Abstract
The chapter takes as its starting point the parallax between tragedy and comedy as a red thread that has been running through our culture since antiquity. Freud and Lubitsch are then taken as a special exemplary case of this parallax: in the fall of 1919 they both looked at the same story, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (written in 1816), which inspired Freud in writing the famous paper “The Uncanny,” while Lubitsch at the very same time produced his delightful comedy “The Doll” based on an episode of the same story. The chapter proposes a series of oppositions to address this parallax shift between the uncanny and the comical: frontal view vs. “looking awry”; diabolical evil vs. stupidity and inanity; desire vs. drive; individual vs. generic; the lack of a lack vs. proliferation of the lack; the inherent dissatisfaction vs. the dislocated partial satisfaction etc. It finally argues that one should not simply posit the one against the other, but rather address the very parallax between the two.
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Notes
- 1.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (14th edition, 1989) proposes “Abderitan laughter = scoffing laughter, and Abderite = scoffer.”
- 2.
Democritus says, e.g., “You and your affairs are all one vast joke. […] There is no taking it seriously. All is vanity. Mere interchange of atoms in an infinite void.” And Heraclitus: “I am thinking, friend, upon human affairs; and well may I weep and lament, for the doom of all is sealed. Hence my compassion and my sorrow. For the present, I think not of it; but the future!—the future is all bitterness. Conflagration and destruction of the world” (Lucian 1905, 195).
- 3.
Let me just mention the wonderful self-portrait of young Rembrandt in the guise of a laughing Democritus, 1628.
- 4.
“[Socrates] was about to clinch his argument, though, to tell the truth, sleepy as they were, they were hardly able to follow his reasoning. In fact, Aristophanes fell asleep in the middle of the discussion, and very soon thereafter, as day was breaking, Agathon also drifted off” (223d.). The verge between comedy and tragedy is placed on the verge between wakefulness and sleep, as well as on the verge of night and day. There is a further curious detail that the report of this discussion is curtailed: “Aristodemus [who reported on this] couldn’t remember exactly what they were saying—he’d missed the first part of their discussion, and he was half-asleep anyway” (Ibid.). So all we get is a cut-off bit of this discussion, much in need of its “missing half.”
- 5.
Rokem’s book provides an excellent and ample commentary on this passage. Curiously, Leo Strauss took a very different view, based on a close scrutiny of Aristophanes’ work and adopting his perspective: “The second trait that, according to Aristophanes, distinguishes Socrates from the poets is his ineptitude in judging human beings and in handling them. The man who above everything else worries about the things aloft has a very inadequate knowledge of the manners and souls of the various kinds of men: From on high one does not see human beings as they are […]. Socrates, one may say, is a leader of souls […] without being the knower of souls” (Strauss 1996, 313). Thus poets, both in tragedy and (particularly) in comedy, can see what philosophers cannot; philosophy’s limitation would precisely be its all-encompassing stance “from above.” Philosophy’s fault would thus be to purport to be a meta-genre, disavowing its being a genre, actually in its loftiness an inferior one.
- 6.
I guess deceptively so—and Alenka Zupančič’s book on comedy (2008a) is a great attempt to argue for comedy as the attitude which comes ultimately closer to the psychoanalytic basic insights. All subsequent work on comedy is indebted to her path-breaking book. The present chapter is but an attempt to further embroider the issue.
- 7.
His oldest existing movie, Als ich tot war, As I Was Dead (1916), was actually found in Slovenia, of all places, in 1992, given that one of the biggest fronts was on the Soča river. A single specimen survived in an attic.
- 8.
Actually eight, if we consider the two that premiered in January 1919 and were produced in 1918. The great successes were Die Austernprinzessin, The Oyster Princess—a vintage Lubitsch to the point that on his memorial plaque in Berlin only the three most memorable films are mentioned, Die Austernprinzessin, Ninotchka, and To Be or Not to Be. The other one was Madame Dubarry, a costume piece, a historical spectacle set in the time of the French revolution, which was his first big international success (in America, too: this was one of the films that led to the American invitation in 1923).
- 9.
Already in 1921, when he had attained a wide reputation, he looked back on his career so far and said: “Possibly I like a little fantastic film of mine, The Doll, best of all” (Lubitsch quoted in Eyman 1993, 66).
- 10.
If one does not count the two Shakespeare parodies that immediately followed Die Puppe: Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920), a parody of The Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo und Julia im Schnee (1920), a parody of Romeo and Juliet. Apparently Die Puppe gave him a taste for poking fun at “great literature,” but not for long.
- 11.
Gruesome nannies evoke Struwwelpeter, which was written by another Hoffmann, namely Heinrich Hoffmann, in 1845, and was one of the most popular German educational books. It is now widely known due to The Tiger Lillies and their adaptation, Shockheaded Peter, in 1998. It makes one wonder about German special education methods!
- 12.
In the credits of the movie, and then in filmographies, we find an Alfred Maria Willner as the author of the adaptation of the story, which is misinformation. Willner was merely the German translator of the French operetta libretto, and this is the text that Lubitsch had in his hands; one cannot to ascribe any authorship to Willner.
- 13.
I started with some general considerations of the tragic and the comic paradigm. One has to add that das Unheimliche presents a specific modern turn, emerging in the early nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the French revolution, and cannot be simply subsumed under the tragic tradition, despite the fact that all these stories invariably have a tragic ending.
- 14.
- 15.
This is the feature exploited by the position of the analyst: the analyst, too, utters at the most an “Ah!” here and there, he turns into an automaton to give rise to the dimension of the Other, the real interlocutor of the patient’s “monologue,” and also to produce that strange kind of love, perhaps love in its paramount sense, which is what Freud called transference love. Nathanael’s lengthy conversations with Olympia prefigure the analytic sessions.
- 16.
“Hoffmann’s fantastic tales,” as the phrase goes. Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier was the title of his first book that made his fame in 1814, while “The Sandman” story belongs to the volume Die Nachtstücke, 1815–16.
- 17.
I tried to argue all this at more length in my old paper on the uncanny, see Dolar (1991).
- 18.
When dealing with comedy we all follow in Zupančič’s footsteps: “It is the logic of constitutive dislocation (as immanent nothing) that links the comedy to the dynamics of the drives, and distinguishes it from the uncanny, which is bound to the dynamic of desire with its logic of constitutive lack (as transcendent nothing)” (2008b, 75).
- 19.
Robert Pfaller proposed an elegant formula for the distinction between the comic and the uncanny: the comic is what is uncanny for others (Pfaller 2005, 209). His picturesque example is the case of the sneezing corpse: if an actor who is supposed to be dead on stage sneezes, this would produce hearty laughter. The assumption of this laughter is the fictional “naïve observer” who would take the theatrical fiction for reality and for whom such an event would indeed appear as uncanny. What we laugh at is the observer to whom we have delegated the belief in the reality of fiction. Zupančič retorted that what we delegate in this instance of a naïve observer is not the belief, but the knowledge which can discriminate between theatrical fiction and reality, and having deposited this knowledge with the Other we can believe in the theatrical illusion: “As long as the big Other knows that this is only a play and not reality, I can believe it is reality” (2008b, 66). Thus we would have two Others: the one who believes (and takes the theatrical illusion for reality) and the one who knows (that there is a firm demarcation line between the two). The situation is perhaps more troubling if we consider that “there is no Other of the Other,” to take Lacan’s dictum, so “that the two others tend to collapse, that the other and the Other are easily confounded […] The other who believes and the other who knows cannot be quite held apart” (Dolar 2017, 581). This threatening collapse caused a major problem for Plato and his take on mimesis, what one could call his panic. It is not easy to disentangle knowledge and belief.
- 20.
The film was well received at the time, except for the extremely negative reviews in the Catholic press: “The content of this concoction which exhibits the low-point of our contemporary cinema by a sad example, is in its whole course nothing else but a shameless mockery of the life of catholic orders” (Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Puppe).
- 21.
If we are to follow Kleist’s famous piece on Marionettentheater, then the marionettes lead us directly to the core of the human. Their advantage is the absence of consciousness and self-reflection, which is not unrelated to the comic figures in their mechanical drivenness. Kleist wrote his piece in 1810, in the same historical moment as Hoffmann’s Sandman.
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Dolar, M. (2019). The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec Lubitsch. In: Mascat, J., Moder, G. (eds) The Object of Comedy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_2
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