Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy by Burrows Ian

Author:Burrows, Ian [Burrows, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789041620
Goodreads: 55186793
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2020-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

Someone called ‘John’ adds, approvingly, ‘she’ll see reality when your migrant guests give her the high hard one in the back door.’ Tonally these are lines that might have been spoken by one of the rapists in Blasted. The woman they are talking about is descriptively transformed into a comic, slapstick body: one plonked and jolted, bumped around but — in terms like these — not, apparently, seriously or lastingly harmed. The colloquial terms that ‘John’ uses are of a piece with this: not a woman who is raped, but given ‘the high hard one’; possessing a body only insomuch that it can be synecdochised and accessed (not a body, but a ‘back door’).

Slapstick bodies are not commonly supposed to arouse our sympathy. As we’ll see in the next chapter, the strategies of rendering someone’s body a slapstick entity often amount to a concerted artistic or critical refusal to allow that person sympathy when violence is done to them. Doing this is a way of exculpating the viewer from any responsibility for what happens or what has happened to that person. James Delingpole is perfectly open about the fact that he is withdrawing any possibility of sympathy for the woman who left his talk: ‘I’d like to stress that I’m not even remotely sorry for any upset I may have caused,’ he says in some concluding bullet points, having earlier acknowledged that he caused her significant upset (describing the woman who left his talk as ‘visibly distraught’). A feature of comic performance is applied to a real-life victim: this person, the writer insists, is of no real consequence.

Among the comments posted underneath Delingpole’s article, those from ‘Mustapha Mond’ and ‘John’ are part of a general trend towards dehumanising minority groups and vulnerable people. In such company, their tone isn’t, perhaps, all that noteworthy: their intentions are to demean someone, and refusing to take that person seriously is a way of doing that. But as well as demeaning them, the strategies of turning someone into a slapstick body also, importantly, render that person as an entity who is incapable of receiving sympathy. In the moment of their getting up and leaving the room, they can be presentationally transformed into bodies alien and unlike our own. Just like RSC insiders who term passed-out audience members ‘droppers’, the people calling themselves ‘Mustapha Mond’ and ‘John’ on Breitbart seek to redesignate a person as an object susceptible to physics but not emotions. Theirs, they say with their tone, is a parody of violence; the victim — they insist — does not feel ‘real pain’, because the victim, they imply, cannot feel ‘real pain’.

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