one who can help her. Her reward is not only the defeat of the aggressor, but also the gain of a partner who has learned not to be ashamed of his weaker qualities. Because of his confession of being in bed a dead loss, she herself is able to accept her mistakes and to admit, “Me too!” (66⬘ 24⬙). Rock knows the secret question to seduce every woman in the world: “Would you like to go shopping?” (66⬘ 05⬙). Ultimately, they are a perfect couple, nevertheless we cannot be sure whether this question is genuine or just a key word.

Comic Strategies A comic strategy that we expect to be employed is that of the incongruence of constellations (e.g. when the two parts of a couple do not go together,

303 something very common in comedy). This is a standard source of laughter in (T)Raumschiff Surprise as well. Another important comic strategy that is utilized in the comedy is the allusion to other movies or to a genre as a whole. A basic way of alluding to another movie is by the adoption of a character. The names, the way of speaking, the clothing or a specific constellation of figures can be a signature that marks the relationship between the quoting and the quoted movie. In (T)Raumschiff Surprise, there are the dumb, the good, and the evil. As we have seen, the dumb are of special interest because they are well-known stereotypical characters in comedy. The dumb character usually grows with his task, but in this movie he remains as dumb as he was at the beginning. On the contrary, the good couple (outlaw and princess) and the antagonistic couple (the villain and his henchman) match the cliché (cf. Charney; Haider-Pregler). As we have seen before, these positions are clearly signalled from the moment of the first appearance of the character: the helpless as well as the ridiculous position of Mr. Spuck. The second appearance confirms this impression, when, as an answer to the question of why this crew should be able to save the world, the Surprise crew sings, “’Cause we’re so pretty/ so smart and so nice/ we’ll be Miss Waikiki” (5⬘ 01⬙). The trio wear the Starfleet uniforms although they do not at all behave like the ‘real’, ‘masculine’ men of Captain James T. Kirk, but rather like displaced drag queens. Instantly this gives an idea of the satiric impulse. The hidden homosexual potential of the Enterprise-crew is probably meant to be a source of comical effects. This can be described according to the strategies of intertextual incongruence between the used and mentioned characters with a recognizable male or female attitude. There are not only external but also internal relations of incongruence. For example, when the group arrives in the Middle Ages there are some ‘real’, ‘masculine’ warriors who are not only a parody of dumb, stinking, fat but strong, and brutal looking lansquenets but also function as a strong contrast to the gay couple in their pyjamas and their exaggerated effeminate attitude. This leads to the question of the necessarily contrasting background with which the comic strategies work. First of all, the movie is a spin-off production of a German TV show. This context is responsible for the formal mode of presentation – the artificial light, the cheap scenery, the static camera. The audience already knows who the characters on the screen are, but is also aware of the original characters that are being poked fun at. Under these conditions it is possible to increase the tempo of the movie, because there is no past that needs to be explained. There are some running gags with the equipment that rely on the audience’s previous knowledge (e.g., Spuck’s hand mirror has the same design as the ‘tricorder’ of the Enterprise, and a high-tech phallic symbol is thus misused in a subversive way). The casting of (TV) stars guarantees a faster way of communication: e.g. Til Schweiger is one of the best known male actors in Germany whose image

304 hovers between tough and tender (quite similar to the image of Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element; France 1997). For example, when he plays the part of a hitman in Der Eisbär (Polar Bear) (Germany 1998), his character is afraid of having a tiny penis. In his role as a recently married womanizer in Der bewegte Mann (The Turbulent Man) (Germany 1994), he again has to deal with his own homophobia and has to learn something about his feminine qualities as well. Therefore, he has been well cast for a hardboiled, unhappily divorced space taxi-driver who is a horrible lover and owns a small, pink, pig-shaped musical clock. The metafictional statement in front of Lord William can be read as a sign of how well-calculated the casting was. When Rock is asked to give his particulars, he replies, “My name is Til Schweiger, I’m an actor” (36⬘ 32⬙). Comical effects in the movie are also induced through much wordplay. There are a great number of puns that arise initially: Officer checks Rock’s ID. Officer: I can’t read this. Rock: ‘Rock’. Officer: ‘Rock’ – and then? Rock: Not: ‘And Then’. ‘Rock. That’s It’. Officer: What you mean – that’s it? Rock: The family name of my ex-wife is ‘That’s’. Mine is ‘It’. ‘Rock That’s It’. Not: ‘And Then’ (24⬘ 30⬙).

Secondly, there are different dialects that signify each group. The good ones (on the Star Wars-level) speak without an accent, but the bad ones speak with an east-German dialect; and the cleaner has an invented African accent which is meant to be funny. In German TV and cinema, dialect is seldom used as a way of characterizing a figure. The Surprise crew speaks mostly with a southern-German accent and with a very strong effeminate attitude that is obviously in conflict with the masculine tradition of the characters. On the contrary, the existing accents of Pavel Chekov and Hikaru Sulu are overstated. Also, the sex appeal of Lieutenant Uhura is emphasized in a way that reveals the (hidden) sexual aspects of the Star Trek series (cf. Kanzler 163). The names of the figures also could be mentioned in this context: Spuck and Kork are just sexist variations of the originals; Nasi and Bora Bora are meant to sound funny, Popowitsch, Schrotty, and Pulle are speaking names; while Queen Metapha phonologically reminds us slightly of ‘Queen Padmé Amidala’. The villain, ‘the Emperor’ that is, becomes the ‘Regulator’. The name ‘Jens Maul’ uses the ambiguity of ‘Maul’ in ‘Darth Maul’. ‘Jens’ just does not fit this context – and ‘Maul’ is fixed on its German meaning, that is not ‘to hurt somebody’ but to ‘snout’. On the other hand ‘moaning’ in German means ‘maulen’, while people from eastern Germany are predicted to moan very often. Maul’s way of speaking is a mixture of jabbering and snorting, reminiscent of

305 the central acoustic signal of the original character Darth Vader (cf. Werber 126). An interesting detail is the stereotyped Nazi style of Jens Maul, although this is more likely an effect inspired by the (former) East German police uniform. On the other hand, there are characters that speak with an emphasized masculine attitude; Rock tries to speak that way, and the Consul and the Regulator speak with an even more ridiculous heroic attitude. Also, Jim and John or Lord William/Santa Maria have masculine intonations. The attitude, not only the way of speaking, is used for comical effects (e.g. there are numerous rhymes that do not fit the whole setting, but are meant to be funny): “William: A last lance thrust/ leads to your lap my Lady!/ Metapha: I think you are insane./ You’ll seek for me in vain” (47⬘ 55⬙). The lyrics of the crew’s Space-Taxi-Song involve a counting-out rhyme, which is originally meant to be totally innocent, although it could also have an indecent meaning to it: “Gay go up and gay go down,/ To ring the bells of London town” (19⬘ 50⬙). Other important sources of comical effects are the spheres of the media and the body. There are copious (often indecent) puns that refer to the physical, mainly in order to violate certain taboos. Jokes that refer to the homosexuality of the main characters are used as a comic strategy: “Kork: Today the preSpring Break medical examinations will take place. I’m looking forward to them taking my temperature” (7⬘ 25⬙). Or, to give another example: “Spuck: And what are you?/ Kork: I’m the Captain. Spuck: You only slept your way up! Kork: So what?” (8⬘ 09⬙). Then, there is the motif of the clinical thermometer with the vibration signal that Spuck ‘puts away’ while hovering; he forgets all about it until he removes it at the end of the movie. It’s the only evidence proving that he truly came back from the future. Also, the tail of the little pig of the musical clock casts a shadow on the wall of the dungeon in such a way that Kork suspects Spuck and Rock are having sex, when he hears Spuck saying: “May I take him out? May I touch him? He looks so crumpled . . .” (43⬘ 11⬙). As mentioned before, Rock is presented as being very attractive to both women and men. His taxi-driver cap demonstrates his masculinity. Indeed, the engines being lowered out of the frame of the car are obvious phallic symbols. In addition, the Surprise itself resembles a phallus. Exactly in the moment that the taxi is ejected from the spaceship’s tip, we hear the crew cry out in orgasmic ecstasy. But there are also deficient aspects of the body being mentioned: Mr. Spuck is worried he is working out too much because he is having problems with his intervertebral discs. Pulle more than once refers to the crew’s obesity, such as when their attempts to hover nearly fail: “Is it any wonder? You’re eating pie all day long. Honestly I think you’re too heavy to hover” (9⬘ 50⬙). In the end, Spuck really is ‘too fat to fly’ (as the button on the control desk says) back to the future. Kork becomes seasick and throws up into his little satchel when the taxi makes a nosedive, and he urinates in a teacup. Jens Maul suffers from asthmatic attacks and speaks in an unusual way. Regulator Rogul wears extra-thick

306 glasses. Queen Metapha forgets her bra – and is shown in a deformed body-shape on her ‘princess of the year’-poster. Lord William loses a tooth in an apple and has a really big nose that looks like a phallus. And finally the poor alien H2O2 chokes on his beer so hard that a (well meant) dose of asthma-spray leads to his death. This death scene is very physically staged as well – his body bursts and his innards spurt all over the Surprise(d) crew. On the other hand, there are an astonishing number of jokes based on media topics. This comic strategy also makes use of physicality, especially when the invisible hi-tech (of series like Star Trek) is ridiculed, for example in the scene when the Consul is not allowed to speak before a senator has started a record on an old-fashioned turntable. Another interesting example is the 3-D message system of the year 2304, which obviously does not work properly – an allusion to the original Star Wars movie (USA 1977). The pitch changes perpetually. And there are the old problems of communication as well: When the government tries to call, they are only able to reach a (female) answering machine so they have to send a fax – even more old-fashioned technology (for a sci-fi movie), yet it’s obviously reliable technology. Miss Bora Bora’s comment is infused with a sexual metaphor, which emphasizes the physical aspect of communication technology as well, when she remarks, ‘They are using strongly pulsing vibration to penetrate us. May they enter?” (11⬘ 57⬙). And finally there is the transition to the dream-sequence of Rock, which is designed in a commonplace way – the mental blackout of Rock after his first sight of Metapha is represented by a film tear (‘Filmriss’) that is taken literally (as an ‘absence’). The picture on the screen burns and then turns white, so the audience can see the erotic day dreams of Rock: a princess foam-washing his taxi-cap, almost like a girl in a cheap, soft-porn video clip on MTV (only that the girl under the shower starts to wash her hair and to brush her teeth as well). Yet the shooting of this scene is formally perfect. The comic strategy can be clearly identified as a parody of the specific forms of a well-known genre. Direct quotations are not the only way to make fun of other movies – it is also possible to allude to a particular form of a group of movies. More specifically, the conventional mode of storytelling in different genres can be parodied. There are myriad details on the acoustical level that show how calculated this part of the movie is. Assorted songs constantly interrupt the story and almost transform the movie into a “space opera” (cf. Stableford). Furthermore, there is the sobbing of Jens Maul, which is obviously an acoustic quotation of the breath of Darth Vader. However, Jens Maul sobs because he is an asthmatic who has to use his medical spray periodically. (It is also a common cliché that the villain supplies the good guy with the central tool that in the end destroys the evil one – in this case it is the spray can, with the nice sound of clattering.)

307 There are other justified sound effects in the movie: The sacred music, which is the leitmotif of the Regulator, is not an added soundtrack, but sung by the monk-like guys in the background. The Regulator plays the melody on an electric organ. Another interesting detail of the sound design is the way the horn of Jens Maul’s moped sounds – a ridiculous, though for teenagers a common way of souping up a bike. Another good example of the precise use of sound is Johann Strauß’s famous “Donauwalzer” (“Blue Danube”) being played when the Surprise crew tries to hover. This constitutes the first selective quotation of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA 1968); the next ones are the transition-scenes that reference the colour-effects in the Star Gate sequence at the end of 2001. Another movie acoustically alluded to by (T)Raumschiff Surprise is Minority Report (USA 2002). This music provides a famous way of handling an interface. In this movie, it is accompanied by a symphony orchestra, which just might be conducted by Metapha. The space taxi-race is another selective quotation, which is designed like the race in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (USA 1999), while the wild chase of Rock on horseback hurrying after Jens Maul alludes to the Indiana Jones trilogy (USA 1981–1989), as well as the (laser-)whip does Maul’s. One very often quoted scene is the men on wires breaking through a glass dome, like Harry Tuttle at the end of Brazil (UK 1989), a movie full of allusions itself. Apart from these sci-fi movies, there are also quotations of the western genre: it is no accident that the villains arrive in town by train, as they do in High Noon (USA 1952), and that the mayor is searching for a new sheriff. There is the selfreference of the characters Santa Maria, Jim and John, figures in Bully Herbig’s Der Schuh des Manitu (The Shoe of Manitou) (Germany 2001), who even directly refer to the plot of their film: “Santa Maria. It’s getting late. We have to sell a tribal pub to the Apaches” (58⬘ 45⬙). In this sequence there is also a selective quotation of the form of a special genre – the shopping-channel, which is parodied by the ‘Santa at Noon’-Show. (In addition to this, the number-girl at the ‘tjost’ quotes the corresponding girls in the TV quiz shows). Another TV format alluded to by (T)Raumschiff Surprise is a famous German show for children called 1, 2, 3, with Michael Schanze as the quizmaster (his famous formula was: “If you’re wrong or right, / You’ll be told by the light”). This is parodied by ‘Schrotty’ when he tries to beam Kork and Spuck, and then turns on a certain melody and flashes of light appear on the floor space: “If you’re beamed right,/ You’ll be told by the light” (13⬘ 50⬙). And last but not least, there are several allusions to the Terminator trilogy (USA 1984–2003): the motif of the time-journey itself. Before destroying a hostile spaceship, Rock remarks, “Insalata mista, baby!” (23⬘ 29⬙). This is obviously a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous “Hasta la vista, baby!” in

308 Terminator 2: Judgement Day (USA 1991). Also, the red dot in the eye of Jens Maul is a clear signal reminding us of the machine-eye of the Terminator which is a ‘classical’ mark of being evil, especially an evil machine. Nevertheless James Cameron was not the one to make this motif famous. In fact, he himself was referring to the red eye of HAL in Kubrick’s 2001 (USA 1968). Generally the camera strategies in (T)Raumschiff Surprise are much more variable than expected, as the first four sequences clearly show. In the beginning we see a well-calculated mise-en-scène. The tiny melody of a musical-clock is drowned out by the noise of a military helicopter in the background and the little figure in the foreground is run over by a big wheel – something we instantly recognize as being in accordance with the formal laws of action-movies. The worm’s eye view of General Baby, a parallel movement of camera and object along a frontal axis towards the audience, the frontal view of Baby’s astonished face, the subtitles, the freeze-frames (showing the ID-cards of the FBI agents), and the extreme back lighting when the steel door opens all exemplify the typical style of mystery series. And thirdly, the movie establishes the central motives of the sci-fi genre, unfolded along the dominating contrast between the level of the Star Wars allusions and that of the Star Trek parody: The battle over Earth starts with an establishing shot of the quiet majesty of a huge spaceship that suddenly explodes as multitudinous little space fighters fly by, continuously firing. And in the end, the spaceship bursts and tumbles down, now in the background, while in the foreground the huge hooded head of the Regulator proclaims that the age of Mars has come. There is a moving camera, a well-calculated miseen-scène, and later on sequences with a high tempo and a great many takes per minute. (All this is nearly literally quoted from the opening sequences of Star Wars: Episode IV; USA 1977).) The council of Queen Metapha is also shot in a specific way with the camera movement forming a total loop around the scene, along the lines of Michael Ballhaus. All this constitutes a visual effect, which has to be taken seriously. On the formal level, this is the basis for the moments of parody – a change of the content that is incongruent with the staged form. To materialize this ‘formal quotation’ there must be at least one differing formal code to produce a significant difference. The main contrast in (T)Raumschiff Surprise is the distinction between the levels of Star Wars and Star Trek. As the table of formal tension clearly shows, during the Enterprise episodes there is an immobile camera; e.g. the entire fifth sequence is shot in just one take, a very slow change occurs between the ‘medium shot’, the ‘full shot’ and cheap scenery. In light of the highly skilled sequences before, working with digitally animated cities and battles in space, the audience is sure that this atmosphere of a TV studio is not a matter of incompetence but a calculated switching of the code, a change between the ‘analogue’ TV aesthetics and the digital animations of modern blockbuster cinema.

309 Because of this distinction, the movie is able to show the old-fashioned form of the TV series as the form itself, while in the comedy-show they have to use the cheapness without remark. The intro-sequence of the TV-(T)Raumschiff shows the differences very clearly: there is a cheap model of an Enterprise-like spaceship, which is obviously suspended by strings. On the contrary, the (T)Raumschiff in the movie – though it is shaped like a penis – looks perfectly like the common mental image of a ‘normal’ spaceship on screen. As we have already stated, the formal differences concern the details of the film design. By way of example, there are differences in the colour-design of the different quoted genres: While the counsellors of Queen Metapha are dressed in white and light brown cotton robes, the colours of the Regulator are black and red, and the dominant material is leather. On the contrary, the mystery level is marked by blue neon light, while the style of the Middle Ages reminds one of the old Technicolor movies, and the Wild West is based on brown leather and plaid skirts. The background of the film set inside the Surprise is a neutral crew, and the crew is dressed in the well known pyjamas in basic colours: This question of design is mentioned on the level of the story at least three times: First, with Rock’s protest when Spuck suggests that his taxi-cap could be coloured pink. Next, pink is the colour of his armour when it comes to the ‘tjost’. And finally the whole Earth is redesigned by Spuck, of course in pink (cf. Kanzler). The movie obviously combines a great number of different genres to get a parodying mixture. As we have seen, the film starts with the genre of mystery movies, a special form of sci-fi movies that deals with conspiracy plots, aliens, and governmental organizations hiding the truth. And Mr. Spuck as a secret prisoner in Area 51 fits into and parodies this cliché at the very same moment. But also the common science fiction movie with its spaceships and battles, its futuristic technology and architecture is alluded to, especially the motif of a time machine. The next genre the movie addresses is the musical, and sequence 5 provides one long take showing the heroes singing and dancing. And not only once but at least six times there are inserted songs, and so it is possible to talk about (T)Raumschiff Surprise as a ‘space opera’. The next obvious genres are the adventure movie (especially knight-movies) on the one hand and the western on the other hand. According to the motif of a time-journey, the movie seizes the opportunity to change the setting as often as possible and to show as many different sceneries as possible. There are elements of love-stories and action-movies, but they are not clear enough to be categorized as an allusion to the whole genre. (Elements of thrillers, horror, erotic or criminal movies simply cannot be found.) On the other hand, the whole movie is a spin-off production and therefore stands in a close relationship to the TV-series; and secondly, the movie as a whole is obviously a comedy – but these are properties of the movie itself and do not refer to a formal attitude

310 quoted by the movie. So it is likely (T)Raumschiff Surprise has to be categorized as a pastiche (cf. Verweyen and Witting) not a parody. But what is the inherent story behind all those allusions? What is the core of the story? Is there a plot of its own behind the quotations of other characters, movies, and genres? And is there a link between the different plot-lines, between the main conflict and the sub-conflicts, between the main and the supporting characters? Starting with the main plot, it is clear that it is the task of Queen Metapha to save the world. She must realize that she can rely neither on her counsellors nor on the Surprise crew, and has to fight for herself, supported only by Rock. But what exactly is her task? She started to save her world as it has been, just apart from the fact that Mars is attacking, and this should be realized by preventing a foreign being and technology from coming to Earth. Her violation of the law (time journeys are forbidden) seems to be justified in this respect, and the council needs to make an exception to save both the world and (of course) a specific hierarchy of power. The alien culture must not contaminate Earth, the technology must not be integrated, and the impositions of technological progress must be averted; although the assimilation of the alien technology enables mankind to colonize Mars 250 years later, the colony will strike back, and this has to be prevented. To understand this solipsistic logic of Metapha’s quest we can imagine dissatisfied European politicians deciding to sink the Mayflower, preventing North America from being settled. According to the logic of (T)Raumschiff Surprise, this would be a clever idea to prevent a stated European loss of power. And surprisingly, we can identify a famous model for this strategy: The first of the Star Trek movies, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (USA 1979), deals exactly with this fear of technology that had become uncanny (‘un-heimlich’) in the specific ambiguous sense Freud has mentioned, namely that of being both uncanny and ‘unknown’ or ‘formerly known’. At the end of the Star Trek movie, we come to realize that the spaceship ‘V-GER’ that tries to terminate all life on Earth was once the satellite ‘VOYAGER VI’, a satellite that has been unrecognizably transformed and returned to its architect. The doom of mankind can only be prevented by the union of a man with the female embodiment of V-GER to a new species. On the contrary, this assimilation of humanity with a mechanical being is what two decades later the next generation of the Enterprise has to prevent in Star Trek: First Contact (USA 1996) (cf. the contribution of Ulrich Scheck in this volume). The point is that in this movie the ‘bad’ Bork are trying to prevent first contact, while the heroes are trying to save the Earth by changing the past to retain the first contact of mankind with another species. But they have to commit a foundational crime by breaking the ‘First Directive’, that is to enforce the history to happen – because otherwise it would have not happened by itself. In (T)Raumschiff Surprise this optimistic motivation is topsy-turvy: History has to be changed, and the way to change it is to choose isolation and

311 technological inertia. The stranger and his technological potential is something dangerous, and the foundational crime is committed in order to defend Earth from being penetrated by aliens. And because (T)Raumschiff Surprise is a comedy, the plan apparently works. Nevertheless there is a paradox, namely the origin of a time machine without the former alien input. When the heroes come back to the future there are still spaceships, because there cannot be a crew of a spaceship if there are no spaceships at all. Now we must turn to the framework story. We have a gay couple being split up and sent to different epochs, and they are reunited after 300 years. They are connected by the aim to win the Miss Waikiki Contest, and finally they do win it. But first, one of them has to stay in the past, and we see him talking with the officials from the government, trying to prove he truly originates from the future; in the end he convinces them by producing a thermometer safeguarded in his rectum. But this means that someone else stayed behind in the past, that someone else came to Earth and brought new technology. And back in future the audience has to recognize that when they are is not just the year 2304 without Martians, but also a redesigned future in pink; see the skyline of Bespin, a sky-city of the Star Wars-Universe (cf. Vaz and Hatta 64). Now we can see that the mission has been only partially successful. All they managed was to exchange the alien that was brought to earth: H2O2 has just been replaced by Spuck. And he is the one who now, instead of H2O2, manages to change the whole system. It is not by accident that the returning heroes are welcomed by the Surprise crew and not by the counsellors of Queen Metapha. In the last 300 years Earth has changed into the pink planet, which is obviously meant as a happy ending. Nevertheless, the counsellors have vanished, and perhaps the hierarchy of power has changed as well. Earth is no longer a place of serious counsel, of politics and wartime strategy. Now it is the home of the Miss Waikiki Contest 2304. As we are now on the level of a Star Wars parody, we could say that Spuck had managed to achieve – not the victory of the dark side of the force – but of the pink one.

Works Consulted Bachmaier, Helmut (Ed.): Texte zur Theorie der Komik. Stuttgart: Reclam 2005. Charney, Maurice: Comedy High and Low. An Introduction to the Experience of Comedy. New York et al.: Peter Lang 1991. Eick, Dennis: Drehbuchtheorien. Eine vergleichende Analyse. Konstanz: UVK Verlag 2006. Faulstich, Werner: Grundkurs Filmanalyse. München: Fink 2002. Hahn, Ronald M., and Volker Jansen: Lexikon des Science Fiction Films. München: Heyne Verlag 1997. Haider-Pregler, Hilde (Ed.): Komik. Ästhetik, Theorien, Strategien. Wien: Böhlau 2006.

312 Herbig, Michael Bully (Dir.): (T)Raumschiff Surprise. Germany 2004. James, Edward: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. Kanzler, Katja: ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’. The Multicultural Evolution of ‘Stark Trek’. Heidelberg: Winter 2004. Koebner, Thomas (Ed.): Filmgenres. Science Fiction. Stuttgart: Reclam 2003. Korte, Helmut (Ed.): Einführung in die Systematische Filmanalyse. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 2001. Macho, Thomas, and Annette Wunschel (Eds.): Science and Fiction. Über Gedankenexperimente in Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Literatur. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 2004. Naha, Ed: The Science Fictionary. New York: Wideview Books 1980. Stableford, Brian: Space Opera. In: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. New York: Martin’s Griffin 1995. Vaz, Mark Cotta, and Shinji Hata (Eds.): Von Star Wars bis Indiana Jones. Das Beste aus den Lucas-Archiven. Rastatt: Modern Graphics 1995. Verweyen, Theodor, and Gunther Witting: Die Kontrafaktur. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag 1987. Werber, Nils: Der kleine Junge hinter der Maske. Stoßatmung und Strömen. In: Die größten Schurken der Filmgeschichte. Ed. by Klaus Dimmler. Leipzig: Reclam 2000. Pp. 126–132.

V. Comic Strategies: Gender and Laughter in Literature, Theory, Communication, and Art

Susanne Bach

May I Laugh about Women’s Lib? or: The Difficult Relationship of Humour and Feminism in Margaret Atwood, Caryl Churchill, and Helen Fielding Even though it could be deemed politically incorrect to make fun of gender matters, writers like Margaret Atwood, Caryl Churchill, and Helen Fielding have inserted humour into the feminist debate. By employing psychological, sociological, philosophical, and literary theories this essay develops working hypotheses about the relationship of feminism and humour. It also emphasizes the historical dimension; after having been the means of questioning the socio-cultural and political status quo, feminism now is itself the target of critical questions. In the end, the essay shows that both laughing with and laughing about feminism can at the same time question and strengthen it, since laughter keeps it within the discourse, thus supporting and constantly reaffirming its relevance.

Feminism and laughter can both be justifiably called ideological minefields. Both invite hot disputes: Who defines ‘feminism’ in the first place and what are its aims? And, connected with that question: Who defines gender and its appropriate behaviour? Who may laugh about what? What is funny and what is plainly disgusting? Where is the borderline between laughing-at and laughingwith, between insult and mirth? Both areas, feminism and laughter, touch essential areas of identity and self-definition, of taste and education, of emotion and reflection. Both can become very serious matters. In trying to negotiate the gap between these two hotly contested areas of human experience as they are represented by fiction, there are further guiding questions this paper is going to ask: Are there sectors of feminism that are open to laughter at all, what kinds of alliances can humour and feminism form, and how can laughing about feminism be justified in modern fiction.1 Since I want to identify sectors and forms of contact and interaction and test whether they can adequately bridge the gap between the seemingly separate spheres, I will start my argument with one example taken from history, then proceed to discuss works of fiction, and finally introduce a metalevel consisting of six theoretical assumptions about the correlation between feminism and humour. The history of feminism is not a funny affair. There have been too many struggles and fights, too many wounds and traumata. One from the countless examples to illustrate this commonplace notion stems from nineteenth-century 1 Fay Weldon has claimed that fiction was “the major means by which feminism had influenced women’s lives” (Hanson 16; who rightly adds the medium film).

316 Great Britain: Emily Davison, a suffragette, died at the Epsom Derby of 1913 after stepping out in front of the King’s horse in order to draw public attention to the women’s movement. Many of her fellow suffragettes were imprisoned and went on hunger strikes, during which they were restrained and forcibly fed. Their fellow countrywoman, Queen Victoria, who had died in 1901, could not serve as a role model. In 1870, after her eye had fallen upon the report of a meeting in favour of Women’s Suffrage, she wrote a very angry letter: The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady – ought to get a GOOD WHIPPING. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position.2

In general, women in all countries and at all times were killed, raped, put into prison or suffered disadvantages for their seemingly simple demand of equality. So, in short: no laughing matter. Introducing humour or laughter into this debate could be understood as breaking a taboo because it is too close for comfort. And this is already the first point I would like to make: distance is a necessity in order to be able to laugh, and laughter, in turn, also distances the laughing subject from the object being laughed about. By breaking taboos, laughter is able to destroy the protective cover the taboo provides and is also able to create – a sometimes painful – distance to the object of the laughter. Michail Bakhtin, Anton C. Zijderveld, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Judith Butler, Peter L. Berger and many others have discussed laughter and the comic. However, their forms and functions have been defined in so broad a sociological, cultural, anthropological, and psychological framework that no handy initial definition will do for the means and aims of this paper, which in the following passages will therefore not differentiate between humour, laughter, sarcasm, parody, satire, irony, etc. I would instead direct readers to the introductory essays by Stefan Horlacher, Gaby Pailer, and Andreas Böhn in this volume. It has always been possible to laugh at feminists but hardly ever did laughter emanate from within the feminists’ circles. However, some writers have rejected the high level of seriousness to which gender issues seem to be happily married, among them Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who has been accused by feminists of internal sabotage and of making ‘the cause’ ridiculous. One example of Atwood’s double-edged humour can be found in her everything-but-funny novel The Handmaid’s Tale, with its “problematic heroine from a feminist ⬍http://www.worldwideschool.org⬎. Unless otherwise noted, emphases are according to the original. 2

317 standpoint” (Wagner-Lawlor 83), which is listed by the American Library Association among its “10 Most Challenged Books of 1999” due to a high volume of complaints from parents regarding – among other targets of criticism – the novel’s anti-religious content and sexual references (Wikipedia). One of the handmaids is called Offred. In her world, during the late twentieth century, all women are subjugated under the patriarchal government of Gilead. If they prove to be fertile, they are allocated to a Commander who then tries to father a child in a pseudo-biblical ceremony. In order to instil the new rules and regulations and also to mitigate the justified feelings of anger and frustration, the fertile women are subjected to an intricate brain-washing. They are shown movies from former times, so-called “unwoman documentaries” (128). In one, Offred sees her own mother: my young mother, younger than I remember her [. . .]. She’s wearing the kind of outfit Aunt Lydia told us was typical of unwomen in those days, overall jeans with a green and mauve plaid shirt underneath and sneakers on her feet . . . She’s in a group of other women, dressed in the same fashion, she’s holding a [. . .] banner [. . .] The camera pans up and we see the writing, in paint on what must have been a bedsheet: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT [. . .] Behind this sign are other signs, and the camera notices them briefly: FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY. RECAPTURE OUR BODIES. DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN’S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE? (Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 129f.).

Offred remembers how her mother used to call at her grown-up daughter’s house in order to tell her about the facts of life from a feminist perspective: “I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies. A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women” (130f.). Offred, now exploited and brain-washed by female collaborators, the so-called Aunts, “who ironically place a high value on ‘cameraderie among women’ ” (Bouson 141), can now only muster bleak sarcasm at her mother’s beautiful chimera of a feminist Garden of Eden:3 “Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a woman’s culture. Well, now there is one” (The Handmaid’s Tale 137). Irony and sarcasm are double-voiced discourses which are never called into question because they serve as mental means of staying alive in Gilead. However, there is also straight-forward, overt humour to be found in The Handmaid’s Tale, and it subverts and deconstructs itself. Many years later, at a conference on the Gilead regime, an eloquent history professor tries to be funny in his talk: Instead of tale he wants the participants to think of “the word tail; that being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats” (313). After the graphic description of the 3

Wagner-Lawlor points out the implicit irony directed at the “ineffectiveness of the feminist movement as represented by Offred’s mother” (90).

318 handmaids’ bodily exploitation and rape, few readers will find this humorous or witty, even though the conference minutes state “Laughter, applause” (ibid.). The reader by now has learned to read against the grain, between the lines, and to reject such patriarchal “master interpretations”. In a lecture, posted on her homepage, Atwood commented on the whole complex of problematic expectations concerning male and female perpetrators/ victims: But is it not, today – well, somehow unfeminist – to depict a woman behaving badly? Isn’t bad behaviour supposed to be the monopoly of men? Isn’t that what we are expected – in defiance of real life – to believe now? When bad women get into literature, what are they doing there, and are they permissible, and what, if anything, do we need them for? (Homepage).

The answer can be found in Atwood’s novels, and critical reactions frequently attack this very point, namely the phenomenon that women can be as bad as men: the aunts in The Handmaid’s Tale, Cordelia in Cat’s Eye, and Zenia in The Robber Bride. The Robber Bride deals with three modern women, Tony, Charis and Roz, who all represent different forms of female success. Tony is a professor of military history, Roz is a successful business woman, and Charis supports herself as a single mother by working in a shop selling new age-merchandise. They each represent head, heart, and soul and they all could stand as legitimate role models for careers in women’s liberation. They come from poor backgrounds, from patchwork and/or immigrant families, and have worked their way up. However, they are being made fun of. There is an early warning sign for the novel’s readers foreshadowing a detached attitude towards feminist issues. In the university women’s toilet cubicle, of all places, there is a highly symbolic “writing on the wall” (cf. The Holy Bible, Daniel 5, 1–31). Tony reads a graffiti: “Hersterectomy not hysterectomy: feminist deconstruction sucks” (The Robber Bride 25). Even though Tony, the rational and strong woman military history professor, refuses to do the ‘accepted’, i.e. ‘female’ research in “social History, such as who ate what when, or Life in the Feudal Family” (22), she possesses a large sand-table in which she stages historic battles, using kitchen spices: cloves for the Germanic tribes, red peppercorns for the Vikings, green peppercorn for the Saracens, white ones for the Slaves. The Celts are coriander seeds, the AngloSaxons are dill. Chocolate sprinkles, cardamom seeds, four kinds of lentils, and little silver balls indicate the Magyars, the Greeks, the North African kingdoms, and the Egyptians (111). To keep the lighter spices from rolling, she uses a touch of hairspray (112). Absentmindedly she picks up one of Otto’s fallen cloves [. . .] and pops it into her mouth. It’s a bad habit of hers, eating parts of the armies on her map (113).

319 She is not the only eccentric: Her new age-friend Charis who generally thinks that cabbage juice is a cure for cancer, always makes her bed neatly because she “respects” it (40), before she habitually goes on to check her quartz pendulum for the upcoming news of the day (44). Charis thus confirms the (now funny?) typical cliché of the 1970s, new age, spiritual “new woman”, just as Tony is nothing but the cliché of the female professor, joining hard fact research with a touch of haute cuisine and hairspray. The third woman, Roz, fits a cliché pattern, too. As a successful business woman she looks like the pet model for females having joined the ranks of big money, which used to be an all-male club in the past. But she, too, is a generous contributor to the humour potential of the story. For example, she has a bad conscience about her profits and thus keeps a donations list: “She still does Battered Women, she still does Rape Victims, she still does Homeless Moms, [. . .] she still does Abandoned Grannies” (92). When her historian friend Tony mentions Caesar and the Rubicon, she can only think in trivial business terms: Rubicon – “what a great lipstick name” (101). They are liberated, they support other women, and they are thus (!) a laughing stock. Clever and ‘serious’ female behaviour is defined by Zenia, their former friend who will later rob them of their husbands and whose alleged ‘feminism’ could stand up to most male chauvinist actions. She seduces the husbands, she weasels herself into the women’s lives, she takes advantage, lies, steals, blackmails, and possibly kills. Zenia fashions herself not only to what men want but also to what the women want to hear; she represents the part which is lacking in each of the three other women. For Zenia, only one creed exists that Roz is finally able to articulate near the end of the novel: ‘The Other Woman will soon be with us,’ the feminists used to say. But how long will it take, thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet? Meanwhile the Zenias of this world are abroad in the land, plying their trade, cleaning out male pockets, catering to male fantasies [. . .]. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. The Zenias of this world have studied the situation and turned it to their own advantage; they haven’t let themselves be moulded into male fantasies, they’ve done it themselves (392).

During Zenia’s time at university, there was a couplet coined in her honour in more than “half of the fraternities” on campus: “Trouble with your penia? – Try Zenia!” (177). But even that is not funny, the lines are remembered by Roz with as much awe as with disgust. The three victims are Zenia’s laughing stock but Zenia does not lend herself to be used as the narrative’s object of ridicule. Roz, Charis, and Tony all lose their husbands, their money, their self-respect and their reputation. They lose their trust and they live in fear, and yet, there is hardly any narrative sympathy on their side. Not only is the evil perpetrator a female, but also, in the victims’ case, narrative insult is added to Zenia’s

320 injuries.4 Heilman concludes that even the “last laugh (and look) are, as ever, hers” (178). Whereas Atwood’s novels do not exclusively focus on women but also include round (i.e. “capable of surprising”; Forster 81) male characters, plays like Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls offer an all-female cast. Some of the women depicted were famous in history and art: Geoffrey Chaucer’s character Patient Griselda, Pieter Bruegel’s Dull Gret; Joan, rumoured to have been the only female pope; Isabella Bird, a well-known Victorian traveller; and Lady Nijo, a fourteenth century Buddhist nun. What looks like a lesson in the proud history of female strength and women’s liberation turns out to be a look into an abyss. All women prove to be vain, self-pitying, and inadvertently laughable; they talk about their husbands, fathers, sons, lovers, bosses, friends, and enemies. It becomes clear what great significance each of these men had in a single woman’s development – and thus the absent men are very much present on stage because the women’s monologues frame their accomplishments in spite of or because of them, but always in relation to men. Other conversations centre around clothes and kitchen recipes, church and children. Thus, Top Girls can be read as a parody. Indeed, some stage productions have interpreted the play along the lines that even these prominent and accomplished women can be reduced to the commonplace (cf. Eichler), the trivial and to traditional denominators, and, similar to Atwood’s novels, they are laughing stock material. A detailed look at them supports this thesis: Isabella Bird, the famous nineteenth century Victorian traveller, tries to act the lady in the wilderness of Tibet and Morocco. Patient Griselda does not object to being sent home only in her underwear. Pope Joan compares her own cries of pain at giving birth to a cow lowing. When they meet on stage, they all get silly and drink too much, and finally the pope, blind drunk, gibbers inarticulate Church Latin before unceremoniously throwing up in a corner. Ultimately, they turn out to be more conservative in their values and attitudes than many men of their times, and thus throw a curious light on the idea of female role models. Especially Pope Joan is a good example. Strongly differing from her characterization in other works of literature, her depiction in Churchill’s Top Girls represents a clear break with a potentially ideal feminist achievement: namely a woman who was able to shame and outwit centuries of male hierarchy in one of the world’s most patriarchal systems, namely the Vatican. In order to illustrate the gap in the different depictions of the female pope, a passage from 4

Sometimes, even secondary literature seems to fall under Zenia’s spell: “She returns [. . .] to vanquish these lies that the women so tenaciously cling to. [. . .] Zenia’s return, then, may be viewed as beneficial, a final ‘lesson’ for the women to learn” (Aguiar 131).

321 Donna Woolfolk Cross’s bestselling novel Pope Joan will be contrasted with Caryl Churchill’s play. Cross writes: The doors swung open, and the seven proceres entered, proceeded by acolytes carrying the banners of their office. They were followed by the cardinal clergy and then the seven optimates of the city [. . .] In slow procession the delegation came down the aisle and halted before Joan. ‘John Angelicus’. Pascal, the primicerius, addressed her in formal tones. ‘By the will of God and of the Roman people, you have been elected Lord Pope of Rome, Bishop of the Roman See.’ Then he prostrated himself before her and kissed her feet [. . .] Replete with ancient and elaborate ritual, the ordo coronationis, or coronation ceremony, took several hours [. . .]. Throughout it all Joan stood solemn and erect, weighted down by the liturgical robes [. . .] stiff with gold. Despite the magnificence of her attire, she felt very small and inadequate to the enormous responsibility being laid upon her (355–358).

Joan’s first acts as pope are to visit the typhus- and cholera-ridden parts of Rome, to build a school for women, and to single-handedly save the life of her prelate Gerold, who rewards her by making love, and finally she undertakes something which looks like the first pregnancy test in medical history (385). In contrast, Churchill lets Joan develop a rather different self-image: “I taught at the Greek school in Rome, which St Augustine had made famous. I was poor, I worked hard. I spoke apparently brilliantly [. . .] suddenly I was quite famous” (12); “I never obeyed anyone. They all obeyed me” (21). She gets drunk with the others, and then says: “Something something something mortisque timores tum vacuum pectus – damn. Quod si ridicula – something something on and on and on and something splendorem purpureai. Nos in luce timemus something terrorem” (28). The above is followed by the laconic stage direction: “Joan gets up and is sick in a corner” (28f.). No beautiful vestments, no one face down on the floor in front of her and no one kissing her feet, just a woman who embarrasses herself by having had too many drinks and who by throwing up draws attention to her (in the Bakhtinian sense) grotesque body which she cannot control as she controlled most other things in her life. No admiration but disgust: The reduction of the female role model is tangible. The highest representative of one of the most influential organizations is reduced to and shown dependent on the reactions of her female body – a body which is treated by herself and by others with rejection, aversion, and negation. Similar conceptions of the female body, its unpredictability, needs and weaknesses, can be found in Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, a novel which has not only been credited as capturing the mood of “fin de millénaire independent women” (Hanson 16) but also, like Atwood’s and Churchill’s works, has been diagnosed as “problematic, particularly from a feminist point of view” or even as ‘anti-feminist’ (Marsh 52, 54; cf. Hanson 17). Here, the heroine is aware of the fact that she is a laughing stock, but she tries to make the most of it. The author explicitly allows her protagonist to make fun of herself;

322 Bridget’s self-ironic and self-disparaging comments show how a modern, educated, and independent woman still adheres to traditional role models in which a husband is the ultimate object to increase a woman’s worth and to complete her self-definition. The novel’s very first page already focuses on the 1990s marriage market do’s and dont’s for women: Don’t eat too much, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t be sluttish in the house (“imagine others are watching”, Fielding 2), don’t have crushes on men, “but instead form relationships based on mature assessment of character” (ibid.), and finally, the coup de grace of paradox, do not “[s]ulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend” (ibid.). As if she were living in Jane Austen’s time, society judges her by her success on the marriage market: one of the first questions Bridget is asked in nearly any social gathering is “How’s your love life?” (11) and, when admitting to not having a partner yet, the usual reply is something like: “You career girls! I don’t know! Can’t put it off forever, you know. Tick-tock-tick-tock!” (ibid.). After being finally offered the choice between two men, “Mr Right” (Mark Darcy) and “Mr Wrong” (Daniel Cleaver), “Mr Right” saves her on Christmas Day from “Mr Wrong” and from her terrible family. The ending is predictable: Then he took the champagne glass out of my hand, kissed me, and said: ‘Right, Bridget Jones, I’m going to give you pardon for’, picked me up in his arms, carried me off into the bedroom (which had a fourposter bed!) and did all manner of things which mean whenever I see a diamond patterned V-neck sweater in future, I am going to spontaneously combust with shame (307).

This happy ending of course only underlines a basically traditional plot which can also be found in women’s romances (cf. Batsleer; Bach). However, some features of the novel do not seem to fit that genre. Bridget Jones’s Diary is not at all shy or reluctant about sexuality, and feminism is not carefully hidden in the subtext, as would be expected from readers of classical women’s romances. Bridget is always aware of what she should do: She knows she should be independent, self-reliant, and strong. But, among other things, her feelings and ‘common opinion’ get in the way. Her family and friends keep strongly suggesting that she get married and have a baby; and the zeitgeist surrounding her – novels, newspaper, gossip, women’s magazines etc. – seems to indicate that without a partner a woman cannot be regarded as a whole person. As in Plato’s Symposium, men and women seem to be two halves of one sphere, once separated and now damned to look for the missing half eternally. With Bridget Jones it becomes clear that feminism and a liberated life do not come naturally once all other barriers are removed. They are cultural

323 constructions like gender (cf. Butler) which need to be willed and to be actively put into practice. For Bridget, it is not being a woman that counts but becoming a woman, echoing de Beauvoir’s (1972) theory with a twist: 6 p.m. Completely exhausted by entire day of date-preparation. Being a woman is worse than being a farmer – there is so much harvesting and crop-spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature [. . .] Ugh. Ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence? (Fielding 30).

Being thus a modern woman following pre-existent construction plans, there seems to be an additional super-ego demand in Bridget to be feminist - but her emotions all point the other way. She even secretly seems to enjoy the failures of her feminist agenda. Bridget stands in her own way, consciously or subconsciously: Working as a journalist, she misses the outcome of an important trial because she goes to buy sweets and cigarettes in a shop near the courthouse (241) and is only rescued from total embarrassment by mere chance. “The plot appears routinely to punish Bridget for attempts to manage her life, while rewarding her for being out of control”, assesses Case correctly (181). By intertextually alluding to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,5 Fielding manages to link the gender issue to the tradition of Gothic parody already present in the early nineteenth century. Austen’s heroine Catherine Morland “had a thin awkward figure, a shallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features [. . .] she could never learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid” (37). Her adventures in an old abbey have to be taken with a grain of salt, since, for example, a mysterious old manuscript, found in the dead of night in a locked cabinet, turns out to be a washing bill. In her room in the old abbey, Catherine finds a mysterious chest, but alas it is not a decomposing corpse the heroine chances upon. It is filled with bed sheets. Both in Austen’s and in Fielding’s novel a young woman is left alone to fend for herself in a hostile and/or alien world far away from home, left alone with society’s demands and a simple desire for happiness coupled with an active imagination, and it is she,

5

Marsh reads Austen’s Emma as pretext (cf. 63–65); and Hanson Pride and Prejudice (18).

324 rather than other characters who would rather have deserved this treatment, who becomes the laughing stock.6 In summation of the first part of this paper it can be said that in modern fiction, readers often are confronted with successful women who theoretically could represent feminist role models – the military history professor, the pope, the caring single mother. However, they are not made-to-order feminist heroines who are adorned with halo of righteousness and unassailability. Instead, they are ridiculed; their weaknesses and their adherence to typically ‘female’ clichés are emphasised, exaggerated and mercilessly exploited. Since sooner or later, most of them turn out to be victims, they should theoretically not only win the readers’ admiration but also their pity. Instead, they are rather laughing stock material than anything else. At this point, male authors would be accused of chauvinism. Female authors could in turn be attacked for high treason. But exactly this is one didactic target the works in question address, namely that the desire for equality excludes nurturing the idea that women authors and female characters alike are or ought to be better than men. The Lady Macbeths and the Zenias of this world function as touchstones and show how wrong and how essentialist, how chauvinist and how old-fashioned such an assumption is. Zenia and Lady Macbeth do not use men’s weapons, so to speak, and thus conveniently leave the blame at patriarchy’s doorstep by being eager pupils who simply copy or adopt male behaviour. They are despised because they reject male malevolence in favour of female malice, thus destroying the idea of an encompassing and unquestioned female victimhood. That leads to some abstract observations and questions about feminism and laughter which follow from the previous analyses. 1) Humour carries psychological relief functions. Henri Bergson stated that laughter is always joined by “Gefühllosigkeit” (Bergson 8), an “absence of feeling”. Sympathy, fear or pity prevent laughter (77). Maybe feminism is and has been such an emotional topic for so long that now, finally, the time has come in which many people need a break from this complex emotional debate and simply want to relax and laugh at something that they could only approach with high seriousness before. After the break, they can go back and continue the cause.

6 The two novels also show, as Gilbert and Gubar point out with reference to Northanger Abbey, “the emptiness of the patriarchal hierarchy, [. . .] the inadequacy of the family as the basic psychological and economic union of society” (137). And if Northanger Abbey is “not unfittingly pronounced North | Anger” (135), then Bridget Jones could as “Everywoman” Jones bridge the gap between 1990s women’s semi-liberated, average, everyday existence and the more radical demands traditionally attributed to (first-wave) feminism.

325 2) Laughter has corrective functions. People can only laugh if they have a norm in mind which is violated for a moment by the thing or situation they laugh about (cf. Bergson 15). Exaggeration or excess leads to similar results. By exaggerating or ridiculing aspects of feminism, it is only being tested: ‘Does this theory serve as a norm or is it in need of fine-tuning?’ ‘Does that feminist theory already bear violation?’ ‘Is it strong enough?’. 3) “The familiar is seen in a new light”, writes Berger in Redeeming Laughter (207). Feminism is familiar by now. Are there universities in the Western hemisphere left which do not offer courses on feminism? So maybe feminism is in need of a “new light” in order to develop. Also, the stasis of the familiar is something feminism originally was fighting against. The sociologist Anton C. Zijderveld pointed out that in jokes, “people play with meaning” (6). In our context, one could say: By playfully attributing new meanings, people simply try to find new forms for the ‘old’ concept of feminism. Only by constantly changing and adapting can feminism remain true to itself. 4) Laughter reduces complexity. Humour often resorts to clichés, types, and stereotypes. It then makes use of so-called “stillgelegte Wahrheiten”7 – disused or laid-up truths. As feminism is complex and many-layered, essentialist or simple black-and-white definitions do not hold anymore. Within this complexity, laughter introduces a gap, granting access to the basic layers, where the memory of familiarity is stored. 5) Feminism, as symbolized by Showalter’s image of the “wild zone” (347), and humour share the same methods, or, as Berger has put it, in “ordinary, everyday life then, the comic typically appears as an intrusion. It intrudes, very often unexpectedly, into other sectors of reality” (6) and “serves to revitalize and to de-mechanize the individual” (Horlacher, in this volume). If we assume for a moment that humour and feminism share similar mechanisms, then we can deduce that both open up similar possibilities – the access to “other sectors of reality”. Working together, they can even reinforce their potential and their power of revitalisation and demechanization. 6) Finally, in my opinion, it is a good sign that people make fun of feminism. This demonstrates that the theoretical approach – at least in the western hemisphere – is well known. It does not make sense to tell jokes if you have to explain them afterwards. Does feminism come full circle? After being the means of questioning the status quo, it is now the target of being questioned. In the past, it has taught women and men to disregard old-fashioned and restrictive social norms. Now, 7

The term is used by Pfister in a different context (2).

326 the new brand of feminists are genderists;8 young women like the daughter generation in Atwood’s The Robber Bride who have no respect for the achievements of their mothers because they do not know a different world. By having reached a distance from the aims, targets, and pet projects of their mothers they can satirize, ironize, or just giggle about the ideals their mothers held sacred. They are able to re-write old stories: “Change the ending, Mom! [. . .] I don’t like this part!” (The Robber Bride 293). The daughters in The Robber Bride also decide “that all the characters in every story had to be female. Winnie the Pooh was female, Piglet was female, Peter Rabbit was female” (293), thus rejecting the perpetrator-victim equation of the older male-female discourse. When it comes to reading the fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom by the Grimm brothers, they change it into “The Robber Bride” and want all roles to be taken by females. “‘In that case,’ says Tony, ‘who do you want her to murder? Men victims, or women victims? Or maybe an assortment?’ The twins remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women, in every single role” (294). But it is not legitimate to claim that the need for feminism(s) and for feminists is a thing of the past because writers like Atwood show its continued necessity straight into the twenty-second century. In The Handmaid’s Tale’s “Historical Notes” from the year 2195, chauvinist puns and stereotypical jokes abound in the lecture by a Cambridge history professor: instead of the “Underground Femaleroad” he tags it the “Underground Frailroad” (313) and interrupts his talk with an inappropriate quotation from a colleague that “foreplay is what you do on a golf course” (319), and the like. One can laugh with or one can laugh about feminism. The first strengthens it. The second strengthens it, too, since laughing about it keeps it within the discourse, supporting its relevance.

Works Consulted Aguiar, Sarah Appleton: The Bitch is Back. Wicked Women in Literature. Carbondale – Edwardsville: Illinios University Press 2001. Atwood, Margaret: Cat’s Eye. London: Virago Press 1988. —. Homepage. 24 July 2006. ⬍http://www.owtoad.com⬎ —. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Virago Press 1985. —. The Robber Bride. London: Virago Press 1993. Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey. 1818. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982.

8

In recent years, studies of masculinity/masculinities have been able to enrich feminist studies and the gender debate, cf. Horlacher’s comprehensive introductory chapters (Masculinities 13–126).

327 Bach, Susanne: Shrink – oder: Die Umkehrung der geschlechtsdeterminierten Rezeptionssteuerung im Trivialroman. In: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 20.1 (1995). Pp. 147–170. Bachtin, Michail M.: Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolksy. (Trans. of
Tvorcestvo fransua Rable 1965). Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press 1968. Batsleer, Janet: Pulp in the Pink. In: The Study of Popular Fiction. Ed. by Bob Ashley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1989. Pp. 206–212. Beauvoir, Simone de: The Second Sex. 1949. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972. Berger, Peter L.: Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. Berlin – New York: de Gruyter 1997. Bergson, Henri: Das Lachen. Trans. by Julius Frankenberger and Walter Frenzel. (Trans. of Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris. Alcan 1900). Meisenheim am Glan: Westkulturverlag 1948. Bouson, J. Brooks: Brutal Choreographies. Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press 1993. Brown, Janet: Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” Catches the Next Wave. In: Caryl Churchill. A Casebook. Ed. by Phyllis R. Randall. New York: Garland 1988. Pp. 117–130. Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble. 1990. London: Routledge 2006. Case, Alison: Authenticity, Convention, and “Bridget Jones’s Diary”. In: Narrative 9 (2001). Pp. 176–181. Churchill, Caryl: Top Girls. London: Methuen 1982. Cohn, Ruby: Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991. Cross, Donna Woolfolk: Pope Joan. New York – Toronto: Ballantine 1996. Eichler, Rolf: Caryl Churchills Theater. Das Unbehagen an der Geschlechterdifferenz. In: Frauen und Frauendarstellung in der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur. Ed. by Therese Fischer-Seidel. Tübingen: Narr 1991. Pp. 199–216. Eldredge, Patricia Reid: Marlene, Maggie Thatcher, and the Emperor of Morocco. The Psychic Structure of Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls”. In: Psychoanalyses/ Feminisms. Ed. by Peter L. Rudnytsky and Andrew M. Gordon. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press 2000. Pp. 71–84. Emily Davison. 24 July 2006. ⬍http://www.bbc.co.uk⬎ and ⬍http://www.spartacus. schoolnet.co.uk⬎. Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador 1996. Forster, E.M.: Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982. Freud, Sigmund: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. London: Routledge 1966. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven – London: Yale University Press 1979. Hanson, Clare: Fiction, Feminism and Femininity from the Eighties to the Naughties. In: Contemporary Women Writers. Essays and Studies. Ed. by Emma Parker. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2004. Pp. 16–27.

328 Heilman, Ann: The Devil Herself? Fantasy, Female Identity and the Villainess Fatale in “The Robber Bride”. In: The Devil Himself. Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. Ed. by Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport: Greenwood Press 2002. Pp. 171–182. Horlacher, Stefan: Masculinities. Konzeption von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Narr 2006. Kramer, Stephanie: Fiktionale Biographien. (Re-)Visionen und (Re-)Konstruktionen weiblicher Lebensentwürfe in Dramen britischer Autorinnen seit 1970. Trier: WVT 2000. Kritzer, Amelia Howe: The Plays of Caryl Churchill. Theatre of Empowerment. Basingstoke: Macmillan 1991. Marlow, Stuart: Revisiting “Top Girls”. Mainstreaming the Alternative. In: Contemporary Drama in English. Beyond the Mainstream. Ed. by Peter Paul Schnierer. Trier: WVT 1997. Pp. 69–76. Marsh, Kelly A.: Contextualizing Bridget Jones. In: College Literature 31.1 (2004). Pp. 52–72. Marohl, Joseph: De-Realised Women. Performance and Identity in “Top Girls”. In: Modern Drama 30 (1987). Pp. 376–388. Merrill, Lisa: Monsters and Heroines. Caryl Churchill’s Women. In: Modern Dramatists. A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. Ed. Kimball King. New York – London: Routledge 2001. Pp. 61–72. Pfister, Manfred: Konzepte der Intertexualität. In: Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Ed. by Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1985. Pp. 1–30. Plato: Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980. Queen Victoria. 27 July 2006. ⬍http://www.worldwideschool.org ⬎. Quigely, Austin E.: Stereotype and Prototype. Character in the Plays of Caryl Churchill. In: Feminine Focus. The New Women Playwrights. Ed. by Enoch Brater. New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989. Pp. 25–52. Randall, Phyllis R. (Ed.): Caryl Churchill. A Casebook. New York: Garland 1988. Rubik, Margarete: The Silencing of Women in Feminist British Drama. In: Semantics of Silences in Linguistics and Literature. Ed. by Gudrun M. Grabher and Ulrike Jessner. Heidelberg: Winter 1996. Pp. 177–190. Showalter, Elaine: Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981). In: Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader. Ed. by David Lodge. London – New York: Longman 1988. Pp. 331–353. The Handmaid’s Tale. 30 July 2006. ⬍http://en.wikipedia.org⬎. The Holy Bible. King James Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002. Thompson, Lee Briscoe: Scarlet Letters. Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Toronto: ECW Press 1997. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A.: From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”. In: Critique 45.1 (2003). Pp. 83–96. Zijderveld, Anton C.: The Sociology of Humour and Laughter. London: Sage 1983.

Stefan Börnchen

Aletheia as Striptease: Gendered Allegories of Truth in Heidegger, Gorgias, and Barthes In this paper I will interpret Martin Heidegger’s concept of aletheia, designating ‘truth’ in ancient Greek, both in the light of the pre-socratic Gorgias of Leontinoi’s Encomium of Helen as well as Roland Barthes’s 20th century striptease theory. By outlining a rudimentary ‘theory of wilful reading’, I argue that it is both possible and legitimate to elicit comic readings even from stern texts by supplementing them with suitable contexts and thus rendering them comic.

At times, serious, statesman-like German philosophers are hilarious. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, for instance, writes in his preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Elements of the Philosophy of Right) on the philosopher’s business, “Wenn man nun betrachtet, wie solches Geschäft wirklich betrieben zu werden pflegt, so sieht man [. . .] denselben alten Kohl immer wieder aufkochen und nach allen Seiten hin ausgeben” (21) (“When one considers how this business tends to be carried out, one sees [. . .] the same old cabbage being boiled again and again and handed out in all directions”).1 Even his Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), predominantly written in a sublime style, abounds with jovial metaphors. Once in a while, Immanuel Kant becomes witty, too. His Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) supplies a couple of linguistically wilful punch lines. Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, offers plenty of corny puns; it is no exaggeration to say that they form one of the main pillars supporting his philosophical œuvre. There seems to be only one exception to this tradition of German philosophers inclining towards the comic: Martin Heidegger. Not only in private does he seem to be totally bereft of humour, as, for example, his correspondence with Hannah Arendt illustrates (cf. Arendt and Heidegger). His philosophical writings also lack any comic elements whatsoever. They are pervaded by an apparently pretentious, as it were, chthonic gravity. Furthermore, this earnestness is accompanied by an unrivalled propositional obscurity. In his lecture Was heißt Denken? (What Calls for Thinking?), Heidegger writes, “Everything thoughtprovoking gives us to think. But it always gives that gift just so far as the thoughtprovoking matter already is intrinsically what must be thought about. [. . .] What is most thought-provoking? [. . .] Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking” (370). It is precisely this philosophical murmuring which upsets 1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original.

330 Jürgen Habermas. In his lectures Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), he claims, “[d]ie Rhetorik des späten Heidegger entschädigt für die propositionalen Gehalte, die der Text selbst verweigert: sie stimmt die Adressaten in den Umgang mit pseudo-sakralen Mächten ein” (168) (“[t]he rhetoric of the later Heidegger compensates for the propositional content that the text itself refuses: It attunes and trains its addressees in their dealings with pseudo-sacral powers”) (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 140). What Habermas disqualifies as merely rhetorical “pseudosacral powers”, Heidegger himself calls “the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself ” (Heidegger, Being and Time 262). It is wellknown that Heidegger’s inclination towards an allegedly powerful and original, soil-bound language and thought discredited him, both politically and intellectually. However, opinions diverge on this matter. With regard to “the general question of the relation between Heidegger’s thought and his Nazism”, Richard Rorty claims, “that there is [not] much to be said except that one of the century’s most original thinkers happened to be a pretty nasty character” (111). Henri Meschonnic, author of Le langage Heidegger – probably the most important book on Heidegger’s language and rhetoric –, states: Il me semble que ce renouvellement [un renouvellement dans l’approche de bien des questions philosophiques importantes, particulièrement en herméneutique] est une fable. [. . .] Or il s’agit de mettre en évidence que seule l’ignorance de la théorie du langage a pu prendre l’herméneutique de Heidegger pour un renouvellement et une démarche originale (17f.). It seems to me that Heidegger’s renewal within the approach of many important philosophical questions, particularly in hermeneutics, is a myth. [. . .] It is important to show that only ignorance of the theory of language could lead to the idea of Heidegger’s hermeneutics being a renewal and an original operation.

In his book Mithridates im Paradies (Mithridates in Paradise), Jürgen Trabant calls “Heideggers volksetymologisch willkürliches Gleiten von Wort zu Wort [. . .] eine Art philosophisches Sprach-Surfen” (318) (“Heidegger’s pseudoetymological random sliding from word to word a kind of philosophical language-surfing”). Luckily, the question of Heidegger’s value as a philosopher can be left open here. The issue of his relation towards the comic, however, must be clarified. In the following passage I will outline, or rather sketch out, a ‘very brief theory of the comic’.2 Still today, the assessment of the political role of Heidegger’s thought is controversial. In his study Heidegger. L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie,

2

For classical theoretical references in the German speaking tradition cf. Allemann, Preisendanz, Japp, and Schnell.

331 Emmanuel Faye states: “Loin d’enrichir la philosophie, il [Heidegger] a œuvré à sa destruction en la mettant au service d’un mouvement qui [. . .] constitue la négation radicale de toute humanité comme de toute pensée” (10) (“Far from enriching philosophy, Heidegger has worked for its destruction by subjecting it to a movement which [. . .] constitutes the radical negation of humanity”). Yet, it is often the very critics who reproach Heidegger for being entangled in Nazi thought who make puns on Heidegger’s surname, maliciously misspelling it as ‘Heideguerre’ or ‘Heildegger’. Technically speaking, such critics draw on the rhetorical figure of paronomasia.3 They play with the name Heidegger, partly changing the body of the word and thus, while preserving the assonance, create a new word that suggests a meaningful relation between Heidegger’s name and the French word ‘guerre’ (war) or the German word ‘Heil’, which was used when saluting Hitler. Although – in contrast to metaphor – paronomasia does not function with a semantic overlap but with a linguistic, material similarity between the bodies of two different words, its comic effect as a pun resembles the cognitive gain usually ascribed to metaphor. In Chapter 22 of his Poetics Aristotle writes, “Es ist [. . .] bei weitem das Wichtigste, daß man Metaphern zu finden weiß. [. . .] Denn gute Metaphern zu bilden bedeutet, daß man Ähnlichkeiten zu erkennen vermag” (Aristoteles, Poetik 75 and 77) (“By far it is the most important thing to know how to find metaphors. [. . .] For creating good metaphors means being able to recognize similarities”). Both rhetorical figures, metaphor and paronomasia, create punch lines: while they preserve the original or proper meaning of the verbum proprium, they also introduce an additional or supplementary aspect, thus achieving a ‘condensation’ comparable to the meaningful slips of the tongue described by Sigmund Freud in his Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Whether we should consider this kind of punch line or condensation to be a Freudian slip or rather a cognitive flashlight reminiscent of Nietzschean aphorisms is just a question of which perspective we take. In any case, paronomasia as well as metaphor allow us to preserve the trace of a proper meaning while deferring and supplementing it with new aspects or additional connotations. This is why both paronomasia and metaphor play a vital role in deconstructivist strategies, such as in supplementary or paleonymic writing (cf. Culler 102–110, 140–142), as Jacques Derrida has shown repeatedly since publishing his Dissémination. However, we need not invoke the deconstructivist concept of the ‘supplement’ to explain how the context entailed by any interpretation as its own prerequisite affects this very

3

“Die ‘Paronomasie’ [. . .] ist ein die Wortbedeutung betreffendes Wortspiel [. . .], das durch die Änderung eines Teiles des Wortkörpers entsteht, wobei häufig einer nur geringfügigen Änderung des Wortkörpers eine überraschende [. . .] Änderung der Wortbedeutung entspricht” (Lausberg 90; §§ 277–279). For the “deconstructive logics” of the paronomasia cf. Groddeck (139–147).

332 interpretation (Culler 123–125). Harald Weinrich explains in his theory of metaphor the concept of context determination in pre-deconstructivist terms: Eine Metapher, und das ist im Grunde die einzig mögliche Metapherndefinition, ist ein Wort in einem Kontext, durch den es so determiniert wird, daß es etwas anderes meint, als es bedeutet. Vom Kontext hängt wesentlich ab, ob eine Metapher sich selber deutet oder rätselhaft bleibt. Eine starke Kontextdetermination zwingt auch das fremdeste Wort in den gemeinten Sinnzusammenhang (Semantik 340).4 A metaphor, and this in principle is the only possible definition of metaphor, is a word in a context through which it is determined to mean something different than it denotes. It essentially depends on the context whether a metaphor interprets itself or remains enigmatic. A strong context determination forces even the strangest word into the intended frame of meaning.

The context Weinrich refers to is primarily an intratextual context. In order to determine it precisely, however, we ultimately have to refer to “Parallelstellen” (“parallel references”) in other texts of the same author’s œuvre (cf. Szondi 248–251). Moreover, to clarify any general meaning of any expression, we have to draw on intertextual references, that is, intertextual contexts, such as, for example, those provided by dictionaries. These intertextual contexts or references are indispensable as a general foil underlying any specific meaning, i.e., a meaning deviating from that general foil. It goes without saying that any context, whether intratextual or intertextual, has to be procured or supplemented not randomly but in accordance with reasonable criteria. In reality every reader becomes in some way involved in the interpretation by providing an individual context or horizon of understanding and by invoking pre-existent knowledge as well as personal expectations (for the ‘horizon’ as a metaphor for one’s own intellectual context cf. Gadamer 305–312). Yet it seems almost impossible to identify reasonable criteria for a legitimate, if not necessary, context on which to base an interpretation. The same holds for its contextual limitations. Reading and interpreting means rewriting someone else’s text as one’s own, i.e., re-contextualizing it within one’s own horizon. “Der wahre Leser muß der erweiterte Autor seyn” (“The true reader must be the extended author”), the early romanticist Novalis writes as early as in the late 1790s (Novalis, Schriften 470), and goes on to state even more radically: “Der Leser [. . .] macht eigentlich aus einem Buche, was er will. [. . .]/ Ist nicht jeder Leser ein Philolog?” (609) (“The reader does what he wants with a book. [. . .]/ Is not every reader a philologist?”). The early German romanticists, nonetheless, have been reproached for exaggerating the programmatic emancipation of the reader by refusing to provide any criteria for the wilfully strong readings they themselves called 4

Cf. Weinrich, Metapher.

333 ‘romanticizing’ (Novalis, Werke 334).5 Therefore, the question arises: are there any reliable criteria to determine which contexts are suitable for an interpretation and which are not? This question, I am afraid, will remain open here. It may be a question of taste. There may even be no general answer to this question, thus making it necessary to decide individually. Novalis, however, gives a hint: any responsible reading requires a philological conscience and philological skills. A good reading may be a strong or even strong-willed reading. Above all, it must meet philological standards and must be a productive reading. At least this provides one criterion: a context supplement is legitimate when it elicits a productive reading and offers new perspectives, for example comic, humorous, or ironic perspectives. The early German romanticists often associated their practice of productive reading with humour or irony (cf. Frank, Allegorie; Philosophische Grundlagen), which may not be discernible at first glance and may require a particular perspective to be seen at all. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, claims for his concept of ‘twofold irony’, that “zwei Linien von Ironie parallel nebeneinander laufen ohne sich zu stören, eine fürs Parterre die andre für die Logen, wobey noch kleine Funken in die Coulissen fahren können” (369) (“two lines of irony run parallel without disturbing one another, one for the rear stalls, one for the boxes, while little sparks can also flash into the scenery”). The line of irony or humour one detects depends, in other words, on the chosen perspective or intertextually supplemented context. In this regard, Friedrich Schlegel argues along the same lines as one of the greatest masters of humour of all times, Laurence Sterne. “Every thing in this world”, Tristram Shandy’s father Walter says, “is big with jest, – and has wit in it, and instruction too, – if we can but find it out” (Sterne 314). To find it out, I argue, one just needs to add a suitable context. Strong readings which attempt to highlight the comic aspects of a text that have allegedly been overlooked previously always run the risk of what can be entitled ‘hermeneutic infelicities’. They are what antique rhetoric refers to as kakémphaton, the cacophonic. In his Institutio oratoria (Institutes of Oratory), Quintilian states that an embarrassing peripheral meaning can be found practically everywhere: “[Es gibt] überhaupt nichts, was man unbedenklich sagen könnte” (169; cf. Groddeck 105) (“[There is] nothing one could say safely”). Quintilian adds that – always – recognizing the embarrassing undercurrents of a statement is a “Verfehlung, die ich freilich nicht den Verfassern zur Last lege, sondern den Lesern” (ibid.) (“a misdemeanour for which I do not reproach the author but rather the reader”). It is precisely this insight which the narrator Tristram Shandy uses for his never-ending lewd jokes on “noses”, “crevice[s]” and the “[r]ight end of a woman” (Sterne 82f.). Tristram even sketches out 5 “Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnisvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe, romantisiere ich es” (Novalis, Werke 334).

334 what one could possibly call ‘a brief heuristic of the cacophonic’. When Eugenius pins down a possible rhetorical kakémphaton and asks, “Here are two senses [. . .], – a dirty and a clean one, – which shall we take?”, Tristram decides to pursue and exploit the obscene sense. In a way this is a heuristic decision, declaring a “dirty sense” or a “jest”, in Tristram’s words, to be “the scaffold work of INSTRUCTION” (314) and thus not only complying with Horaz’s formula “aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae” (24) but also offering both instruction and amusement. This very briefly outlined ‘theory of the comic’ can be thus concluded: The comic potential of a single expression – whether paronomasia or metaphor – or of a whole text must be developed deliberately, perhaps even produced, by supplementing it with a suitable context. This requires a heuristic decision to read something as comic which, at first glance, may not appear to be amusing. Thus, the comic is rather a reading effect than an inherent quality of a text. The text, however, must offer a comic potential. Admittedly, rendering a text comic by reading it against the grain may be considered a ‘misdemeanour’. Yet as long as it is instructive, we can maintain this heuristic attitude. Even in stern Heidegger, there is a Shandean potential. Now how do we exploit this comic potential methodologically? How does this context supplement mentioned above work? Is it not just another attempt at what one already knows as deconstructivist readings? My suggestion is to conceive the following reading not as deconstructivist but as hermeneutic. Its interpretative method can be termed a topological or metaphorological commentary. As such, it combines hermeneutic and deconstructivist aspects. With this approach I am following Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s recent proposal to de-hermeticize and, at the same time, re-hermeneuticize deconstructivist reading practices. This is what Gumbrecht is aiming at when he describes deconstruction in his book The Powers of Philology as the genuinely philological practice of commenting or filling up a text’s margins with glosses.6 My suggestion supports Gumbrecht and also draws on Ernst Robert Curtius’s as well as Hans Blumenberg’s topological and metaphorological writings. For good reason Blumenberg’s ‘metaphorology’ is one of the remedies offered by Jochen Hörisch in his recently published Theorie-Apotheke (187–193) (Theoretical Pharmacy): as a methodological cure, metaphorology is hermeneutically effective and has few side effects. In his book Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Curtius presents his concept of the “historische[] Topik” (“historical topic”) or “ historische Metaphorik” (“historical metaphorology”) (92 and 6

“Dekonstruktion als philosophische Verkörperung des textuellen Prinzips des Kommentars”, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes, is indebted to the “Fortführung der Tradition des ‘fortlaufenden Kommentars’ ” (Gumbrecht, Macht der Philologie 85 and 82).

335 138). Similar to Blumenberg in his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Curtius understands the “Topik” as the “Vorratsmagazin” “der Rhetorik” (89) (“the topic” as the “stock room” of the “antique instructional building of rhetoric”). Its individual elements, the topoi, are (comparable to what Blumenberg calls “myths”) semantic units with a “hochgradige[] Beständigkeit” (“high stability”) regarding their “narrativen Kern[]“ and “ebenso ausgeprägte[] marginale[] Variationsfähigkeit” (“narrative core and [with] an equally distinct peripheral variability”). These two features give the topoi their durability within tradition: the topoi’s “Beständigkeit ergibt den Reiz, sie [. . .] wiederzuerkennen, ihre Veränderbarkeit den Reiz der Erprobung neuer und eigener Mittel der Darbietung” (the topoi’s “stability works as a stimulus to recognize them, their mutability serves as the stimulus to repeatedly try out new adaptations”), Blumenberg writes (Arbeit 40). In other words, topoi are the relatively stable, recognizable elements linking different contexts over time, even over historical epochs. Topoi are the central threads and therefore these have to be followed in order to find a productive context supplement. The historical topic, thus, provides a pool of criteria for contextual relations. Topoi are intertextual joints, turning intertexts into contexts. This is why, topologically, Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia can be related to Roland Barthes’s and Jean Baudrillard’s striptease theories of the 1960s – which will be demonstrated in the following passage. These theories all share the same topological roots and can be read as adaptations of Gorgias of Leontinoi’s Encomium of Helen.7 Martin Heidegger writes in his lecture The basic problems of phenomenology: Plato says explicitly that the function of logos, of assertion, is deloun, making plain, or, as Aristotle says more exactly with regard to the Greek expression of truth: aletheuein. Lanthanein means to be concealed; a- is the privative, so that a-letheuein is equivalent to: to pluck something out of its concealment, to make manifest or reveal. For the Greeks truth means: to take out of concealment, uncovering, unveiling. To be sure the Greeks’ interpretation of this phenomenon was not successful in every respect. Therefore the essential initial approaches made by this understanding of truth could not be followed through favorably but [. . .] fell victim to misunderstanding, so that today in the tradition the original sense of the Greek understanding of truth is completely hidden. [. . .] Being-true means unveiling (Heidegger, The Basic Problems 215f.).8

What does Heidegger do here? Does this passage prove what Henri Meschonnic writes, “ ‘one notes that Heidegger, from Being and Time on, practices systematically the method of etymological analysis instead of conceptual analysis. [. . .]’ In Heidegger’s language, etymology is the innumerable verification of the etymology of the word etymology, etumos logos, true discourse, 7

I have developed the following argument within the context of my interpretation of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. Cf. Börnchen 270–284. 8 Cf. the parallel reference: Heidegger, Being and Time 262.

336 the truth of the discourse” (297f.)? Heidegger himself both anticipated and rejected this suspicion (cf. Ende 75f.). Nevertheless, he does ascribe etymological connotations to the meaning of a word. These etymological connotations are obviously well known. They are familiar to us as the stereotypical metaphor of the ‘naked truth’. In his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Hans Blumenberg comments on this metaphor: Gewiß wird man zustimmen müssen, die Rede von der ‘nackten Wahrheit’ sei eine Tautologie, weil doch Wahrheit immer das Entblößtsein einer Sache uns gegenüber ist [. . .]. Aber diese Metapher will eben gar nichts in den Wahrheitsbegriff einbringen; sie projiziert Vermutungen und Wertungen sehr diffiziler Art über den Begriff hinweg. Die Metapher hängt ja aufs engste zusammen mit der Deutung und Bedeutung der Kleidung als Bekleidung oder Verkleidung, denen je entsprechende Nacktheit sich ebenfalls differenziert als Durchschautsein einer Täuschung, einer Maskierung, einer schamverletzenden Enthüllung, Bruch eines Mysteriums (61). Certainly one will have to agree that speaking of the ‘naked truth’ is a tautology since truth is always the exposure of something in front of us. This metaphor, however, does not want to introduce something into the concept of truth; rather it projects highly difficult suppositions and evaluations beyond the concept. The metaphor is closely related to the interpretation and meaning of clothing as clothes or vestment whose nudity is differenciated as the unmasking of a fraud, a shaming unveiling, the breaking of a mystery.

This clichéd semantic, or rather topical allegorical potential is exploited by Heidegger for his ‘concept’ of aletheia. Whereas according to Blumenberg the metaphor of the ‘naked truth’ does not want to “introduce something into the concept of truth”, Heidegger claims the exact opposite. Repeatedly Heidegger refers to pre-socratic philosophers, commonly to Heraklites whose “primitive” thinking serves as an example of his own writing – for this reason Trabant calls Heidegger’s thinking not only “wild” but also, in inverted commas, “primitive” (26). Naturally, Heidegger also knew Georgias of Leontinoi, another presocratic philosopher who is usually classified as a sophist (cf. Pleger 155–167). His longest remaining fragment, the Encomium of Helen, is one of the most important texts for today’s understanding of rhetoric. This is the reason for Wolfram Groddeck, placing it at the very beginning of his book Reden über Rhetorik, closely following Thomas Buchheim’s commentary of the Meiner edition of Gorgias’s text. I will briefly present their argument before I return to Heidegger. Groddeck writes: Der Inhalt der Rede scheint zunächst ganz einfach: Gorgias möchte die schöne Helena, welche von den Geschichtsschreibern und Dichtern für das Desaster des Trojanischen Kriegs verantwortlich gemacht wurde, aus der Verantwortung herausreden. Der Lobpreis der Helena ist also strenggenommen gar keine Lobrede, sondern eine Verteidigungsrede (26).

337 The content of the speech seems, at first glance, very simple. Gorgias wants to refute the claim made by historiographers as well as poets that the beautiful Helen is responsible for the disaster of the Trojans. Thus, strictly speaking, the Encomium of Helen is an apologia rather than an encomium.

Gorgias’s text Encomium of Helen begins with the following sentence: “Zier – das ist für eine Stadt die gute Mannschaft, für einen Körper Schönheit, für die Seele Weisheit, für ein Ding Tauglichkeit und für die Rede Wahrheit; das Gegenteil davon aber ist Unzier” (2f.) (“Adornment – this is for a city a good team, for a body beauty, for the soul wisdom, for a thing suitability and for a speech truth; its opposite, however, is un-adornment”). Groddeck remarks: Die [. . .] Übersetzung kann die sprachliche Kraft des Originals nicht wiedergeben. [. . .] Bemerkenswert bei der Aufzählung von “Stadt”, “Körper”, “Seele”, “Ding” und “Rede” erscheint mir, daß auch die “Rede” selbst in die Aufzählung einbezogen ist und als letztes Glied der Aufzählung zum Inbegriff aller guten Dinge wird, als “Wahrheit”. Das griechische Wort aletheia kann man auch als “Unverborgenheit” oder als “Unverdecktheit” übersetzen oder vielleicht gar als “Entdeckung”. Die Wahrheit der Rede ist mit der “Zier” aller wohlgeratenen Dinge, mit dem kosmos, identisch (27, emphases originally Greek). The [. . .] translation cannot reproduce the linguistic force of the original. [. . .] What appears remarkable to me is that the enumeration of “city”, “body”, “soul”, “thing” and “speech” integrates the “speech” itself in the enumeration, thus making it, as the last element, the epitome of all good things: “truth”. The Greek word aletheia can also be translated as “un-seclusion” or as “unveiledness” or maybe even as “de-veiling”. The truth of the speech is identical with the “adornment”, the kosmos, of all fine things.

In the fourth of the twenty-one paragraphs of the speech we read the following on Helen: “Von solcher Abstammung hatte sie die gottgleiche Schönheit, welche sie annahm und unverdeckt trug: in sehr vielen weckte sie sehr heftiges Verlangen nach Eros, und durch ihren Körper versammelte sie zahlreich die Körper von Männern” (4f.) (“From this descendence she got her divine beauty which she accepted and bore unveiled: in many people she aroused a violent longing for Eros, and with her body she numerously collected the bodies of men”). Groddeck writes: Gehen wir dies Wort für Wort durch. Was ist von des Gorgias Lob zu halten, daß Helena ihre gottgleiche Schönheit “unverdeckt” trug? Im Griechischen heißt das: ou lathousa. Und dieser Ausdruck ist aus demselben Wort lantano gebildet, von dem auch das Wort aletheia abgeleitet ist. Wir erinnern uns an den ersten Satz der Rede: der kosmos der Rede ist die “Wahrheit”, die “Unverdecktheit”. Insofern entspricht die “unverdeckte Schönheit” der Helena der “Wahrheit” der Rede über sie [. . .]. Ja mehr noch: die Schönheit, welche Helena “unverdeckt trug”, ist die Wahrheit der Rede über sie (28, emphases originally Greek). Let us go through this word by word. What should we think of Gorgias’ praise that Helen bore her divine beauty “unveiled”? In Greek, this is ou lathousa. And this

338 expression goes back to the same word lanthano from which the word aletheia is also derived. We recall the first sentence of the speech: the kosmos of the speech is the “truth”, the “unveiledness”. Insofar Helen’s “unveiled beauty” corresponds to the “truth” of the speech about her. Even more: The beauty Helen bears “unveiled” is the truth of the speech about her.

Here, in this “founding text of rhetorics” (27), we already find the identification of ‘truth’ and ‘unveiledness’ which Blumenberg calls tautology and which Heidegger wants to exploit philosophically. Gorgias’s and Heidegger’s metaphorical association of truth and the naked human body resembles a semiological locus classicus in Plato’s Kratylos (156f.; 400c), in which he suggestively exploits the assonance of soma (body, corpse) and sema (sign, tomb). Abstract concepts, such as ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’, are allegorically represented by using images of the human body: the human body metaphorically serves as a signifier, that is, the material side of a sign referring to its signified, ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’. The crucial point in the frame of reference of this essay is the gender connotations lying at the core of these images of symbolic bodies: as the corporeal appearance of something ideal, the allegorical human body is in principle a female body. Topologically, the idea of ‘naked truth’ implies the image of a naked female body. Accordingly, permeating to any truth – permeating and tearing apart the signifier that conceals and veils the signified – is traditionally imagined as penetrating a woman’s veil or, using the veil as an anatomical metaphor, penetrating a hymen. Thus, the concept of ‘cognition’, understood as the act of grasping the truth, implies a physical, or rather explicitly sexual (possibly also violent) dimension. In the German speaking tradition, this connotation has been made explicit in Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, deliberately exploiting both the physical and spiritual associations of the word ‘erkennen’. The Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) explains the entry “ERKENNEN” as follows: “sinnliche und geistige vorstellungen flieszen hier vielfach ineinander” (“physical and spiritual notions blend into one another in manifold ways”). In addition, Grimms’ dictionary provides plenty of examples for the expression of ‘cognoscere feminam’ and ‘ein Weib erkennen’ (866), proving the “uralte[r] zusammenhang des worts mit zeugen und gebären” (“the ancient interrelation of the concept of cognition with begetting and giving birth”). Incidentally, there is even the possibility that the German word ‘erkennen’ as well as ‘Kind’ and the English ‘cunt’ are cognates (ibid.). From this point of view, Gorgias’s story of the ‘rape’ of Helen – a rape in every sense of the word – epitomizes a complex conceptual, or rather allegorical system of references. He makes this partly explicit by playing with the semantic field of aletheia. Heidegger does the same in his peculiar etymologizing manner. He does not even make a secret of the association between unveiling and violence. In Being and Time he links his concept of unveiling with penetration and rape, as if alluding to the rape of Helen: “Truth (uncoveredness) is

339 something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression – a-letheia?” (265). This is an almost incredible rhetorical question: using a technical grammatical term, ‘privative’, and at the same time alluding to the semantic field of the Latin verb it is derived from, namely ‘privo’ (‘to rape’), Heidegger suggests that the concept of aletheia has an intrinsically meaningful relation to the idea of rape. “Any interpretation”, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, is characterised by “violence”: “Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit] [. . .]. While indeed this characteristic is especially distinctive of the ontology of Dasein, it belongs properly to any interpretation” (359). Even Jacques Derrida, an author of the highest consciousness with regard to the use of metaphors, writes in his De la grammatologie (Grammatology) about “[une] violence nécessaire [qui] dénude la surface du texte” (31) – “a necessary violence which lays bare the surface of the text” – and thus suggests the need for violence in order to hermeneutically unveil or even penetrate a text and its meaning. Obviously, the topology Heidegger refers to is as old as it is pervasive. Also, it can be considered as misogynous. For within this topological field, there seems to be only one alternative for women to being raped, and this alternative is considered even less honourable by men: prostitution. In fact, even Gorgias’s Helen is suspected of prostitution or, at least, sexual provocation. As quoted above, Helen is said to deliberately unveil her beauty – her kallos and kosmos – and thus provoke the men’s “ardent desire for Eros”. Particularly enigmatic is the formulation that “by her body she numerously collected the bodies of men”, which hints at promiscuity. Groddeck comments, drawing on Buchheim’s commentary: Die Entdeckung über die Wahrheit der Unverdecktheit von Helena hilft vielleicht, die Befremdlichkeit in der Formulierung “durch ihren einen Körper versammelte sie zahlreich die Körper der Männer” – das ist ja irgendwie auch mißverständlich – wahrzunehmen (28). What has been said about the truth of Helen’s unveiledness possibly helps to discern the strangeness of the expression “by her body she numerously collected the bodies of men” – for in some way, this is misleading.

Groddeck does not want to make explicit what could “in some way” be misunderstood, namely that Helen with her beautiful naked body could be considered a stripper, if not a prostitute. However, the retrieval of Helen’s honour attempted by Groddeck is not convincing, particularly as he affirms that Helen’s aim is “eindeutig [. . .] Verführung” (29) (“unambigously [. . .] a seduction”). What remains, then, is the suspicion that Helen is a hetaira: a courtesan.

340 The body of truth as a – female, of course – prostitute: this is, put in a nutshell, the central phantasma of Roland Barthes’s striptease theory, provided that striptease can be considered a kind of visual prostitution. Barthes, for his part, takes up the topological threads running from Gorgias to Heidegger, and interweaves them with bits and pieces of psychoanalytical discourses. Barthes describes the dance of a stripper: “[T]he dance [. . .] acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures [. . .]. Thus we see the professionals of striptease wrap themselves in the miraculous ease which constantly clothes them [. . .]: their science clothes them like a garment” (85f.). The word ‘striptease’ is derived from English ‘to strip’. It can be translated into French as ‘priver de’ which, in turn, is derived from Latin ‘privo’, the word Heidegger associates with rape. His question, “Is it by chance that, with regard to the essence of truth, the Greeks express themselves using a privative term (a-letheia)?”, can thus be reformulated as: is it by chance that a so-called “theory of truth” which confuses allegories with concepts ends up as a striptease theory? I suggest that it is not, taking into account that a striptease theory like Barthes’s is topologically or implicitly already contained in a theory like Heidegger’s, which is rich in topological undertones. While Barthes pursues a semiotic question, talking not of truth but of “significance” and “insignificance” (84), his semiotic striptease theory can nevertheless be compared to Heidegger’s striptease theory of truth. Barthes opens the chapter on “Striptease” in his Mythologies by asserting that the “[s]triptease [. . .] is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped naked” (84). This is already a semiotic or symbolic statement about the woman’s body because, in Barthes’ pre-gender terms, a “desexualised” woman has neither sex nor gender: her body is “bur[ied] [. . .] in insignificance” (ibid.). At first glance, this seems to be a contradiction: would not, according to the topo-logics of unveiling, the nudity of the stripped body show its naked truth and thus fulfill a significative function? Why is this not the case in Barthes’s striptease scenario? Barthes argues that the stripper only pretends to undress. He writes that, “[t]here will therefore be in striptease a whole series of coverings placed upon the body of the woman in proportion as she pretends to strip it bare” (ibid.). Here, Barthes differentiates between the literal stripping of the woman’s clothing from her body and its purportedly contrary symbolic effect, thereby creating a semiotic allegory. By leaving open what exactly the men watching a striptease expect to see, Barthes claims that symbolically, the striptease leads to a semiotic aporia: “The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman” (85). This conclusion can be read as an objection to Heidegger’s “concept of truth”: if the woman’s body’s unveiled nudity is just another vesture, the striptease does not lead towards any truth behind the veil but merely produces

341 another signifying surface. The naked skin is a signifier like any kind of clothing; it does not show what is supposed to lie behind it. According to Barthes, the striptease does not lead to the epiphany of truth promised by Heidegger. In semiotic terms a sign – sema – cannot strip off its signifying side and cannot have its signified appear in an unmediated way. Nudity or unveiledness does not lead to the epiphany of the signified or even of truth. This is what the striptease allegorically illustrates: it draws on the image of soma as the corporeal counterpart of the symbolic sema. Reformulated in poststructuralist terms, this means that signifiers always only refer to other signifiers, but never to a signified: underneath the clothing there is just another vestment – be it even nudity. Barthes makes it clear that this kind of striptease which, according to Jean Baudrillard, is “neither strip nor tease” (107), i.e., the striptease which keeps its truth or its signified invisible, also excludes penetration; for this reason it does not function semiotically. Barthes writes: [T]he nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object [. . .]: this is the underlying significance of the G-String covered with diamonds or sequins which is the very end of striptease. This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity, and definitively drives the woman back into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the irrefutable symbol of the absolute object, that which serves no purpose (85).

As a signifying body – sema –, the female stripper’s real body – soma – does not work, but rather remains an “absolute object [. . .] which serves no purpose”. This is illustrated by the diamonds in mise en abîme: though “material” and thus, according to Freudian logic, associated with the woman’s body as a sexual object (Freud 164–168), the diamonds “bar[] the way to the sexual parts”, and therefore make the female body thus an “object [. . .] which serves no purpose”, i.e., which does not serve for penetration: soma as well as sema remain “enclosed” and “withdrawn [. . .] from human use” (Barthes 85), i.e., from male penetrative access. To turn the argument on its head, this notion suggests that the female body has to be thought of as a usable object. In other words, the female body being forearmed against penetration or rape, barring its genitals – ‘erkennen’, ‘cunt’ –, is, according to the topology outlined in this paper, an allegory of a semiotically malfunctioning body: a body which does not allow for its ‘truth’ to be unveiled. A sign embodied in this form or a corporealized truth like this cannot be ‘known’ (‘erkannt’) according to the topologic of cognoscere feminam. It is hard to imagine a theory demonstrating even more explicitly the phantasmatic fixation of concepts of cognition on the idea of penetrating a female body than Barthes’s and Heidegger’s theories. Ironically, there is a subversive punch line in Barthes’s allegory of the semiotic body: eventually, it switches its gender position. Being a female body unsuitable for penetration, the stripper all of a sudden gains phallic

342 attributes: purity, geometrical shape, hardness, invulnerability and even “a sword”. In contrast to Jean Baudrillard in his Strip-tease essay, Barthes does not pursue these implications. He could, however, have referred to Jacques Lacan’s essay La signification du phallus, a text which can also be read as an implicit refutation of Heidegger’s theory of aletheia as the unveiling of truth. Lacan writes, presupposing his famous identification of woman and phallus: Tous ces propos ne font encore que voiler le fait qu’il [le phallus] ne peut jouer son rôle que voilé, c’est-à-dire comme signe lui-même de la latence dont est frappé tout signifiable, dès lors qu’il est élevé (aufgehoben) à la fonction de signifiant (692). All these ideas still veil the fact that the phallus can play its role only by being veiled, i.e., in turn, as a sign of latency with which everything signifiable is struck as soon as it is elevated (aufgehoben) to the signifying function.

Veiledness and latency – derived from Latin ‘lateo’ (‘to seclude’) – are thus the concepts Lacan brings forward against Heidegger’s idea of aletheia. They also provide an explanation for the gender subversion in Barthes’s striptease theory. There is no chance, not even by force, to unveil the truth in a way to make it become ‘present’. While, from a poststructuralist point of view, still rooted in the Western ‘metaphysical’ tradition, Heidegger’s theory of aletheia is indeed indebted to the Western ‘topological’ tradition – a tradition which, while making such an argument possible, also offers the prospect of subverting any of these arguments. To illustrate this was the aim of this paper. As a general diagnosis, this is no original insight. In his book In 1926, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes (drawing, incidentally, on Heidegger to develop an alternative top-ology): “Understanding and interpretation have always been (more or less explicitly) related to a topology in which a ‘surface’ had to be penetrated in order to reach a ‘depth’ – which was expected to be an aspect of Truth” (421). Topological structures, such as the topology of penetration, always determine what we can say. Yet, we are not helplessly subject to them. They can be countered with arguments. They can also be appropriated by means of – queer, for instance – resignification. Or, opting somewhere in-between these two ways, they can be made explicit by turning them comic. Admittedly, it is a question of personal taste whether one considers something to be comic or not, and there is no way of arguing why juxtaposing Heidegger’s theory of aletheia with texts by Gorgias and Barthes would elicit comic effects. There is only the hope that by contextualizing a text anew, one might once in a while produce a punch line. What remains, at least, is Walter Shandy’s heuristic postulate of wilful reading: “Every thing in this world [. . .] is big with jest, – and has wit in it, and instruction too, – if we can but find it out”.

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Volker Helbig

Judith Butler and the Problem of Adequacy, or: The Epistemological Dimension of Laughter The paper shows that Butler’s turn against epistemological theories that conceive of adequacy between concepts and states of affairs as criterion of truth has much to do with theories of the comic dwelling on incongruity, by making clear that incongruity can also be understood as inadequacy on an epistemological level. Butler’s remarks on the subversive possibilities of laughter are linked to the epistemological foundations of her conception.

One objective of the workshop program on “Subversion of Gender Identities through Laughter and the Comic in Literature, Theatre, and Modern Media” was to relate theories on gender – in particular the ones by Judith Butler – to theories on the comic. The following essay takes up this idea by analysing the epistemological implications of both Butler’s Gender Trouble and the concept of ‘incongruity’ found in theories on the comic. Thereby incongruity will be regarded as a form of inadequacy in the epistemological sense of the word. It will be shown that giving up the epistemological position of realism has severe consequences for our perception of the comic. In order to understand Judith Butler’s theory in its epistemological dimension it is, first of all, necessary to have a look at its basic philosophical structure. The fact that Butler is very much influenced by dialectical philosophy, i.e. the German tradition (Hegel) as well as newer French schools (Foucault, Derrida), is essential to this analysis.

The Basic Philosophical Form and its Application to Gender Issues In all of her texts Judith Butler makes extensive use of other philosophers’ theories. Actually, there is not one point in her argumentation that is completely ‘new’ or ‘original’. If one has a closer look at the names and theories Butler works with, it becomes obvious that she is mostly influenced by European or so-called ‘continental’ philosophy, much more so than other U.S. theorists of our time. Two main influences have to be mentioned: Hegelian dialectics and French poststructuralism. However, it has to be considered that these two philosophical disciplines do not fundamentally differ from each other, but that French poststructuralism is itself to a great extent based on Hegelian ideas. Butler herself draws attention to this fact and deals with the close connections between Hegel and contemporary French philosophers in her first book Subjects of Desire – Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).

348 It is not until Gender Trouble (1990) that she tries to apply these philosophical styles to questions of gender and identity. In view of these facts, it seems justified to call Butler’s work a kind of transcultural effort. In the 10th anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler herself talks about the influence that French poststructuralism had on her theories – which were in turn meant to be critical contributions to the gender debates in the U.S. – and therefore speaks of her work as a ‘cultural translation’: “I [. . .] drew from French poststructuralism to make my points. My work in Gender Trouble turned out to be one of cultural translation. Poststructuralist theory was brought to bear on U.S. theories of gender” (ix). Among the various French poststructuralist theories that Judith Butler takes up in Gender Trouble and other works, two seem to play a dominant role: Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s discourse theory. All of her key ideas are closely interwoven with at least one of these two theories. Thus, none of her statements on issues like sex or gender can be seen independently of this theoretical background. Butler does not seem to have come to her conclusions inductively, say by observing people’s behaviour, but mainly by applying Derrida’s and – more so – Foucault’s ideas to the ‘sex versus gender’-problem. This might explain why Gender Trouble remains so theoretical and philosophical, although gender issues could rather be seen as primarily social topics that might have to be approached from a more sociological and empirical perspective. Butler herself points out that she regards Gender Trouble as a philosophical work, in the first place, and not necessarily as a sociological study on gender – although she does not seem to make a clear distinction between these disciplines. Like Foucault’s discourse theory, Butler’s gender theory is a critical one. It offers a philosophical approach to society that is not merely descriptive but implicitly political. This can be seen from the fact that Butler’s statements – just like Foucault’s – often involve concepts like ‘power’ and ‘oppression’.

The Direction of Change and the Problem of Adequacy – Laughter as a Sign of Inadequacy Any philosophical approach that claims to be critical and is not content with mere interpretations but seeks progressive change (the prototype of such an approach would be Marxism) explicitly or implicitly includes ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ judgements. To criticize a certain ideology is to say to what extent it is ‘wrong’. Such judgements are necessarily based on some sort of valuation criteria by which the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are defined. Any form of active and intentional change logically involves a certain direction of change. If we say, “Let’s not stay where we are right now”, we usually have to add, “Let’s move in this or that direction” Any political program that seeks to

349 change a situation does not only say, “situation A must be ended”, but also, “situation B must be reached”. And it is exactly this feature that makes Marxism and other critical theories so problematic from a philosophical point of view: How does one know – epistemologically spoken – that situation B is better than situation A? How does the idea of a ‘right’ way of living come about? And where is the so-called ‘right’ concept taken from? In Marxism and some other approaches the basic criteria for such ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ judgements are taken from perceptions of the ‘real world’. The concept of reality is considered unproblematic within these disciplines, because they argue from the epistemological standpoint of realism. And as soon as something like an external reality is set, the question of whether theories, discourses, philosophies, ideologies etc., are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (true or false) can be answered quite easily: the interpretation of the world given in the ideology can be compared to the ‘real world’ so that inconsistencies might be found and the ideology in question can then be criticized as a ‘wrong’ interpretation of the world. In ‘right’ or ‘true’ statements about the world we expect to find a certain correspondence between the propositional content of the statement and the ‘real facts’ – a specific relation between a theory and its object that we shall call ‘adequacy’. Judith Butler’s theories are critical theories. They are not merely descriptive but normative, and therefore have what we called a ‘direction’. Butler herself concedes that “there is a positive normative task in Gender Trouble” (xxiii). Since Judith Butler’s theories are critical, politically motivated, and meant to initiate social change, they necessarily include ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ judgements. Her theses explicitly or implicitly claim that the current situation is not acceptable: the dominating discourses are one-sided and much too narrow so that they have to be modified and expanded. But does this criticism of currently ruling discourses not imply the thesis that they are – in some way – inadequate? And does such a judgement of inadequacy not require an objective basis? What can discourses be compared to, if one does not have access to any prediscursive reality? These are not just typically Butlerian rhetorical questions but ones that I actually intend to answer. Since Butler rejects the idea of any ontological basis and claims that even those material things that one takes as ‘ontological’ or ‘real’ are actually nothing but discursive effects, there is no objective non-discursive criterion left by which a discourse could be judged. If Butler were right, it would seem as if discourse stood against discourse, and any discourse would be as good as any other. Would it be possible to distinguish between ‘better’ and ‘worse’ discourses? Obviously, Butler seems to claim that the discourse she suggests is ‘better’ or more adequate than others. Among the discourses she does not accept are, for instance, ones that include binary concepts like ‘man vs. woman’. This raises the question of what valuation criteria Butler considers in

350 order to determine the adequacy of discourses, when she stipulates that there is no criterion ‘before’ or ‘outside’ of discourses. How can she explain in what way her non-binary discourse would be more adequate? And: adequate in relation to what? I will try to answer these questions later on. First, I would like to reveal something about the concept of adequacy that might be very helpful in understanding some of Butler’s remarks on parody, drag, and humorous bodily acts and in approaching them from an epistemological point of view. Butler’s works Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter deal with the function of laughter in various cultural contexts, mainly in connection with gender questions. In order to be able to discuss the specifically Butlerian function of laughter in an epistemological framework, I will try to point out, first, to what extent the problem of adequacy can be related to some well-known key concepts found in theories on the comic. Laughter is often described as an effect of discrepancy. In some theories this discrepancy is referred to as a kind of ‘incongruity’. People tend to laugh about unexpected and surprising events that collide with the ‘normal’. This reaction is due to some incongruity between the expectation that a subject has with regard to a certain situation and his or her actual perception of this situation. This incongruity-theory involves some remarkable epistemological hypotheses, in that it is quite evident that the subject in question needs to have a certain conceptual basis, i.e. at least a vague idea of what might be ‘normal’. Otherwise he or she would not be able to perceive a situation as ‘incongruent’ to his or her expectations. This conceptual basis that constitutes our expectations seems to be very close to what I earlier defined as the ‘adequate’ approach to the real world. If someone has a clear concept of what is or is not adequate, he or she might feel that inadequate things or events are ‘strange’ or ‘funny’. In this sense, what is called ‘incongruity’ in theories of the comic could be – purely hypothetically, of course – related to what is called ‘inadequacy’ in epistemology; one could replace the term ‘incongruity’ with the term ‘inadequacy’, and thereby focus on the epistemological dimension of laughter. This operation opens up an interesting approach to the work of Judith Butler. It also seems to support her views on drag and parody. Butler encourages us to get rid of our traditional understandings of sex and gender, e.g. by exaggerating common gender roles – which would seem adequate in non-critical discourses – so that they will appear ridiculous in the end. And if we actually laughed at conventional gender roles, this would be a sign of their inadequacy, Butler seems to hope. At this stage it might be helpful to try to reformulate the concept of adequacy on the basis of Butler’s view of the world: Since she rejects the traditional idea of reality, she has to develop an alternative basis on which to judge what might be adequate or inadequate.

351 Non-Teleological Change In the previous segment on the direction of change, I asked the question of how it is possible for Butler to prefer one discourse to another and to claim that hers is ‘better’ than others, in view of the problem that she cannot make use of socalled ‘real’ or ‘natural’ facts in order to judge a discourse, since she defines reality as discursively created itself. If there is no ontological basis, I earlier wrote, it is impossible to determine whether a discourse is adequate or inadequate. We stipulated that the wish for progressive change automatically requires a ‘telos’ and that there is the necessary condition of a ‘direction’. The solution to this problem is quite simple. Judith Butler, in the tradition of Hegel and many other dialectical philosophers, regards ‘truth’ as something dynamic, as a process or endless movement. In a way, ‘truth’ has been replaced with ‘the search for truth’. Therefore, progressive change must not be aimed at a final objective anymore, because now it becomes the objective itself. In her introductory book on Butler, author Sara Salih writes: “The idea of process or becoming will be crucial to understanding Butler’s theories, which draw on the Hegelian notion of dialectic [. . .]. Within Butler’s dialectical model, knowledge proceeds through opposition and cancellation, never finally reaching an ‘absolute’ or final certainty” (Salih 3f.). Nevertheless, things become problematic when Salih tries to compare Butler’s concept of non-teleological movement to scientific revisionism: “The sciences follow this similar movement through experiment, disagreement and revision” (ibid.). There is a fundamental difference between Butler’s approach and science that Salih does not take into account: Scientists revise their theories on the basis of experiments, empirical data, ‘reality’, and they only do so when inadequacies emerge. But revision is neither necessary under all circumstances nor is it a general aim. On the contrary, scientists consider the possibility that a theory might indeed be correct or ‘true’ as long as it will not be falsified, and thus hypotheses do not necessarily have to be revised, whereas in Judith Butler’s opinion, change, movement, and revision are values in themselves. She regards them as inevitable and necessary and as the actual aims of her engagement. As indicated above, she would never accept an idea to be final or ‘true’. In this sense, Butler’s way of thinking is strictly opposed to scientific principles. But what about ‘reality’? Is any discourse as ‘unreal’ as the other? Is Butler in no way more ‘right’ than her opponents? Butler actually accepts this consequence with regard to her own theories. Although she does criticize realists, naturalists, scientists, conservatives and others for creating ‘imaginary’ discourses, she admits that she is creating ‘imaginary’ discourses herself. In Bodies That Matter she says that her aim is not to replace a ‘wrong’ concept with her own ‘right’ concept, but “to promote an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary” (91).

352 As a result, the problem of adequacy can be reformulated as follows: Discourses are inadequate insofar as they remain static and claim that ‘this’ or ‘that’ definitely IS the truth. Discourses are adequate as long as they remain dynamic, i.e. are open to new meanings (‘resignifications’, as Butler would say) and creative impulses, and do not rely on fixed identities and categories.

Laughter as a Subversive Strategy – Laughter as a Sign of Relief On the basis of this revised, i.e. ‘Butlerized’, concept of adequacy/inadequacy – according to which an inadequate discourse would be a rigid or static discourse – and my claim that laughter can be read as a sign of inadequacy, two new functions of laughter can be determined: 1) Laughter as a subversive act in view of inadequate discourses (discourses that are inadequate insofar as they are static and not dynamic); 2) Laughter as a sign of relief (with regard to a subject that laughs because he or she has got rid of ‘false ideals’ about identity). Butler’s notion of laughter as a way to make conventional gender roles look odd implicitly defines laughter as an intentional act that constitutes the comic – a typically poststructuralist idea. Normally, one would think that the comic causes the laughter and that laughter is not necessarily an intentional act: We often laugh unwillingly when we are faced with something ‘funny’. However, Butler seems to suggest that we should laugh – intentionally – at concepts and definitions that are, in her view, too rigid in order to make the person who believes in these concepts and takes them as natural aware of the ‘fact’ that they are in no way god-given and irreversible but can also appear inadequate when viewed from another perspective. Finally, Butler talks about a kind of laughter that could be called ‘laughter of relief’. We might also laugh after having left behind our illusory ideals of the ‘normal’. Recognizing that what we considered to be ‘normal’ and obligatory, what tortured us insofar as we could never really live up to it, turns out to be an arbitrary construction might be such a great relief for us that we burst into laughter: “The loss of the sense of ‘the normal’, however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal’, ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Gender Trouble 138f.).

Conclusion: Non-Comical Incongruity At this point we have to ask which conclusions can be drawn from the attempt to analyse the concept of incongruity in theories of the comic as based on the concept of inadequacy in epistemology. If one accepts Butler’s epistemological program and assumes, that a) the so-called normal does not exist as a naturally

353 given reality, and b) that everything that differs from the normal can be seen as an equally legitimate possibility (from an epistemological point of view, not necessarily from an ethical one), what consequence does this have for one’s perception of the comic? In a strict sense, nothing could appear funny anymore – how could we laugh at a new semantic variation as something odd or absurd, if we perceive it as epistemologically acceptable as anything else? Obviously, inadequacy/incongruity cannot be created anymore from such a standpoint. Taking into account Butler’s primary (normative) valuation criterion in the judging of discourses, that is, that variation itself – the mere change of given semantic orders – has to be the aim, this dilemma is taken even one step further: Unusual constellations that would seem funny from a non-Butlerian point of view – insofar as they differ from the normal – do not only look not funny from a Butlerian point of view, but would simply have to be welcomed as necessary changes. Thus, Butler’s specific concept of laughter as an intentional act, of drag and parody as subversive means, seems to be inconsistent with the incongruity-concept in theories on the comic. Incongruity necessarily requires the normal. If the normal is not taken seriously anymore – which would be appropriate in Butler’s view –, differing from the normal will become noncomical. One might still perceive incongruities, but those incongruities cannot be the source of laughter anymore, at least not in the way they can be for nonButlerians. One origin of this problem lies in the fact that Butler obviously uses the term ‘laughter’ quite differently: Whereas theories on the comic analyse laughter as an effect of incongruities (an unexpected and surprising violation of the normal makes us laugh – often unwillingly), Butler’s notion of laughing and causing laughter is that of an intentional subversive act.

Works Consulted Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter. On The Discursive Limits Of “Sex”. London – New York: Routledge 1993. —. Gender Trouble. Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity. 10th Anniversary Reprint. London – New York: Routledge 1999. Salih, Sara: Judith Butler. London – New York: Routledge 2002. Villa, Paula-Irene: Judith Butler. Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag 2003.

Caroline L. Rieger

Comparing Same-Gender and Opposite-Gender Conversations: a Laughing Matter? While research in applied linguistics on gendered discourse usually focuses on differences in male or female communication, the qualitative analysis described in this article concentrates on similarities in men and women’s communicative interaction. It shows that they both use laughter as communication in casual conversations with same- and opposite-gender addressees. Laughter is not used gender specific, and it does not exclusively occur as a response to jokes, funny stories, or the experience of humorous events. Alternatively, it serves various interactive functions in same-gender and opposite-gender encounters, such as expressing sociability, alignment or commonality with the addressee, politeness, or embarrassment. These are the interactive functions of laughter discussed here. They are, however, not the only communicative roles laughter does play.

The research and analysis of gender in interaction is usually a rather serious matter, especially since competing theories have emerged from the extensive research on gender and language.1 Over the past decades, many studies that have explored gendered discourse have yielded contradictory results. These contradictions are in part, but not exclusively, due to differences in the design of such studies. As a case in point, some of the studies on the discourse marker “you know” which have generated mixed results2 can be reported here. While Lakoff (qtd. in Holmes 7) claims that women use “you know” more often than men, Rieger (Gender Differences), Holmes, as well as Freed and Greenwood, found that this is not the case. On the other hand, Holmes as well as Freed and Greenwood maintain that both genders use it more often with a same-gender interlocutor than with an opposite-gender addressee, while Rieger as well as Dixon and Foster contradict that finding. As the latter report, men employ “you know” in a confident manner (as opposed to an ‘unconfident’ manner) more often when talking to women than women do when talking to women or men (103). Rieger, in contrast, found that both men and women use “you know” more often with women than with men; she also found that women and men use approximately the same number of “you know”-fillers (Gender Differences). Five studies – carried out at different times, on different continents, in different settings, under different conditions, with different speech events and different subjects, the only commonality being the fact that women and men 1

Cf. reviews in Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender, and in Hopper. Cf. Holmes; Coates; Freed and Greenwood; Dixon and Foster; Rieger, Self-repair; Gender Differences. 2

356 engaged in English talk – have revealed inconsistent results. This is surprising to researchers who assume that gender is a non-linguistic factor that has a uniform effect on language usage, and to researchers like Jennifer Coates who are convinced “that women and men do pursue different interactive styles” (139). Some also declare that most gender differences in language usage and conversational style are gender-preferential rather than gender-exclusive, which is a diminution, but nonetheless an affirmation of the difference theory, and so they too stress the gender differences in their research, i.e. in their research design and questions. The contradictory findings come as no surprise to those researchers who are not convinced that women and men employ different communication styles and who believe that gender is only one factor that might influence language usage, and not necessarily in a uniform manner. Many more factors influence language production and they all interact with each other in complex ways, which makes it impossible to isolate just one and to designate it as the one responsible for a particular phenomenon of language production. As Eckert writes in The Whole Woman, “Gender, like ethnicity and class and indeed age, is a social construction and may enter into any of a variety of interactions with other social phenomena” (253). Alice Freed goes one step further in investigating why the general public and academia are convinced of and interested in the existence of gender differences in language usage, although recent research on gender differences and language does not confirm these beliefs.3 She concludes that the emphasis on gendered talk could be interpreted as an attempt to “maintain gendered behaviour” (12), as Deborah Cameron had suggested earlier, because although the “twogender system is still enforced [. . .] the edges are blurring” (Freed 13) and there “are signs of gender destabilization all around us” (12), that create discomfort and thus the wish to counteract these perceived developments. Finally, some gender scholars, such as Robert Hopper, believe that described dissimilarities in female and male conversational style do not necessarily reflect actual behavioural differences, but rather our biased perception – influenced by our socialization – that women and men communicate differently (4). Although the inconsistent results of studies in gendered behaviour could deter us from further researching it, we could also take them as an invitation to investigate more, more carefully, and more mindfully. My research intends to do just that, while not stabilizing the two-gender system, and rather to challenge our beliefs on it through focusing not on differences, but on similarities 3

Cf. Bergvall, Bing, and Freed; Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton; Eckert and McConnellGinet, Think Practically; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender; Freed; Hall and Bucholtz; Hopper; Johnson and Meinhof; Livia and Hall; Rieger, Self-repair; Gender Differences; and Wodak.

357 in the conversational styles of women and men. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate similar instances of laughter in gendered interaction. To be more precise, the analysis of related communicative functions of laughter in the conversations of female and male bilingual speakers will be the focus of attention. Bilingual speakers have been chosen as participants in this study because they facilitate the examination of a variety of conversations produced by the same participants under similar and dissimilar conditions. The data analysis concentrates on the communicative usage of laughter by bilingual women and men when talking to a same-gender partner and when conversing with an opposite-gender partner.

Motivation So far laughter has mostly been studied as behaviour, not as communication. Its interactive role in spoken discourse has often been neglected. In fact, linguists with an interest in speech events do not always include occurrences of laughter in their transcripts. Wallace Chafe writes, “I have spent a great deal of time transcribing speech, and like many others I have frequently come across instances of laughing. The easy way out is just to ignore them” (36). Clearly, many other scholars do not ignore them. The wealth of literature on laughter attests to that.4 However, only few researchers recognize the necessity to investigate laughter from an interactive perspective. Here, Robert Provine, who has studied over 1200 speech events, has prepared the way. He has found that laughter accompanies humorous speech rather than being a response to it. In addition, he found laughter to be used for social reasons such as expressing friendliness, politeness, and sociability (40). This suggests that laughter has interactive functions and these remain to be studied. When we change our focus from laughter as behaviour to laughter as communication we can investigate, as Glenn Phillip puts it, “how its meaning gets constituted jointly by laughers and hearers” (25). Since I agree with Glenn that “the careful study of human laughter reveals much about its form, functions, and uses, and such study reveals much about human communication in all its facets” (2), I intend to add to our knowledge of laughter and human communication with the present investigation.

Methodology: Participants, Data Collection, and Data Preparation In my paper, laughter in casual face-to-face conversations between two bilingual speakers in an experimental setting will be the focus of attention. For that 4

Cf. reviews in Glenn or Ruch and Ekman.

358 purpose, casual conversation is defined as an informal everyday collaborative speech event, a dynamic process of constantly and mutually agreed-upon changing of the focus of attention in a verbal interaction which takes place between two or more participants and leads to coherent spoken discourse. The participant group consists of eight volunteers, four females and four males between the ages of 23 and 63. Five participants, Gordon, Henry, June, Lauren, and Sue, are native speakers of English and three participants are native speakers of German: Isabel, Sven, and Werner.5 All eight participants are bilingual, using English and German on a daily basis. For all candidates, the dominant language is their first language. None of them had grown up as bilingual, but each had learned the second language initially in a school setting and developed it subsequently in an immersion situation. Certain criteria were used for the selection of the participants for this investigation. They all had to demonstrate a very high degree of proficiency on all levels (i.e., phonological, grammatical, lexical, semantic, and stylistic) regarding their communicative skills in English and German when engaging in casual conversations. For each participant, four different speech events of about twenty-five to thirty minutes were videotaped in an experimental setting. The speakers engaged in two casual, dyadic conversations – one in English and one in German – with a same-gender partner first and with an opposite-gender partner thereafter. The first two conversations were video-taped consecutively and – approximately a week later – so were the last two. The participants were asked to talk as naturally as possible about a casual topic of their choice or about their favourite novel, movie, or travel destination. These choices were given ‘just in case’ to get the conversation started, but most participants did not make use of them. Except for Henry and Gordon, most participants did not know each other or know each other well and so used these conversations to get acquainted. The data collection yielded 420 minutes of casual conversation, 210 minutes of English conversational data and 210 minutes of German conversational data. The recorded data were transcribed and coded. All tokens of laughter were transcribed using the symbol of a smiling face to signal laughter by the speaker.6 The symbol ☺ in the written transcript can simultaneously serve as the code for the analysis of laughter and so does this combination {☺} used to designate shared laughter, i.e. laughter by speaker and addressee. Two or more smiling faces indicate longer or ongoing laughter.

5

For ethical reasons, pseudonyms were used and all other potentially identifying names were also changed. 6 A description of all other transcription conventions used can be found in the appendix of this article.

359 Methodology: Qualitative Analysis For the qualitative analysis7 of laughter in the above-described conversations, this study makes use of two mutually complementary approaches to the analyses of spoken discourse. First, we have the ethnomethodological/conversation analysis approach, which is based on the phenomenology of philosopher Alfred Schütz, was developed further by the sociologist Garfinkel, and has been greatly influenced by the research of Jefferson, Heritage, Sacks, and Schegloff. Conversation analysts are interested in determining how members of a society produce a sense of social order. Accordingly, they analyse conversations, an excellent source of people’s sense of social order. Initially they focused on the ‘mechanics’ of conversation (turn-taking, repairs, openings and closings), but more recently they have concentrated on the processes of negotiating meaning and comprehension. Their aim is to describe and explain the communicative and interactional competence of ordinary speakers.8 Second, we have the interactional sociolinguistic approach, which is interdisciplinary in nature, combining linguistic, sociological, and anthropological knowledge for the analysis of discourse. Researchers adopting this approach concentrate on how people from different cultures or social groups use language. They describe the differences and similarities in the use of linguistic strategies and processes from different angles. This is the approach adopted nowadays by many modern AngloAmerican linguists, such as Brown, Goffmann, Gumperz, Levinson, Schiffrin, 7

Applied linguists make use of qualitative or quantitative analysis to contribute to our knowledge of language in use. Quantitative analysis – an approach not chosen in this particular study – focuses on the locating, counting, and comparing of certain linguistic forms, linguistic items, or other communicative elements within a large amount of linguistic resources such as conversations or texts produced by a large number of study participants often collected over a long period of time. Quantitative analysis includes statistical evaluation allowing the researcher to draw general conclusions about the linguistic elements under investigation and/or the producers of these linguistic items. Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, focuses – in the case of conversation analysis as a sociological approach – on the detailed description of a (small) number of similar examples of certain linguistic/communicative items and its linguistic and social context. Within interactional sociolinguistics qualitative analysis concentrates on the interpretation of the interactive usage and social meaning of a (small) number of linguistic/communicative objects within a (limited) number of discourse events. The interpretations of these analysed examples help the researchers identify trends. However, their findings cannot be extended to other examples or other discourse events. A larger number of similarly designed qualitative studies will eventually allow the researchers to draw more general conclusions. Similarly, quantitative studies can be designed to complement qualitative studies (Gumperz; Hatch and Lazaraton; Heritage; Sacks; Schiffrin, Approaches; Segerdahl). 8 Cf. Heritage; Sacks; Schiffrin, Approaches; Conversation; Segerdahl.

360 and Tannen.9 Within the framework of interactional sociolinguistics it is assumed that the meaning, structure, and use of language is socially and culturally relative.10 Furthermore, interactional sociolinguistics emphasize the importance of context, shared knowledge, contextualization cues,11 conversational involvement, and conversational inference for the encoding and interpretation of meaning in discourse. This study follows Givón’s suggestion of integrating different traditions of discourse analysis (Preface). Accordingly, it adopts a sociolinguistic approach in which the findings and methodology of interactional sociolinguistics are dominant and the perspectives and results of conversation analysis are respected and taken into account wherever necessary and/or helpful. Laughter and humour theories, such as the superiority/hostility theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory – all concisely described by Glenn (18–23) – cannot play a significant role for this study’s analysis as they focus on laughter as behaviour, not on its interactional properties. In its attempt to contribute to our knowledge of the communicative functions of laughter and ultimately to a theory of interactive laughter, this study must mainly rely on the theoretical framework of interactional sociolinguistics and the findings of the few groundbreaking investigations that have dealt with laughter as interaction.12

Laughter as Communication Although laughter is first and foremost understood as a response to humour, something that is not humorous or funny, such as joy, nervousness, embarrassment, relief, hostility, and even the misfortune of others can still be a laughing matter. Laughing at or about something or laughter accompanying something can be both, voluntary or involuntary, conscious and subconscious. If laughter were not under voluntary control – as Chafe asserts (39) – there could be no invitation to laughter and no acceptance or rejection of that invitation, as described in some studies.13 Certainly, if laughter were not under voluntary control it could not be recognized – and thus investigated – as a communicative feature. Contrary to popular belief, human beings do not laugh randomly or 9

Cf. Schiffrin, Approaches. Cf. ibid. 98. 11 Contextualization cues are “aspects of language and behaviour (verbal and nonverbal signs) that relate what is said to the contextual knowledge (including knowledge of particular activity types: cf. frames; Goffman, 1974) that contributes to the presuppositions necessary to the accurate inferencing of what is meant (including, but not limited to, the illocutionary force)” (Schiffrin, Approaches 99–100). 12 Cf. Glenn; Haakana; Hay; and Jefferson. 13 E.g., Glenn; Haakana; Hay; and Jefferson. 10

361 uncontrollably, as Glenn maintains (2). His claims derive from a multitude of studies confirming that “people laugh in systematic, sequentially, and socially organized patterns” (ibid.). These properties ensure the communicative and interactive value of laughter. Laughter can communicate different ideas and take on different (social) functions, of which some will be described here, starting with its most commonly recognized function, the expression and sharing of amusement, enjoyment, pleasure, or, as Chafe likes to call it, “the feeling of nonseriousness” (39).14 In the conversations under investigation, both men and women produce humorous utterances accompanied by laughing and provoking or inviting shared laughter. The participants employ these laughing matters in conversations with same-gender partners as well as with opposite-gender partners, when speaking English as well as when talking in German, i.e. in a variety of conversational circumstances. In the first conversation (example ⬍1⬎), June recounts an episode from her childhood. When she was in grade five, she watched the movie Dracula, which she describes as “absolutely terrifying”. June: [. . .] and for probably about three ⫽ years (..) I wouldn’t keep my window open at night (..) I- like my bed was about this far off the ground so (..) I would look under my bed ☺ {☺} turn off my lights and run and jump on my bed Isabel: yeah ☺ {☺} (example ⬍1⬎).

June shares a scary episode in her childhood, but in hindsight, both June and Isabel can see the humour in this scare. They find it funny that little June checked for Dracula under her bed. The laughter and amusement do not just derive from awareness of an almost universal childhood experience. As adults, June and Isabel know that at some point, most children check for monsters and such under their bed, behind the curtains or in their closet before going to bed. This episode, however, is especially funny because the space under June’s bed could never have accommodated Dracula since it was tiny, as she indicates through holding both hands about ten inches apart while uttering “like my bed was about this far off the ground”. Humour in conversations does not merely amuse the interlocutors. The pleasure they express through laughter – especially through shared laughter – also derives from a sense of shared experience, or, as Markku Haakana puts it, “having a bonding social experience” (209). On a meta-level, it then communicates, “We are alike”. This is also illustrated in the following, which is an excerpt from an exchange between Sven and Sue. They talk about the difficulties they both 14

I would, however, like to point out that I do not believe that enjoyment and pleasure do exclude seriousness, as Chafe seems to suggest.

362 usually experience when faced with the challenge to understand German or English dialects. In example ⬍2⬎ in particular, Sven talks about a vacation in Southern Germany where he had a hard time understanding the locals. Sven: I remember just being on a walk with friends and Sue: oh yeah Sven: we met some farmers and they were in a distance (..) telling us something (..) I had no idea what she was talking about Sue: what they were talking about Sven: no idea at all Sue: oh my gosh you just smiled politely Sven: yes Sue: and said yes {☺} and thank you very much {☺} Sven: actually you have a good day too {☺} (example ⬍2⬎).

At some point, Sue joins Sven in telling his story. This indicates that although she was not present at the time she knows exactly what he is talking about. In and on itself, this is already a bonding experience. Sven accepts her as a co-narrator, and they mutually finish the episode by weaving in some polite formulae that one might use in such a situation. The shared laughter at the end of each formula shows their amusement and simultaneously serves as an indicator that they are only joking because this is of course not what happened. The remarkable coordination of Sven’s laughter with Sue’s laughter – apparent in the transcript through the absence of a smiling face preceding the symbol chosen for shared laughter – is rather rare. Gail Jefferson first described that shared laughter seldom starts simultaneously, but usually begins after one person’s laughing is understood as an invitation to join in. Haakana describes shared laughter as “a socially valuable phenomenon” and summarizes the findings on them as follows: “Sharing laughter is seen to exhibit such positive interactional features as intimacy, affiliation and alignment and to be sharing of a similar sense of humour, a similar attitude towards something” (209). However positive shared laughter is described, the contribution of more laughables is seen as even more desirable as they demonstrate an even “stronger display of alignment than just laughing” (220). Without a doubt, example ⬍2⬎ illustrates a playful bonding experience, valued by both Sue and Sven. Their first shared laughter is reinforced and reproduced after a second contribution by Sue and again after a third laughable by Sven. Only then do they leave the realm of play, but the fact that they continue with the same topic, “Difficulties understanding dialects”, suggests that they seek to prolong the bonding experience. A feeling of alignment created by humour and laughter is also evident in the following example. The context of excerpt ⬍3⬎ is as follows. Werner and Henry are talking about travelling. Henry has disclosed that he is a bit odd since he does not like to travel, and he thinks he might just as well watch documentaries about foreign countries on TV. Werner, on the other hand likes to

363 travel, but he did not enjoy his recent trip to Indonesia. It was an organized trip, and Werner felt that everything was staged for tourists. Werner: [. . .] und da dachte ich mir auch (..) and then I thought to myself (..) ich hab nämlich vorher so ein Videoband [1 ausgeborgt 1] eh since earlier I had [1 rented 1] a videotape uh Henry: [1 ja 1] [1 yes 1] Werner: in der Biblio- in der Bibliothek und dann das angesehen in the libra- in the library and then I watched it und ich hab praktisch DASSELBE gesehen and I saw virtually THE SAME wie ich auf dem [2 VIDEOband vorher 2] gesehen hatte (. . .) compared to what I had seen on the [ 2 VIDEOtape earlier 2] (. . .) Henry: [2 mhm ja 2] [2 uhu yes 2] Werner: ☺ {☺} und da dachte ich mir auch (..) ☺ {☺} and then I thought to myself (..) das hätte ich billiger haben können ☺ {☺ ☺} this I could have gotten cheaper ☺ {☺ ☺} Henry: j⫽a (Hx) ☺ ☺ j⫽a ja ye⫽s (Hx) ☺ ☺ ye⫽s yes [. . .] (example ⬍3⬎).

Werner delivers his tale like a joke with “das hätte ich billiger haben können” (“this I could have gotten cheaper”) as the punch line. But Werner’s narration and his laughter are more than just funny. They serve as a positive politeness strategy in the sense of Brown and Levinson.15 Since Henry had made himself vulnerable by revealing that when it comes to travelling he is strange, different from others, Werner makes sure that his conversation partner can save face. He offers a story that justifies Henry’s point of view and raises common ground. Werner himself 15

Brown and Levinson use Goffman’s notion of face to develop their theory of politeness. For Goffman the term “face” designates a person’s positive social image as it is claimed and constructed in social interactions and as it reflects this person’s integrity and social status. If particular acts in social encounters challenge or jeopardize a person’s face, the analyst speaks about “face-threatening acts” and the need and desire to “save face”. This desire exists for all the participants in a social encounter (318). First, Brown and Levinson assume that “all competent adult members of society have (and know each other to have): face” (321). They further assume that face has two aspects, positive face (a desire to be appreciated) and negative face (a desire to be kept free from imposition) (321f.). Both, positive and negative face can be threatened in social encounters (323). To avoid face-threatening acts different politeness strategies are adopted. Positive politeness strategies, such as seeking agreement or raising common ground, aim to support the interlocutors’ positive face, whereas negative politeness strategies, such as apologizing or giving deference, aim to support the interlocutors’ negative face (328).

364 had similar thoughts, namely that watching a video-tape of Indonesia would not only have been the same as travelling there, but it would also have been less expensive. Werner’s laughter is very well received because Henry joins in and even laughs longer than Werner does. This seems to indicate that Henry understands and appreciates the hidden message, that he is not odd because he prefers learning about foreign countries through TV instead of experiencing them through travel. Of course, the fact that Werner does set up this narration as a funny story – and he clearly marks it as such through his laughter – indicates that he understands Henry’s position, but does not quite share it. The shared laughter serves as a substitute for a shared point of view. On a meta-level, it says, “We might have different opinions, but we are not that different”. The universally recognized function of laughter as an expression of amusement or nonseriousness allows interlocutors to use laughter as a meta-message or a framing device to distinguish between serious and non-serious utterances. In fact, Glenn has “found laughter to be one of the primary frame markers between adults shifting into playfulness” (28). Consider the laughter featured in excerpts ⬍4⬎ and ⬍5⬎. The short selection shown in ⬍4⬎ follows Werner’s mentioning that he does rarely go to the meetings of a certain German-Canadian club because its members often get drunk: “Werner: [. . .] if I wanted to associate with drunken Germans I would have stayed in Germany ☺ {☺}/ June: {☺} yeah” (example ⬍4⬎). Werner ends his statement with laughter to mark it as a funny exaggeration and June shares his laughter to signal that she understands it as a joke. Furthermore, she communicates that she shares his point of view by adding the affirmative “yeah” to her laughter. By contrast, in example ⬍5⬎ laughter is also used to mark joking but not to raise common ground. Gordon and Sven talk about swimming. Gordon, who is not a swimmer, mentions his belief that the drag of the water makes swimming hard, but he has a training tip for the swimmer. Gordon: [. . .] what you should do is uh is is add water. to /y/ uh Jell-O ☺ {☺} then uh that makes it even harder (..) actually train against uh (..) training in water that’s water-jelly and then when you move into water it’s easy (..) so (..) Sven: but what I like about it (..) it doesn’t (..) you injure yourself not so easily [. . .] (example ⬍5⬎).

Gordon includes laughter in his suggestion, to add Jell-O to the water in the pool, and by doing this he signals to Sven that, although their conversation about swimming has been serious up until now, he is currently shifting into a non-serious, joking context. Sven signals through shared laughter that he recognizes this. Here, the shared laughter does not have the same function as in examples ⬍1⬎, ⬍2⬎ or ⬍4⬎, as it does not contribute to a feeling of affiliation or alignment. Neither does it accompany a politeness strategy, as in

365 example ⬍3⬎. For the shared laughter to have the same function as in the preceding examples Sven would need to get more involved either through an additional affirmation, like June or Isabel’s “yeah”, an added laughable, as seen in example ⬍2⬎ and ⬍4⬎, or longer laughter, as demonstrated by Henry in ⬍3⬎. This also illustrates nicely that the meaning of laughter is jointly constructed. What started as a frame marker could have become the beginning of a positive symmetrical experience. At the end of Gordon’s turn, when there is no more laughter and Gordon uses the discourse marker “so” as a frame marker to close the jocular mode, Sven had another opportunity to add a laughable. Instead he continues the conversation with a serious sub-topic, sports injuries and the fact that they are not as common in swimmers as they are in runners. The other four participants in this study have also used laughter as a frame marker. They use it when interacting with same-gender partners as well as with opposite-gender partners, when conversing in English or in German, their first or their second language, that is in a variety of conversational circumstances. Extract ⬍6⬎ presents the beginning of the taping of Lauren and Sue’s first conversation. Sue’s opening question, how Lauren likes Winnipeg, is missing from the tape and thus the transcript. Lauren is new to the city, whereas Sue has lived there for many years. Lauren: also un- uns gefällt Winnipeg bis jetzt SEHR SEHR gut well w- we up until now VERY VERY much like Winnipeg Sue: oh gut (..) was be- bedeutet bis jetzt? ☺ also? oh good (..) what me- means up until now? ☺ I mean? Lauren: ja den WINTER hab’n wir noch nicht erlebt ☺ {☺ ☺} well we have not yet experienced WINTER ☺ {☺ ☺} (example ⬍6⬎).

The phrase “bis jetzt” (“up until now”) in Lauren’s answer could imply that she expects things to get worse and Sue takes her up on this with another question. She adds laughter to give a playful, a teasing quality to her question. The laughter thus marks a shift into the non-serious mode. This should assure Lauren that Sue is not offended by the fact that Lauren does not like Sue’s city no ifs and buts, and also make it clear that Sue herself does not intend to offend Lauren. The additional discourse marker “also” (“I mean”) delivered in a questioning tone also softens her question. It seems obvious that Sue wants to make sure that Lauren, whom she does not know, does not misinterpret her question. Lauren, unlike Sven in the preceding example, does not just signal to her conversational partner that she understands and accepts this shift from the serious to the non-serious, but she chooses to play along. Although her answer has validity in a serious mode she laughs when delivering it. Her answer is not a joke though. Everybody in Winnipeg knows that the winters there are very hard, and newcomers hear about this early on and often. Lauren’s laughter thus does not refer to the content of her answer, but rather refers back to Sue’s

366 question. Now it is Lauren’s turn to tease Sue. With her emphasis on the word “Winter” she seems to say, “It is pretty obvious that I can not state with certainty that I like Winnipeg because that might change in the wintertime”. Such a statement could, however, offend Sue if it were taken seriously. That is why Lauren marks it as non-serious through laughter. Sue accepts this and joins in the laughter. Laughter is also used in example ⬍7⬎ to avoid offending the addressee, Henry. In their conversation, Lauren is telling him about a time she spent in Germany on a research assignment. Her story focuses on difficulties she experienced to which Henry replies that having obvious problems abroad could lead to interesting and rewarding encounters. In principle, Lauren is inclined to agree, but not in this specific situation. To make sure she does not hurt Henry’s feeling with her response she adds laughter. “Lauren: yeah well I I I’d prefer to experience something like that when I’m actually being a tourist rather than over there on a research trip ☺/ Henry: yes of course [. . .]” (example ⬍7⬎). Laughter accompanying embarrassment can be found in all sixteen conversations. When participants are searching for a word in their non-native language they sometimes produce a short laughter of embarrassment. The addressee does not share this laughter, but tries to help. Examples are given in ⬍8⬎ when Lauren is searching for the German equivalent of “counter culture” and in ⬍9⬎ when Sven is searching for the English term “breast stroke”. Lauren: ja wie sagt man das denn auf Deutsch? ☺ well how does one express this in German? ☺ Sue: keine Ahnung also no idea you know (example ⬍8⬎). Sven: [. . .] I do first a little bit of freestyle and then back (..) back row? back- no back stroke Gordon: back stroke I guess Sven: yeah and then (. . .) uhm what’s the other name? ☺ for this (..) breast stroke yes Gordon: breast stroke yeah (example ⬍9⬎).

Not just word searches in the second language are accompanied by laughter. Narrating embarrassing episodes is also a laughing matter. In a conversation with Isabel, Gordon is embarrassed to admit that he knows where to get certain magazines and he laughs at his embarrassment: “Gordon: das sollte ich vielleicht nicht gestehen (.) aber ich habe gehört dass man diese Zeitschriften da ☺ findet / maybe I shouldn’t admit this (.) but I have heard that one can find these magazines ☺ there” (example ⬍10⬎). Sue’s laughter also expresses embarrassment in example ⬍11⬎. The context of the excerpt was as follows. Sue talks about the fact that she has no contact with French speaking Canadians in Winnipeg and that she regrets not being able to speak French on a regular basis like she used to do years ago. The fact that Sue cannot use her French regularly

367 has weakened her command of that language. This has led to her not passing an exam designed to test her skills in a third language. Sue: [. . .] hab ich wirklich nicht die Gelegenheit mei- mein Französisch zu üben I have really no opportunity to use m- my French und dann hab ich noch ☺ das war ein Schock [. . .] and then I did ☺ that was a shock [. . .] habe die Prüfung ehm eh eh geschrieben und bin durchgefallen I uhm uh uh wrote the exam and I failed Lauren: o⫽h o⫽h Sue: ☺ {☺} das war aber ein Schock ☺ {☺} that was a real shock (example ⬍11⬎).

Sue is embarrassed by the fact that she failed her French exam. Actually, she is so embarrassed by her failure that she does not come right out and talk about it. Instead she prepares Lauren for a shocking revelation – “das war aber ein Schock”/ “that was a shock” – and then gives quite a few explanations, why she failed. These reasons, such as being so confident that she did not do the readings and did not study, have been left out here as to not make this example too long. Lauren reacts with a sympathetic “oh” while Sue adds embarrassed laughter. This time, Lauren joins her laughing, which could signal that there is no reason to be ashamed or that Lauren is not judging Sue.

Concluding Remarks Linguistic or applied linguistic research on gendered discourse usually focuses on differences in male or female communication. By contrast, this study concentrated on similarities in gendered discourse to demonstrate that women and men do use (at least some) interactional features similarly. The qualitative analysis presented here, concentrated on a similar usage of laughter as interaction by women and men. It did show that they both use laughter as communication in casual conversations with same- and opposite-gender addressees. In other words, laughter is not exclusively used as a response to jokes, funny stories or situations, or other humorous events. Instead, it serves various interactional functions. The ones that were investigated and described here are expressing sociability, alignment or commonality with the addressee, politeness, embarrassment, marking certain utterances as friendly instead of offensive, and marking stretches of talk as non-serious or joking. These are by no means the only interactive functions of laughter; others, such as laughter as a back channelling device or brief response to a speaker’s contribution, expressions of hostility, nervousness, relief and so forth have been left out because of the absence of tokens or the low quantity of tokens in my data collection.

368 Qualitative studies such as this one and the other sociolinguistic studies on the interactive meaning of laughter cited in this article increase our knowledge on humour and our understanding of human interaction. They are meant as a modest – but hopefully not insignificant – contribution to the development of a theory of the interactive functions of laughter.

Works Consulted Bergvall, Victoria L., Janet M. Bing, and Alice F. Freed: Rethinking Language and Gender Research. Theory and Practice. London: Longman 1996. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson: Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. 1978. In: The Discourse Reader. Ed. by Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland. London – New York: Routledge 1999. Pp. 321–335. Bucholtz, Mary, A., C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton: Reinventing Identities. New York: Oxford University Press 1999. Cameron, Deborah: Performing Gender Identity. Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity. In: Language and Masculinity. Ed. by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Pp. 47–64. Chafe, Wallace: Laughing While Talking. In: Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2001. Linguistics, Language, and the Real World: Discourse and Beyond. Ed. by Deborah Tannen and James E. Alatis. Washington: Georgetown University Press 2003. Pp. 36–49. Coates, Jennifer: Women, Men and Language. 2nd ed. London: Longman 1993. Dixon, John. A., and Don H. Foster: Gender and Hedging. From Sex Differences to Situated Practice. In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26 (1997). Pp. 89–107. Eckert, Penelope: The Whole Woman. Sex and Gender Differences in Variation. In: Language Variation and Change 1 (1989). Pp. 245–267. —. and Sally McConnell-Ginet: Think Practically and Look Locally. Language and Gender as Community-based Practice. In: Annual review of Anthropology 21 (1992). Pp. 461–490. —. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. Freed, Alice. F.: Sex and Gender Difference and Language: A Glorious Obsession. Presentation given at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 28. Toronto, 14–17 October 1999. —. and Alice Greenwood: Women, Men, and Type of Talk: What Makes the Difference? In: Language in Society 25 (1996). Pp. 1–26. Givón, Talmy: Conversation, Cognitive, Communicative and Social Perspectives. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1997. Glenn, Phillip: Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. Goffman, Erving: On Face Work. An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. 1967. In: The Discourse Reader. Ed. by Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland. London and New York: Routledge 1999. Pp. 306–320.

369 —. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row 1974. Gumperz, John J.: Language and Social Identity. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983. Haakana, Markku: Laughter in Medical Interaction. From Quantification to Analysis, and Back. In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (2002). Pp. 207–235. Hall, Kira, and Mary Bucholtz: Gender Articulated. Language and the Socially Constructed Self. New York: Routledge 1995. Hatch, Evelyn, and Anne Lazaraton: The Research Manual. Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. Boston: Heinle & Heinle 1991. Hay, Jennifer: The Pragmatics of Humor Support. In: Humor 14 (2001). Pp. 55–82. Heritage, John: Presenting Emanuel Schegloff. In: Discussing Conversation Analysis. The Works of Emanuel A. Schegloff. Ed. by Carlo L. Prevignano and Paul J. Thibault. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2003. Pp. 1–10. Holmes, Janet: Functions of “you know” in Women’s and Men’s Speech. In: Language in Society 15 (1986). Pp. 1–22. Hopper, Robert: Gendering Talk. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press 2003. Jefferson, Gail: A Technique for Inviting Laughter and its Subsequent Acceptance Declination. In: Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Ed. by George Psathas. New York: Irvington 1979. Pp. 79–96. Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof: Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell 1997. Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall: Queerly Phrased. Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press 1997. Provine, Robert: Laughter. A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking 2000. Rieger, Caroline L.: Gender Differences in the Filling of Hesitation Pauses in English and German Spoken Discourse. Presentation given at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 28. Toronto, 14–17 October 1999. —: Self-repair Strategies of English-German Bilinguals in Informal Conversations. The Role of Language, Gender and Proficiency. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Alberta 2000. Ruch, Willibald, and Paul Ekman: The Expressive Pattern of Laughter. In: Emotions, Qualia, and Consciousness. Ed. by Alfred Kaszniak. Tokyo: World Scientific Publishing 2001. Pp. 410–425. Sacks, Harvey: Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1992. Schiffrin, Deborah: Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell 1994. —. Conversation Analysis. In: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 11 (1990). Pp. 3–16. Segerdahl, Pär: Conversation Analysis as Rigorous Science. In: Discussing Conversation Analysis. The Works of Emanuel A. Schegloff. Ed. by Carlo L. Prevignano and Paul J. Thibault. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2003. Pp. 91–108. Wodak, Ruth: Gender and Discourse. London: Sage Publications 1997.

370 Transcription Conventions Used: (..) (. . .) . . . (1.5) ⫽ CAPS (H) (Hx) ? ☺ {☺} [1 overlap 1] /y/ [. . .] italic

slight pause noticeable pause long pause, number in brakes indicates length in seconds lengthening of a sound or vowel utterance that was cut off (either by speaker or addressee) excited and/or emphasized delivery audible inhalation audible exhalation spoken with the intonation of a question laughter laughter of speaker and addressee a stretch of speech overlapping with another stretch uttered by a different speaker undecipherable word omitted transcription; continuation of utterance and/or turn italicized utterance has been translated from German into English

Oliver C. Speck

The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada Much has been said to the effect that the everyday is already heavily aestheticized, while art is losing its romantic mission to subvert. The point of differentiation between serious art and ‘joke’ art is here exactly that of the humoristic context. The question, ‘Is this serious?’ decides if the artwork is ‘really’ subversive or ‘just a clever joke’. By means of humour, Dada – this, rather short-lived, multinational and multilingual art movement – achieved what is the commonsensical expectation of modern art: a subversion of the prevalent ideology. The techniques employed here such as collage, pastiche (e.g. Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield), performance (Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters), assemblage, nonsensical or pseudo-metaphysical titles (George Grosz, Max Ernst) certainly inspired artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and the Ant Farm collective, to name a few of the late-comer Dadaists. This article will examine Dadaist techniques of subversion, among them techniques to subvert the gendered body, and look at DADA vis-à-vis present day art.

The rather short-lived international and multilingual art movement known as Dada has been only recently emancipated from its more famous successor, Surrealism. The exhibition entitled “DADA” shown in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005 presented an extensive overview of Dada’s manifestations in its different locations in Germany, France, Switzerland, the USA and elsewhere. A German exhibition in 2003, entitled Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit that found its way to New York in 2005 as Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–1940, grounds Dada in the tradition of the grotesque in German art. But even the latter exhibition and the accompanying scholarly material – regardless of the title – appears to be avoiding an analysis of the combination of the specific Dadaist humour and its subversive strategies. This oversight is indeed even more curious when we consider that, by means of humour, Dada achieved what constitutes a commonly-held expectation for modern art: a subversion of the prevalent ideology. The techniques employed – collage and pastiche (e.g., Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch), performance (Hugo Ball), assemblage (Kurt Schwitters), nonsensical or pseudo-metaphysical titles (George Grosz, Max Ernst) – certainly inspired artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and the Ant Farm collective, to name a few of the late-comer (post-)Dadaists. In order to put the phenomenon of Dada into relief and examine the way in which Dada’s strategies of subversion by humour work to debunk ideology, including the very ideology or myth of art that animates the Dada movements with all its paradoxical force, this article will first look at Dada vis-à-vis two instances of present day art, both of which insist on being taken seriously. With

372 Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben, the prevalence of strategies aimed at the subversion of gender and other ideologies can be explicated. While Dada’s sometimes sophomoric humour might appear as nonsense, I will show that the Dadaists are dead serious about art. Indeed, they embrace the paradox of the Romantic programme to the bitter end.

Is this Serious? Much has been said to the effect that the everyday is already heavily aestheticized, while art is losing its Romantic mission to subvert. The point of differentiation between serious art with the mission to subvert and ‘joke’ art, lacking this mission, concerns precisely the humouristic context. The question – ‘Is this serious?’ – decides if the artwork is ‘really’ subversive or ‘just a clever joke’. The seriousness is, of course, debatable, and in the age of computer generated images, always in doubt. To take the example of self-mutilation and selfdestruction in the artwork of David Nebreda,1 we need to believe the authenticity of the documents (rather than their computer generated origin), or the content of the artwork, to judge whether ‘he is really serious about that’ – serious because his body bears the imprint of his art, making him a latter-day ‘hunger artist’. Another, diametrically opposed point of reference would be the T-shirt marketed as underground art by alternative manufacturers. While conservative art critics will certainly bristle at the idea of an art form based on corporate branding, a recent article in the New York Times Magazine makes clear that the creators of these so-called ‘minibrands’ want to be taken seriously both as artists and entrepreneurs. Self-consciously channelling the bohemian lifestyle of the avant-garde artist, they attempt to abolish the difference between art and advertising. Given this trend, the journalist muses that “a product-based counterculture is inevitable” (Walker). Underlying the judgements concerning the seriousness of art is, of course, the fact that the point of no return for art has long been passed with the ultimate ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, the infamous urinal with the enigmatic signature “R. Mutt” that was displayed at the Salon of the Society of Independent Artists of New York in 1917 and entitled Fountain, as well as with his mustached Mona Lisa with the vulgar subscriptio. While it is obvious that these two works subvert normative expectations as to what is admissible in a museum and what is not, it is important to underline that Duchamp’s works, as well as Dada art and especially its performances, use gender as a framework for breaking down norms. As Andreas Böhn points out in his introductory essay to this volume, sex and gender are generally assumed to be congruent, i.e. ‘natural’, 1

Recently, in turn, the subject of a documentary film, ADN by Judith Cahen, 2005. David Houston Jones provides a succinct introduction to Nebrada.

373 and the comic subversion of gender identities therefore identifies and aims especially at assumptions about gendered role models. Duchamp’s Fountain underlines the contingency of gender norms by an unfolding of anal and sexual transpositions and slippages. The literally ob-scene object, the receptacle of urine – normally banned to the restroom for men, not to be seen by women – is not only displayed in the public space of an art gallery like it would be in a showroom for plumbing supplies, but also turned horizontally, thus revealing its vaginal form, while the signature’s meaning is open to unlimited interpretation – is it “Mutt-eR” (mother, in German)? A reference to the actual manufacturer of the urinal, Mott (Molesworth 179)? A mutt . . . – as much as the title is equally open to lewd interpretations. Given Jacques Lacan’s intimate acquaintance with the Dadaist and surrealist artists, the proto-Lacanian nature of this joke should not surprise us. Lacan famously demonstrates the uncoupling of sex and gender in his article The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious by using an amusing anecdote about two identical restroom doors. The sovereignty of the signifier over the signified, and in extension, of the signifying chain, over the biological being, is also demonstrated by one of the most famous, intriguing, and perhaps the funniest of Duchamp’s creations, the character – or “trademark”, as Helen Molesworth calls it – of Rrose Sélavy. This crude pun (éros, c’est la vie) serves as designator for a female alter-ego, (her) authorial signature, as well as brand name: She was an easily identifiable image and brand name; an identity for a given set of producers, as identity shielding the identity of her ‘parent company.’ The placement of her name or image on works ‘authenticated’ them. The version of authenticity being offered, however, is a puzzling one, for our surest belief in Rrose Sélavy comes not from Duchamp, but from Man Ray’s famous portrait of her (Molesworth 181).

Looking, then, at the portraits of Marcel Duchamp as elegant lady (Dickerman 376; Molesworth 180), we notice immediately that Duchamp does not appear like a drag queen but rather ‘plays it straight’. However, the appearance of “Rrose” on these head shots is that of a star beyond her prime. We could imagine this type of photo in the display case of a second-rated theatre or variété: the female star as narcissistic object of the fetishistic gaze has a short shelf-life. Man Ray obviously also ‘plays it straight’ and mimics the style of theatrical publicity shots, complete with soft filter, key light stressing the cheekbones, expensive jewellery, and hat deep over the piercing eyes. The portrait of a woman is thus turned into an image of women. Indeed, as George Baker points out in a lucid article, “the practice of Dada photography cannot be separated from a reflection upon the image of women” (193). This image depends as much on the fetishistic gaze as it does on the accessories like jewellery, fur collar, and ostrich feathers. Roughly at the same time these photographs were taken, Walter Benjamin describes the prostitute, the incarnation of woman-as-commodity, as

374 “menschgewordene Allegorie” (“humanized allegory”), as he explains: “Die Requisiten, mit denen die Mode sie ausstaffiert, sind die Embleme, mit denen sie sich behängt. Der Fetisch ist das Echtheitssiegel der Ware, wie das Emblem das Echtheitssiegel der Allegorie” (Gesammelte Schriften 1151) (“The requisites with which fashion dresses her up, are the emblems which she hangs on herself. The fetish is the commodity’s seal of authenticity, as much as the emblem is the allegory’s seal of authenticity”).2 By cleverly playing on gender stereotypes, this complex strategy of setting textual, contextual and cultural significations against each other, Man Ray’s portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy show that the fetishization and commoditization of art is linked to the fetishization and commoditization of women. By exposing this link and opening the differentiated fragments of this allegory up to ridicule, Dada finds a unique strategy of mocking the bourgeois fetish image of women. As we know from numerous sources, this strategy certainly provoked public outcry insofar as the Dada exhibitions were accompanied by scandals and police interventions (e.g. Gale 146–148, Molesworth 184–186). The outrage and indignation that these subversions cause, as well as more benign, humourous reactions, undoubtedly form part of Dada’s strategy. Looking at Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, we find assigned to Dada the position of a proto-filmic art that anticipates film’s “physical choc effects” that, at the time, cinema itself with its limited technical capabilities was not yet able to achieve. Referring to the use of waste and devalued items such as old bus tickets in their collages, Walter Benjamin describes the program of the Dada artist thus: What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creation, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of their production. [. . .] Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public (The Work of Art 237f.).

Ready-mades, and with them the entire Dada movement, problematize the notion of works of art proper, and constitute a clever comment on the commoditization of art and also of the entire Lebenswelt. With Dada, the event of art is transposed away from the object, the ‘artwork’ as such, to become a purely discursive event. Let us now look at how the decisive event of Dada still casts a shadow over the production of art, indeed the very notion of what art is and does. Instead of pointing to the many neo-Dadaists, for example the Fluxus-movement of the sixties, let me come back to the above-mentioned examples. If Dada posits art 2

Unless otherwise noted, all tranlations are my own and emphases according to the original.

375 as hovering between discourse and the embodiment of an object, Nebreda’s art insists on the embodiment in the artist himself. The Nebreda phenomenon, however, is a post-Dada possibility, as one of Dada’s premises is that the work of art has been done away with. Indeed, Nebreda tries to find a more secure object in the subject ‘artist’. The studied art-historian and self-proclaimed “non-artist” (Surlering) short-circuits the classic mechanism whereby art, having techne– in the Greek sense, has its origin outside itself, favouring instead the artist who paradoxically finds his essence in the work of art, the “absolute abstract inessence”, as Giorgio Agamben puts it in his book, The Man Without Content (54). Agamben defines the modern artist as follows: “The artist is the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station in this side of himself ” (55). For Nebreda, the origin of the work of art seems to inhabit his own artistic self, making him the new though impoverished version of the Romantic genius. In this light, the creation of underground brands appears here equally as an attempt at a new grounding in the purely tautological gesture of creating a brand for a subculture, defined by those who share the aesthetic object by buying this ‘cool brand’. The artistic process emerges here in a pure form, reduced to a self-conscious creation of an aesthetic object ex nihilo, a moment where the artistic community imagines itself as whole, retroactively projecting its founding moment as the mythical origin, that is, the creation of a commodity with an inflated exchange value, which gives the work of art its value. Both these gestures want to be understood as a call back to seriousness and substantiality in art, an anti- and post-Dada move to reground art, once in the doubling of the artist in subject/object and once in the empty gesture of the brand-creation. Here we encounter an interesting ironic twist: Dada itself has often, and rightfully, been labeled ‘anti-art’, a label, by the way, that the artists did not employ at the time (McEvilley). Dada is ‘anti’, because the original Dadaists understood very well that these tautological gestures are ideological gestures par excellence: the empty phrases of propaganda attempt to fill the brand of the respective community – be it nation or group of artists – with content by teleological reading and retroactive projection. Dada, as Roman Jakobson writes already in 1921, developed in opposition to the rampant “zoological nationalism” of the first decades of the twentieth century (40). Hence the Dadaists’ fondness for mock-propaganda and fake titles borrowed from the military and commercial lingo of the day: “Dada Siegt!”.

But is it Really Subversive? To answer this question let me come back, once again, to the anti- and post-Dada examples. We should not dismiss them as simple incidences of ‘postmodern

376 irony’. It is important to see the implicit Romanticism of these utopian gestures which promise relief from the fragmentation of modern life, one in the form of the suffering artist who embodies and acts out the schizophrenic modern self for us and in our stead, the other in the illusion of an artistic community, an ‘incrowd’ of hipsters cynically playing into consumer capitalism and united – if only temporarily – by the aesthetic experience of the minibrand of the moment. Being simply ‘anti’ is of course not a recipe for subversion. It can quickly deteriorate into a meaningless gesture. Andreas Böhn rightfully stresses the inherent paradox in an avant-gardist project based on transgression. The “laughingwith-position”, as he calls the subversive mode of laughter in Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Bachtin that violates norms, rather than reaffirming them, will quickly exhaust itself by running out of norms which it can violate. The Dada artists were well aware of the dangers of exaggerating their anarchic actions, as Hanne Bergius shows. As she puts it: “A subtle taming of the Dionysian by the moderating counterforce of the Apollonian was necessary” (167). Bergius traces the complex subversive strategies Dada employs back to the grotesque in Romanticism and points out the constant play of closeness and ironic distancing in their performances, or as Schlegel’s famous definition of irony puts it, “steter Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung” (172) (“a permanent change of self-creation to self-destruction”). This “permanent change” can be observed in actu in Tristan Tzara in his famous Dada Manifesto 1918: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles” (76). Acknowledging the intention of Dada’s iconoclastic performances as a tactic to subvert prevalent nationalist ideology, Leigh Clemons sees the danger of this programme. Clemons writes: “However, Dada’s deconstructive tactics were so continually active, so all-pervasive that they left no space in which any form of representation [. . .] could be reformed and solidified. This created, in effect, a field of empty ‘play’ devoid of any referents and relations” (149). What Clemons claims here, in short, is that the Dadaists follow through with romantic irony and end up with complete nonsense. Here, however, Clemens seems to underestimate the Dadaists’ determination to follow through with their own programme. Roman Jakobson’s perceptiveness can help to put this nonsense into perspective. In his 1921 essay, he remarks that while the jingoism of the time attempts to particularize Europe, “space is being reduced in gigantic strides – by radio, the telephone, aeroplanes” (34). He compares this Copernican shift with the “science of relativity” (35), where indeed Dada “relativizes itself historically” (38). Such a relativized movement can not only not have a centre, but must also necessarily be without firm identity. The multinationality of Dada immunized the movement against the pitfalls of a nihilistic stance of being solely ‘anti’. As T J. Demos points out in his close readings of the trilingual poem L’amiral cherche une maison à louer (Circulations; qtd. in

377 Zurich Dada), Dada “refused the formation of an alternative community of consensus, one unified in opposition” (Circulations 16). Without any firm ideological grounding, this refusal can be easily misunderstood as mere gesture. Hugo Ball’s much quoted diary entry from 4 April 1916 – “our cabaret is a gesture” – leads for example Hans Burckhard Schlichting to diagnose a protopostmodern relativism in Dada. If the cabaret is only a gesture, he deducts, this gesture can only gain a relative meaning. According to Schlichting, this relativism is developed by the Dadaists “in einem semantischen Egalitarismus, der klassischen Vorform des heutigen ‘anything goes’ ” (59) (“into a semantic egalitarianism, the classic early form of today’s ‘anything goes’ ”). However, the relativity that Jakobson describes should not be confused with postmodern relativism. To better grasp this Dadaist relativity, I would like to evoke Gilles Deleuze. In his book on the baroque, The Fold (Le pli), Deleuze, establishes “perspectivism as a truth of relativity (and not a relativity of what is true)” (21). Instead of a timeless “Truth” to which every subject takes a varying, relative position, perspectivism “is the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject” (20). Deleuze’s notion of perspectivism relies on a Benjaminian notion of allegory. He is following Leibniz, but he is also inspired by Benjamin’s famous book on the Trauerspiel. In typical Deleuzian fashion, this acknowledgement appears in the last few pages of The Fold, almost like an afterthought (125). However, Deleuze’s notion of allegory is clearly indebted to Benjamin. Instead of a personification of a transcendent principle, this modern notion of allegory concerns a text that is the allegory of its own creation. The “destruction of the aura of their creation” that Benjamin evokes in the above quoted passage, is here also emblematic in the true sense of the word. By using waste, devalued items, and cut-outs the process of the creation is exposed. The witty, funny, and openly unwieldy titles add the inscription that every emblem needs, as, for example, in Raoul Hausmann’s collages – the collage with the inscription “Dada siegt” is entitled: Ein bürgerliches Präzisionsgehirn ruft eine Weltbewegung hervor (A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement) (for more examples cf. Dickermann 126–133). We should understand the Dadaist project with Deleuze as a projection, a model, but not as a metaphor. A metaphoric mode of reading establishes a transcendental perspective from which a body of texts is judged. Only from a certain point of view, however, can we grasp a truth about gender-roles in our society. And this point of view, which is, like all allegories bound to time, also the only legitimate point of view. Man Ray’s portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, to come back to this example, establish this truth solely from the point of view of the commodity. Contrary to Schlichting, I would argue that, if Dada is indeed only a gesture, this gesture points to a sophisticated strategy of subversion that works on two levels: it avoids exactly what I would label “bad postmodern relativism”, i.e.,

378 the commonly-held attitude that one can read a work of art in any way one wants, because everyone possesses an equally-valid personal truth, instead of establishing a relativist perspectivism. And, secondly, the refusal to build any community, even one that is only defined by its opposition, is directed against the romantic ideal of a community bound by a shared aesthetic experience. This is exactly what Benjamin pointed to in the above quoted passage that describes the Dadaistic achievement of “a rather vehement distraction”. The role of distraction in Benjamin’s work of art essay is, of course, crucial: “Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses” (The Work of Art 240). The fascist aestheticization of politics attempts to prevent a mobilization of the masses by pressing art into the production of ritual, pseudo-auratic values, in order to preserve the conditions of private ownership.3 What first appeared as a simple question – ‘But is it really subversive ?’ – now touches nothing less than the problem of the work of art. Let me briefly return to Agamben. Rereading Hegel’s Aesthetics, but also responding to Kantian aesthetics, Agamben shows that we need not fear the death of art, but the infinite dying of art. He proclaims, “as long as nihilism secretly governs the course of Western history, art will not come out of its interminable twilight” (58). Dada’s attempts at humour that sometimes seem quite desperate are indeed the final attempt to kill art in its modern conception, manifestly impossible though this might be, but this is also an attempt to come out of its twilight. It is no coincidence that, after this no-holds-barred attack on art, the Surrealists reintroduced limits, complete with jealously guarded definitions and manifestoes.

Can We Still Laugh? The general mood at the Dada-performances must have been quite raucous. Hugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, notes in his diary on 26 February 1916: “Everyone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The little cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is getting to be a playground for crazy emotions”. And this intoxication was certainly carried over to other Dada venues. A journalist attests for an evening 1918 in Berlin “an incredible confusion of whistling, laughter and indignation” (Wolfrath 283). A painting by Marcel Jano, “Cabaret Voltaire, 1916” (Teubner 137), can serve as an illustration of an evening at the Cabaret, to which Hans Arp gives the following 3

Benjamin’s argument, especially his clear preference for the Dadaists and Surrealists and his scathing critique of Futurism, of course, has been hotly debated. For an overview of the discussion and a bibliography, cf. Antliff 154.

379 impression: “Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists” (Arp on Arp 234). The description of this Dada performance sounds like the symptoms of the so-called “shell shock”: “tics and tremors, paralysis, hyperaesthesia of one or all the senses, swooning, catatonia, mutism, blindness, deafness, stuttering, rhythmical screaming, and crawling on all fours, [. . .] and a general lapse into atavistic or infantile methods of reaction” (Doherty 90). Of course, this atmosphere of a mad dance on the volcano can not be separated from the war raging at the same time – as Hugo Ball writes in his novel Tenderenda the Fantast: “The laughter increases to the same degree as the horror” (119). Although it is certainly aligned with him and his grotesque tics, Dada’s laughter, however, should not be mistaken for the senseless, hysteric laughter of a victim of shell-shock. It is, rather, a laughter with this victim, a laughter that stems from the truth of relativity, a truly mirthless laughter as Beckett famously describes it.4 It is Hans Arp’s great insight to point out “that the Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art” (Arp, Looking 13). This mirthless laughter is emblematic for the state of art, which is the state of the world. Let me put in a final word of warning: nowadays, the event of Dada registers a nostalgia for what preceded its murderous gesture, and raises the spectre of the artwork that will not leave us, and that returns in major exhibitions (such as the above-mentioned Pompidou/MOMA/National Gallery of Art exhibition), and that invites us ever so playfully to reify and deify it once again. We should instead hold true to Dada’s animating force: A true Dadaist takes nothing seriously, by taking nothing seriously.

Works Consulted Agamben, Giorgio: The Man without Content. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press 1999. Antliff, Mark: Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity. In: The Art Bulletin 84.1 (2002). Pp. 148–169. 4

Mirthless laughter must be understood as a process. Beckett, Watt (48):“Of all the laughs that are strictly speaking not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless. They correspond to successive, how shall I say successive. . . suc . . . successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. The laugh that now is mirthless once was hollow, the laugh that once was hollow once was bitter. And the laugh that once was bitter? Eyewater, Mr. Watt, eyewater”.

380 Arp, Jean Hans: Looking. Museum of Modern Art. In: Arp. Ed. with an introd. by James Thrall Soby. Garden City (NY).: Doubleday 1958. Pp. 12–16. Arp, Jean: Arp on Arp. Poems, Essays, Memories. New York: Viking Press 1972. Ball, Hugo: Die Flucht aus der Zeit. Zürich: Limmat 1992. —: Flight out of time. A Dada Diary. New York: Viking Press 1974 (Trans. of Die Flucht aus der Zeit). —: Tenderenda the Fantast. In: ‘Blago bung, blago bung, bosso fataka!’ First Texts of German Dada. Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, and Walter Serner. Trans. and introd. by Malcolm Green. London: Atlas Press 1995. Pp. 87–149. Beckett, Samuel: Watt. New York: Grove Press 1959. Benjamin, Walter: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol I.3. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1991. —: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Illuminations. New York: Schocken 1969. Pp. 217–251. Bergius, Hanne: Dada Grotesque. In: Comic Grotesque. Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870–1940. Ed. by Pamela Kort and Hanne Bergius. München – New York : Prestel 2004. Pp. 155–169. Clemons, Leigh: Serious Fun. Berlin Dada’s Tactical Engagement with German National Narration. In: Theatre Research International 28.2 (2003). Pp. 143–156. DADA: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Ed. by Leah Dickermann. Washington D.C.: D.A.P./The National Gallery of Art 2005. Deleuze, Gilles: The Fold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993. Demos, T. J.: Circulations. In and Around Zurich Dada. In: October 105 (2003). Pp. 147–158. —: Zurich Dada. The Aesthetics of Exile. In: The Dada Seminars. Ed. by Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky. Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, in association with Distributed Art Publishers 2005. Pp. 7–29. Doherty, Brigid: “See: We Are All Neurasthenics!” or, The Trauma of Dada Montage. In: Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997). Pp. 82–132. Jones, David Houston: The Body Eclectic. Viewing Bodily Modification in David Nebreda. In: Reconstruction 5.1 (2005). 15 August 2006. ⬍http://reconstruction. eserver.org ⬎. Lacan, Jacques: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious. In: Yale French Studies 36/37: Structuralism (1966). Pp. 112–147. McEvilley, Thomas: The Triumph of Anti-art. Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism. Kingston (NY): McPherson 2005. Molesworth, Helen: Rrose Sélavy goes shopping. In: The Dada Seminars. Ed. by Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky. Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, in association with Distributed Art Publishers 2005. Pp. 173–189.

381 Schlegel, Friedrich: Kritische Schriften und Fragmente. Studienausgabe in sechs Bänden. Vol 2. Paderborn: Schöningh 1988. Schlichting, Hans Burckhard: Anarchie und Ritual. Hugo Balls Dadaismus. In: Dionysius DADA Areopagita. Hugo Ball und die Kritik der Moderne. Ed. by Bernd Wacker. Paderborn: Schöningh 1996. Pp. 41–68. Surlering: Les ‘petits amputations’ de David Nebreda. (Review of an 2004 exhibition of Nebreda’s work). 15 August 2006. ⬍http://www.surlering.com⬎. Teubner, Ernst (Ed.): Hugo Ball (1886–1986). Leben und Werk. Berlin: publica 1986. Tzara, Tristan: Dada Manifesto 1918. In: The Dada Painters and Poets. An Anthology. Ed. by Robert Motherwell. Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1981. Pp. 76–82. Wolfrath, Willi: Der Dadaismus. 1918. Da Dada da war, ist Dada da. Aufsätze und Dokumente. Ed. by Karl Riha. München – Wien: Hanser 1980. Pp. 283f. Walker, Rob: The Brand Underground. The New York Times Magazine. Sunday, 30 July 2006. Pp. 28–33, 55–56.

List of Contributors Susanne Bach – M.A. in English Literature, German Literature, and Education, University of Freiburg, Germany, 1989; Ph.D. Freiburg, 1992; Habilitation (postdoctoral thesis) in English studies, Mannheim, 2003; Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim, 1992–2003; Research Fellow, Edinburgh University, 1995; Visiting Scholar, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1995–1996 and 1999–2000; Associate Professor (Hochschuldozentin) at Mannheim University and Visiting Professor, Bayreuth University, 2003–2006; Chair of English Literature at Kassel University, as of 2006. Andreas Böhn – M.A. in Germanic Studies and Philosophy at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 1988; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, Mannheim, 1991; Habilitation (postdoctoral thesis) in Germanic and Media Studies, Mannheim, 1999; Lecturer, Mannheim, 1988–1997; Visiting Lecturer at the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 1992; Habilitation Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 1997–1999; Heisenberg Fellowship (DFG), 1999–2001; Professor of Germanic and Media Studies, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, as of 2001. Stefan Börnchen – M.A. in German Literature at Washington University, St. Louis, USA, 2000; Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of Cologne, Germany, 2005; Teaching Assistant, Washington University, 1999–2000; Teaching Assistant, Universities of Cologne and Bonn, 2000–2001; Research Assistant, University of Cologne, 2001–2006; Scholarships from the German National Academic Foundation, Fulbright Foundation et. al.; University Prize and Offermann Hergarten Prize for dissertation; Collaborateur scientifique at the University of Luxembourg, as of 2008. Raluca Cernahoschi – M.A. in Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver B.C., Canada, 2004. Ph.D. student as of 2004, Ph.D. cand. as of 2006. Teaching Assistant, Stanford University, USA, 1999–2001; Teaching Assistant, UBC Vancouver, 2002–2004; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 2004–2007; Sessional Instructor, UBC Vancouver, as of 2006. Frank Degler – M.A. in Germanic Studies, Philosophy, and History at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 1997; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, Mannheim, 2003; Research Associate, Institute of Germanic Studies, University of Mannheim, as of 2004. Birte Giesler – M.A. in Germanic Studies, Philosophy, and Sociology at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1996; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies,

384 Karlsruhe, 2001; Graduate Research Fellowship at the German Literary Archive, Marbach a. N./German Schiller Association, 1994–1995; Sessional Lecturer at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Darmstadt, Germany, 2001–2004; Visiting Lecturer at the University of Lódz, Poland, 2003; FeodorLynen-Fellowship of the Humboldt-Foundation, 2004; Assistant Professor (Lecturer Level B), Department of Germanic Studies, University of Sydney, Australia, as of 2005. Markus Hallensleben – M.A. in Modern German Literature, Linguistics, Drama and Theatre at the Free University Berlin, Germany, 1994; Adjunct Lecturer at FU Berlin, 1995–1996; Ph.D. in Modern German Literature, FU Berlin, 1998; Visiting Scholar at the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, Nagoya City University, Japan, 1998–1999; DAAD Lecturer of German at the University of Tokyo, Japan, 1999–2003; Assistant Professor at the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C., as of 2004. Jessica Hammann – M.A. in Germanic Studies at the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 2004; Staatsexamen (First State Examination) at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 2006; Sessional Lecturer, University of Mannheim, 2007; Ph.D. candidate in Germanic Studies, University of Mannheim, as of 2007. Volker Helbig – M.A. in Germanic and English Studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 2002; Ph.D. in Literature and Media Studies, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 2006. Stefan Horlacher – Maîtrise at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, France, 1990; Staatsexamen (First State Examination) in English Studies, French Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 1992; Ph.D. in English Studies, Mannheim, 1997; Habilitation (postdoctoral thesis) in English Studies, Mannheim, 2003. Habilitationspreis (postdoctoral award) from the German Association of Professors of English. Visiting scholar at Cornell University (1995) and at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (2008). Research and Teaching Assistant at Mannheim,1992–1997; Assistant Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies, Mannheim, 1997–2003; Associate Professor (Hochschuldozent), Mannheim, 2003–2006; Professor and Chair, Department of English, Dresden University of Technology, as of 2006. Jakub Kazecki – M.A. in German at Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, 1999; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver B.C., Canada, 2006; Teaching Assistant, Halifax, 1998–1999, and Vancouver, 2000–2004; Sessional Lecturer, Vancouver,

385 2004–2006; Assistant Professor of German, Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, 2006–2008; Assistant Professor of German, Department of Modern Languages, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, USA, as of 2008. Ellie Kennedy – M.A in German Literature, Carleton University, ON, Canada, 1995; Ph.D. in German, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 2004; Assistant Professor of German, Department of Culture and Language Studies, University of New Brunswick, Canada, 2004–2005; Assistant Professor of German, Queen’s University, 2005–2008. Karin Lornsen – M.A. in Germanic Studies, Linguistics, and Politics at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 2001; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C., 2007. Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza – M.A. in German Studies at the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 1999; M.A. in Political Sciences and German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Mannheim, Germany, 2000; Ph.D. in German Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, ON, Canada, 2005; Recipient of Canada’s Governour General Academic Gold Medal, 2005, and of the Women in German Dissertation Prize, 2006; Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Canada, 2007; Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, 2007–2008; Research Year in Mexico City, 2008–2009. Christine Mielke – M.A in Germanic Studies, Sociology, Historical Studies and certificate in Applied Cultural Studies at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, Karlsruhe 2004; Graduate Research Fellowship at the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg, 2001–2003; Teaching and Research Associate at the Centre of Cultural and General Studies, Karlsruhe, as of 2004. Gaby Pailer – M.A. in Germanic Studies, Medieval Studies, and Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1988; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, Karlsruhe, 1992; Lecturer, Karlsruhe, 1992–1996; Visiting Lecturer at the University of Tübingen, 1993; Research Fellowships at the Klassik-Stiftung Weimar, 1996 and 2007; Assistant Professor (Margarete von Wrangell Fellowship), Karlsruhe, 1997–2001; Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C., Canada, as of 2001. Beth Pentney – M.A. in English Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada, 2003; Ph.D. candidate in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, as of 2005; Sessional Instructor in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver B.C., 2008.

386 Caroline L. Rieger – M.A. in Communications, Germanic Studies, and Philosophy at the University of Essen, Germany, 1992; Ph.D. in German Applied Linguistics, University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, 2000; Public Relations Consultant at Vom Hoff Communications in Duesseldorf, Germany, 1992–1994; Freelance Public Relations Consultant, 1994–1996; Sessional Lecturer, University of Alberta, 2000–2001; Assistant Professor of German Applied Linguistics, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British Columbia Vancouver B.C., Canada, as of 2001. Ulrich Scheck – Staatsexamen (First State Examination) in Philosophy and Germanic Studies, University of Mannheim, Germany, 1978; M.A. and Ph.D. in German Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 1980 and 1984; Queen’s National Scholar and Assistant Professor, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, 1985–1993; Associate Professor, Queen’s University, 1994–2000; Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, Queen’s University, 2001–2005; Professor and Dean of Arts, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C., Canada, 2005-present; Associate Vice-President (Academic), Thompson Rivers University, as of 2007. Andreas Seidler – M.A. in Germanic Studies, Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, 2003; Ph.D. in Germanic Studies, Karlsruhe, 2006; Graduate Research Fellowship at the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg, 2004–2006; Highschool teacher and Sessional Lecturer at the University of Karlsruhe, as of 2006. Oliver C. Speck – M.A. in German Studies, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, 1990; Ph.D. in German Literature, University of Mannheim, Germany, 1996. Lecturer at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, 1996–1999; Associate/Assistant Professor of German, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2000–2007; Assistant Professor of Film Studies and German, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA, as of 2007. Peter Stear – M.A. by Research in German Studies, UEA Norwich, UK, 1993; Lecturer (Lektor) of English Language and British Studies, University of Mannheim, Germany, 1994–2006; Lecturer and Research Associate of English Literature, University of Dresden, Germany, as of 2006. Sabine Wilke – Staatsexamen (First State Examination) and M.A. in German and English at the University of Mainz, Germany, 1982; Ph.D in German, Mainz, 1986; Assistant Professor of German, Stanford University, 1986–1989; Assistant Professor of German, University of Washington, Seattle, 1989–1992; Associate Professor of German, University of Washington, 1992–1997; Professor of German, University of Washington, as of 1997; Visiting Professor of German, Harvard University, 2000; Chair of the Department of Germanics, University of Washington, as of 2001.

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Hosting the Monster Edited by Holly Lynn Baumgartner and Roger Davis

Hosting the Monster responds to the call of the monstrous with, not rejection, but invitation. Positing the monster as that which defies classification, the essays in this collection are an ongoing engagement with that which lies outside of established boundaries. With chapters ranging from the monstrous mother or the deformed child to subjectivity in transition, this volume is not only of interest to film and gender scholars and literary and cultural theorists but also students of popular culture or horror. Its wide appeal stems from its invitation both to entertain the monster and to widen the call to and the listening for the monsters that have not yet, and perhaps must not yet, come calling back. This sense of hospitality and non-hostility is one guiding principle of this collection, suggesting that the ability to survey and research the otherwise may reveal more about the subjectivity of the self through the wisdom of the other, however monstrous the manifestation.

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008 X-260 pp. (At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 52) Paper € 54 / US$ 78 ISBN: 9789042024861

USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): 1-800-225-3998 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

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Genres of Modernity

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008 X-334 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 120) Paper € 69 / US$ 100 ISBN: 9789042024939

Contemporary Indian Novels in English Dirk Wiemann

Genres of Modernity maps the conjunctures of critical theory and literary production in contemporary India. The volume situates a sample of representative novels in the discursive environment of the ongoing critical debate on modernity in India, and offers for the first time a rigorous attempt to hold together the stimulating impulses of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and the boom of Indian fiction in English. In opposition to the entrenched narrative of modernity as a single, universally valid formation originating in the West, the theoretical and literary texts under discussion engage in a shared project of refiguring the present as a site of heterogeneous genres of modernity. The book traces these figurative efforts with particular attention to the treatment of two privileged metonymies of modernity: the issues of time and home in Indian fiction. Combining close readings of literary texts from Salman Rushdie to Kiran Nagarkar with a wide range of philosophical, sociological and historiographic reflections, Genres of Modernity is of interest not only for students of postcolonial literatures but for academics in the fields of Cultural Studies at large.

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Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000ⴙ

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008 427 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 121) Bound € 85 / US$ 123 ISBN: 9789042024977

New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts Edited by Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Christoph Reinfandt

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000⫹ provides an encompassing survey of artistic responses to the changes in the British cultural climate in the early years of the 21st century. It traces topical reactions to new forms of racism and religious fundamentalism, to legal as well as ‘illegal’ immigration, and to the threat of global terror; yet it also highlights new forms of intercultural communication and convivial exchange. Framed by contributions from novelists Patrick Neate and Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000⫹ showcases how artistic representations in literature, film, music and the visual arts reflect and respond to social and political discourses, and how they contribute to our understanding of the current (trans)cultural situation in Britain. The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of writers such as Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay, Nadeem Aslam, Gautam Malkani, Nirpal Dhaliwal and Monica Ali; films ranging from Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice to Michael Winterbottom’s In This World and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men; paintings and photography by innovative black and Asian British Artists; and dubstep music.

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Migratory Settings Edited by Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas

Migratory Settings proposes a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migration as installing movement within place. Migration not only takes place between places, but also has its effects on place, in place. In brief, we suggest a view on migration in which place is neither reified nor transcended, but ‘thickened’ as it becomes the setting of the variegated memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and idealizations of both migrants and native inhabitants that experiences of migration bring into contact with each other. Migration makes place overdetermined, turning it into the mise-en-scène of different histories. Hence, movement does not lead to placelessness, but to the intensification and overdetermination of place, its ‘heterotopicality.’ At the same time, place does not unequivocally authenticate or validate knowledge, but, shot-through with the transnational and the transcultural, exceeds it ceaselessly. Our contributions take us to the migratory settings of a fictional exhibition; a staged political wedding; a walking tour in a museum; African appropriations of Shakespeare and Sophocles; Gollwitz, Germany; Calais, France; the body after a heart transplant; refugees’ family portraiture; a garden in Vermont; the womb.

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008 276 pp. (Thamyris 19) Paper € 55 / US$ 80 ISBN: 9789042024250

USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): 1-800-225-3998 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations