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The Comic Mimesis

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689659

1539-7858

Mladen Dolar,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Comic MimesisMladen DolarMladen Dolar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLet me start with a story, which is supposedly a true story, quite apart from its truth-value as a legend. There is nothing comical about it, quite the opposite, although it strangely verges on the comic. It will hopefully lead us straight to the core of the problem of mimesis and its comical penchant.Against all odds, there is in Christianity a patron saint of actors, despite the ways in which Christianity has largely regarded acting, and theatre, as a dubious profession, a source of sinful entertainment and questionable virtue. There are condemnations of actors and acting, in most serious terms, from no lesser authorities than Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But there is an actor who was worthy not only of redemption but also of sanctification. His name is Genesius, and his feast is celebrated on 25 August by the Catholic Church. So how did Genesius become worthy of sainthood and the patron saint of acting to whom actors are to commend their soul (if they have one)?1The time is 303 AD; the place is Rome. This was the period known as the great persecution, namely, the last, the largest, and the bloodiest persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. A decade later, with the Edict of Milan in 313, Emperor Constantine would stop all persecution, and a few decades later Christianity would become the official religion of the empire. But at the beginning of this bloody wave, which would cost thousands of lives, all means were employed to stop this pest (although Christians probably then formed less than 10 percent of the population). And one formidable weapon of the anti-Christian propaganda was theatre, a modest stand-in for mass media. Emperor Diocletian fostered this kind of theatre production, so he had a play produced in his court whose intent was to show the contemptible behavior of Christians, to display their irrational beliefs and rituals, to expose them to mockery, and to demonstrate by graphic means how the people who followed that creed would finish badly. The play ended with the theatrical torture and execution of Christians, on stage, no doubt to the general delight of the audience.Genesius was a modest actor who had to play a Christian villain in this scenario and be submitted to the deserved ordeal in the end. But as the play progressed, so goes the legend, the young actor, himself a heathen believer in Roman deities, while enacting the Christian rites and professing their creed, no doubt with the great empathy of a good actor, converted suddenly to Christianity. What he enacted then became the place of revelation; he was touched by the grace of God, which enabled him to see the light and espouse the true religion, as the Christian account would have it. He was so profoundly involved in his role that he decided to abandon his previous sinful life, the life now seen in retrospect as a mere theatrical make-believe. He stopped acting and found the truth in what was to be a mere enactment. All previous life appeared as theatre, and theatre appeared as the place of truth. As the play finished, Genesius seemed unable to abandon his role, so he continued preaching Christianity. What was first seen as an incident was soon considered to be the major crime, the very crime against which the play was staged. The theatrical propaganda device backfired, producing a conversion instead of condemnation and repulsion. Genesius was brought to Diocletian; they engaged in bitter controversy and theological dispute, and he was ordered under severe threats to abandon this creed. He courageously refused, and the consequence was that Genesius was tortured and put to death on the very same stage where he just a little before played a tortured Christian put to death by theatrical make-believe. Reality caught up with the play, the last scene was restaged now for real, theatre fakery was replaced by actual torture, the play served retrospectively as the rehearsal for the real martyrdom. (Was the audience as delighted as before, or even more so?)Genesius did indeed become a Christian martyr and a saint, venerated to this day. He is the patron of the British Catholic Stage Guild. There is a shrine of St. Genesius in St Malachy’s Catholic Church in Manhattan (in the Theatre District, just off Broadway); there is a Genesian Theatre in Sydney; and there are other sites of commemoration. There are some accounts of this story already in the fourth century, although it is hard to tell fact from fiction. The incident became very popular, and soon after lifting the anathema on Christianity there was a church built in Rome in his honor.2It is clear that this event offers itself quite evidently to propaganda. What was meant as anti-Christian ideological warfare could be ideally exploited as propaganda for Christianity, staging the event as the showpiece of conversion, thus theatrically demonstrating the superior power of the true religion. So, it is actually quite surprising that it took Christianity more than a thousand years to come upon this simple idea and to produce a play about Genesius’s martyrdom. His story was part of various martyrologies, often recounted in collections of gruesome anecdotes of Christian martyrdom but not put on stage—for a good and simple reason.3 What would be needed to tell his story on stage is a metatheatrical device of theatre within theatre, a play within a play. In the obvious scenario we would watch Diocletian’s court on stage watching the performance of the actors, with one actor then experiencing conversion, thus descending from the stage onstage to the mere stage. The stage would have to redouble itself to tell this story, but this device was not yet available in medieval times. The invention of a play within a play, the play reflected in the play staged on stage, occurred in the sixteenth century when it quickly gained great popularity (particularly in the Spanish baroque theatre), producing its most famous example, the mousetrap in Hamlet.4 It was only after the mousetrap that Genesius could be put on scene, and there followed a number of plays based on his fate, the two most important among them Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero (The True Impostor) (1608, printed in 1621) and Jean Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint Genest (The True Saint Genesius) (1646). (Here I must point out the most significant subsequent reference, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet, comédien et martyre [1952], the first great apology of Jean Genet, with the explicit reference to Saint Genest in the title and as a subtext.)Jean Rotrou (1609–1650) was a man of spirit and talent who had the misfortune of living in seventeenth-century France, one of the great golden ages of theatre, where in the presence of the great stars Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine all lesser stars were virtually eclipsed into oblivion, although their work was no less interesting and valuable. Rotrou was for some time Corneille’s friend and competitor on stage, a formidable writer, but he died young and his plays are now almost never produced (very rarely in France, never outside). His piece on Genesius is no doubt the most accomplished version of the legend and had considerable success at the time. I am insisting on Rotrou’s version of this legend for one simple reason, namely, its possible and likely influence on Blaise Pascal who must have known the piece (or some other pieces about Genesius, although I didn’t find any reference to it in the literature). Now consider these very famous lines by Blaise Pascal from Pensées:You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured: follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile.5This is Pascal’s notorious advice for nonbelievers: if you don’t have faith, pretend that you have it, act as if you have it, follow the rite, stage your faith, enact the belief that you don’t have, turn yourself into a machine, and the faith will follow by itself. Turn yourself into an actor, into Genesius performing the religious rituals on stage, an automaton saying the text learned by heart, mechanically and without understanding, a text written by another, imposed and merely repeated. There is “the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (P, p. 247).6Thus, in one bold stroke, we find ourselves at the core of the theory of ideology, as expounded by Louis Althusser who took his cue from Pascal:Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian … —scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a language that directly names the reality…. [The subject’s] ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.7From Christian conversion to Marxist theory of ideology, il n’y a qu’un pas. There is Genesius lurking at the bottom of it, and insofar as this describes the very mechanism by which one espouses any ideology (and becomes a subject, for Althusser), we are all Genesius at heart. First acting, then belief, belief induced by acting, acting as an automaton producing belief. The subject of ideology is Genesius.And in one stroke we are thus at the core of the problem of mimesis. One becomes what one enacts. This is the founding myth of mimesis. The enactment, as purely external, has the power of shaping the enactor, it contaminates him, its external mechanism has the power to seize his heart. One imitates, and by imitating one becomes what one imitates. Of course one knows very well that this doesn’t quite happen that way (not with clockwork predictability, if ever), yet this is the inveterate structural supposition that lies at the core of mimesis and its powers, pointing to the enigmatic kernel joining body and spirit. The story has the power of a parable far larger than Christianity. There is something vertiginous in it, bringing together the nature of theatre and its magical power, the nature of material reality, the nature of our beliefs, the inner conviction and the outer automatism.Presenting this story as the demonstration of the superior powers of Christianity is obviously questionable. Does acting work in this way only in this case, when it induces the supposed true belief? But there are many examples, since time immemorial, since the dawn of theatre, of acting inducing all kinds of behavior, preferably the sinful ones, and this was one of the major causes for the various anathemas on theatre and acting, stretching from Plato via Christianity to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Does the same device of conversion by staging apply also to Islam? Or does one become an atheist by acting an atheist? By acting a scoundrel, doesn’t one then run the risk of becoming a scoundrel? By acting a lover, does one fall in love? By acting disease, can one become sick? Every theatre is thick with anecdotes of actors not being able to get out of their roles or of extending their acting in their lives; this is part of theatre folklore. Any actor can become sick by acting disease, but it takes a real genius to act a hypochondriac and to die of it. One of the most famous anecdotes of the entire history of theatre tells us that this is how Molière died, struck by a heart attack on stage when impersonating le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Sick Man). Can one die of mimesis, or rather of mimesis mimeseos, the mimesis of mimesis, of the enactment of a hypochondriac, of someone merely acting having a disease? Fake disease, or rather faking the fake disease on stage, entailing real death. Mimesis of mimesis, imitation of imitation, which appears a very slight thing indeed, can turn into a deadly affair; witness the greatest of all comedians.This is the problem that Plato has to deal with at length in book 3 of the Republic. The problem of modern art is endemically put in terms of how to make art politically relevant, how to create politically subversive art. Plato’s problem was exactly the opposite; art always involves too many political messages, it is far too politically subversive, so he saw his task rather in containing all these political strands in art. So Plato, in this work that laid the foundations of good politics, spent a rather astounding one third of the time discussing aesthetics and the political dangers of artistic endeavors. The problem is ultimately not that there is too much politics in art, so that one would have to protect its purity from political contamination; the problem is that virtually all art’s politics is wrong and dangerous for the community, such as Plato envisioned it, and that one should replace it by an even more artistic politics.I can only give a glimpse of this problem, limiting myself to the Republic.8 The agenda of a large part of the second and the third books is that of censorship: how to censor all these pernicious parts occurring in Homer, the founding father, and on a larger scale (since Greek art took Greek mythology as its major source of inspiration) how to censor the religious narratives on which Greek society was based. Greek gods, to say the least, behaved in most questionable manners, far from setting examples that one should emulate. It all started already at the beginning of theogony, with Uranus, the god of the sky, proceeding to destroy his own children, while the youngest one, Chronos, managed to escape and to castrate him, his own father, with the due help of his mother Gaia.9 Plato is very alarmed by such stories, which abound in virtually all myths: “Even if it were true, it should be passed over in silence, not told to foolish young people. And if, for some reason, it has to be told, only a very few people—pledged to secrecy … —should hear it, so that their number is kept as small as possible” (R, p. 1016).So Plato has a problem, a huge one: the temptation of emulation is immediate and irresistible, particularly for the unformed youngsters, so religion—all Greek mythology—should be kept away from youth, safely locked as far away as possible, if we are to secure their edification. (One may well wonder what he would make of the Bible.) Furthermore, there are so many questionable deeds by heroes and men depicted by poets that could instill fear of death, passions, lust, frenzy, “pleasures of drink, sex and food,” and others (R, p. 1027).10 “We’ll ask Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we delete these passages and all similar ones. It’s not that they aren’t poetic and pleasing to the majority of hearers but that, the more poetic they are, the less they should be heard by children or by men who are supposed to be free” (R, p. 1024).The bottom line is that we would have to censor the bulk of religion and “classical” literature if we are to establish the new free society. Keep the religion and classics away from the kids if you want them to be good citizens.These are the concerns relating to the questionable content, which is bad enough insofar as it sets dubious examples and tempts impressionable souls to imitate them. But it is worse if one considers the form. The argument is that perhaps not so much harm can be done if one only relates such matters, with the authorial voice standing aloof from them (and hopefully condemning them). But already Homer had the fatal tendency of not merely relating the events but of stepping into the shoes of his heroes and speaking in their own voices. The problem is ultimately that of indirect and direct speech; for the moment he decides to impersonate his heroes and lends them his voice in direct speech, a more insidious trouble occurs. One speaks with the voice of another person and there is no way of telling who is speaking; even more, one cannot but adopt the identity of this other person and be marked by it, by what was meant merely as a rhetorical subterfuge. By lending one’s voice one unwittingly pledges one’s soul.But when he makes a speech as if he were someone else, won’t we say that he makes his own style as much like that of the indicated speaker as possible? … Now, to make oneself like someone else in voice or appearance is to imitate the person one makes oneself like…. In these passages, then, it seems that he and the other poets effect their narrative through imitation.[R, p. 1031]There is the mimesis of directly impersonating another person, without the distance of indirect narration and comment, and this is where the greatest danger lurks. Socrates’s interlocutor is quick to point out that “tragedies are like that” (R, p. 1031): “That’s absolutely right…. One kind of poetry and story-telling employs only imitation—tragedy and comedy, as you say. Another kind employs only narration by the poet himself—you find this most of all in dithyrambs. A third kind uses both—as in epic poetry” (R, p. 1032).So theatre presents a particular menace because it dispenses with all narration and proceeds by direct speech alone. Its very form is its message. So the question arises “whether or not we’ll allow tragedy and comedy into our city,” “whether our guardians should be imitators or not” (R, p. 1032): “They mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating slavish or shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy reality. Or haven’t you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and thought?” (R, p. 1032).They should by no means imitate women (young or old, “abusing her husband … possessed by sorrows and lamentations, and even less one who is ill, in love, or in labor”), slaves, bad men, cowards, drunkards, madmen, and furthermore, just in case, they should also refrain from imitating “neighing horses, bellowing bulls, roaring rivers, the crashing sea, thunder, or anything of that sort” (R, p. 1033). In a word, one shouldn’t imitate anything lowly, from villains, women, and slaves to animals or nature, anything below the rank of a free citizen, for one is necessarily affected by it, whether one wants to be or not—”unless it’s done just in play” (R, p. 1034) (or in another translation, “unless it be for jest”),11 Plato cryptically and laconically adds. For jest, in play? Is there a leeway for comedy? Can one ever keep a safe distance in mimesis?On the other hand, one should by all means imitate good examples, the “brave, sober, pious, free” men; one should be edified and elevated by noble models, so imitation can cut both ways. One can become good or bad only by virtue of imitation; one is permeable to it. People are wax; imitation is the knife. The bottom line: imitation sticks. It ultimately contaminates and inculcates. There can be no neutral or innocent imitation; one cannot be untainted by the forces of imitation; one is formed by what one imitates, for better or worse. One is always Genesius. And the sequence is the same as in Pascal: first the body imitates, one only moves one’s lips repeating others’ words, then the spirit follows; it becomes other, unwittingly, and against one’s better judgment. To follow this argument, there is a point where one becomes virtuous or depraved unwittingly, shaped by the powers of mimesis, against many of Plato’s protestations to the contrary. But isn’t there something inherently and unstoppably comical about this? Taking this insight seriously, aren’t we already in the midst of comedy?If serious poets and tragedians were to ask their admission into the city, this is what we should tell them:“Most honored guests, we’re tragedians ourselves, and our tragedy is the finest and best we can create. At any rate, our entire state has been constructed so as to be a ‘representation’ of the finest and noblest life—the very thing we maintain is most genuinely a tragedy. So we are poets like yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone has the natural powers to ‘produce’ to perfection.”12The state is the true mimesis, not the false one; it is the supreme theatre, the best show in town, the Gesamtkunstwerk; it beats theatre at its own game; it is the superior and true show business. Tragedy is redundant, but what about comedy?Now anyone who means to acquire a discerning judgment will find it impossible to understand the serious side of things in isolation from their ridiculous aspect, or indeed appreciate anything at all except in the light of its opposite. But if we intend to acquire virtue, even on a small scale, we can’t be serious and comic too, and this is precisely why we must learn to recognize buffoonery, to avoid being trapped by our ignorance of it…. Such mimicry must be left to slaves and hired aliens, and no one must ever take it at all seriously. No citizen or citizeness must be found learning it.13So comedy is necessary to be able to value the serious, its opposite, but its performance should be left to slaves and aliens, free citizens (and citizenesses!) should never undertake it.“There is an acceptable form of comedy, one in which the moral deficiencies of the agents are made unambiguous, so that an audience is invited to laugh against them, with clear recognition of their faults, and not in any sense with them.”14There is only one kind of laughter for Plato: to laugh against. And it appears that in comedy imitation is even stickier than elsewhere.Imitation, for Plato, is essential for art. Acting presents a particularly tricky aspect of it, as one makes oneself available to all kinds of models, imitating bravery and cowardice alike, sobriety and rapture of passion, and by a fatal tendency the latter tends to be more alluring. But an equally ponderous problem arises with painting, which is merely the production of copies, actually of copies of copies, since the things of which one makes copies are already copies in themselves, copies of ideas. Plato will tackle this at length in book 10, but I cannot go into this. Although the problem is in this case put in impersonal terms—making copies rather than becoming a copy oneself—it is treated with no lesser determination, and the danger seems no less significant.There is a mystery pertaining to all this: copies of copies—why all the fuss? Why would such a slight thing as a copy of a copy, imitation of imitation, cause so much concern and passion, even rage? Why would a doubling create peril? If copies and imitations have no proper reality, or a reality so much slimmer and dimmer than the real thing, why worry?15 Why lose all this time and temper over something so minor, negligible, and even contemptible? The trouble is that the copy, the imitation, has the strange power to affect the thing itself. Imitation cuts both ways; it affects the imitator, one becomes what one imitates, it is contagious, and it spreads by mere contact; one is contaminated the moment one is touched by it. But there is the reverse danger, never quite avowed but constantly in the background, namely, that imitation strikes back, it impinges on the original, it has an impact on it, it changes it, although the original, eidos, is such that it couldn’t possibly be changed or swayed. One makes a copy, not even that, a copy of a copy, and the world of ideas seems to be shattered; it has to be firmly defended against any such intrusion. Imitation shapes the imitator, and it shapes the model that is imitated (the two are not symmetrical, but there is the same concern at the bottom). Imitators can do more harm than they can possibly imagine. They can cause havoc merely by replicating. They can harm themselves by something that appears to be an innocent impersonation, a rhetorical artifice, but, more dramatically, they can disturb the order of eternal ideas by making the replicas of their replicas—just as the sophists, those specialists in imitation, can undermine the true philosophy by merely mimicking it.16Ultimately, Plato’s fear was not that the copy, the imitation, the mimetic double, was but a pale and unworthy shadow of the real thing; his fear was that it was too much like the real thing, too close to it, not separated enough from it, tied to it by an elastic thread that cannot be cut, the umbilical cord tying it to its supposed model; hence the model itself couldn’t be cut loose from it, tied in its eternity to its passing and ephemeral double. The danger is that they are so much alike that a “naive observer” could easily mistake the one for the other.17 Thus it ultimately takes two kinds of others for mimesis: the first would be the naïve observer who would take the appearance for reality, unable to tell the difference, as imitation is staged for his naïve eyes. But simultaneously one has to rely on a second Other (deserving the capital O)—the one who knows the difference, who can ascertain that this is a mere appearance, the Other who would guarantee the difference between appearance and reality and can tell them apart; otherwise one wouldn’t entrust oneself on the treacherous ways of mimesis. Plato’s concern, in a nutshell, is that the two others tend to collapse, that the other and the Other are easily confounded, so his fear would ultimately be, to put it in Lacanian terms, that there is no Other of the Other. The other who believes and the other who knows cannot be quite held apart.18Is there, at the bottom of it, a mechanism pertaining to magic? James G. Frazer has famously pinpointed two kinds of magic, the imitational one, which works by metaphors, by effigies, substitutes, similarity, analogy, at distance (what befalls the effigy will befall the original), and contact magic, which works by contiguity, metonymy, physical connection (contamination or healing by magic touch).19 Freud took this up at some length in Totem and Taboo. In “magical” thinking imitation has the power to contaminate the distant original, and on the other hand mere contact has the power to contaminate two contiguous entities. “Similarity and contiguity are the two essential principles of the process of association,”20 says Freud, instantiating condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy as the two basic principles of dream-work. He adds a bit later that theyare both included in the more comprehensive concept of ‘contact’. Association by contiguity is contact in the literal sense; association by similarity is contact in the metaphorical sense. The use of the same word for the two kinds of relation is no doubt accounted for by some identity in the psychical processes concerned which we have not yet grasped.21So there is a basic fact of psychical processes that resides in the contact, Berührung, of metaphor and metonymy—two ways of touching touch each other, touching at distance and touching the contiguous overlap; imitation and contact are in contact, but their intersection eludes us. Plato, at the core, seems to espouse precisely this point of intersection and overlap, where imitational similarity, although working at a distance from the imitated model, presents a most powerful contact between the two.The essential doubling that lies at the bottom of mimesis brings us finally to comedy. There have been many attempts to bring comedy to concept, to single out its common denominator and underlying principle, but comedy tends to have the last laugh at all these attempts. It always has more tricks up its sleeve than theorists can account for. So, with all the caveats in mind let me take up one classical comment found (again) in Pascal: “Two faces are alike; neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh” (P, p. 34).22 The beauty and the austere elegance of this line is that it tries to pin the comical by the very minimal, just by the mechanism of doubling. It brings it to this core: one is not funny, two is funny, but provided that two is the replication of one, its imitation, its likeness, its mimetic double, its similar twin. What happens between one and two to produce the comical effect? Not between one and two, but between two ones that don’t quite add up to two; they are just clones of each other, same and different at the same time. Where there should be difference there is replication, a crack in the midst of the same. Two different faces are not funny, two similar ones are. So ultimately this is neither a two nor two ones, but a split one, where both parts can neither be counted as two nor made one. The comical object emerges in their very split.23Bergson, who wrote one of the grand books on the comical, was enthusiastic about this turn in Pascal. He proposed an extension:It might just as well be said: “The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.” The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living. Analyse the impression you get from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of tw