Dickensian Laughter by Malcolm Andrews;

Author:Malcolm Andrews;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2013-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Falling Apart Laughing

We use several expressions to indicate our sense that laughter undoes the self. People ‘collapse in laughter’, or they ‘fall apart laughing’; they ‘split their sides’ and ‘burst out’ laughing. ‘Pull yourself together!’ can be the reprimand for someone helpless in the throes of laughter. The self has somehow disintegrated temporarily, and recovery of composure is, idiomatically, to take the form of reconstituting that self as a single compact unit. Laughter benignly threatens individuality; the corollary is that it promotes merging. Laughter’s unrestrained physical demonstration of enjoyment has two effects: it disarms the normal reserves, producing a kind of collapse (‘falling apart’), and it stimulates and liberates others to share that enjoyment. In this essay I am exploring the former effect, and in the following essay the latter.

Dickens often uses the motif of collapse and disintegration to secure his laughter, which is itself an experience of near collapse. But what exactly is collapsing in such scenarios in Dickens’s fiction? Very often it happens in a climactic exposure scene which entails the undoing of an individual, particularly when that individual has developed a distinctive façade to protect his true identity, as in the case of a hypocrite (Pecksniff’s come-uppance is a fine example). The laughter at the crumbling of a deceitful façade is partly joyful triumph at a well-deserved retribution. But it can go deeper than this, beyond the dropping of the hypocritical mask, because there can be something comical, perhaps comical-grotesque, in the abrupt unravelling of the jealously guarded single self. At this point, and before concentrating on Dickens’s scenarios, I would like to draw in some ideas from two theorists who were particularly concerned with the constitution of selfhood, fragmentation and hybridity—Jacques Lacan and Mikhail Bakhtin. What they suggest about the factitiousness and fragility of the unified self, and the terms they use to describe its defensive strategies, help to illuminate the disintegrative power of laughter.

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