Body of Knowledge

One of the biggest laughs I’ve had in recent days came when I was watching a DVD of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, the version with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple*. After opening the downstairs curtains to start the new day, the maid rushes upstairs to her mistress’ bedroom, knocks on the door, and after perfunctory invitation to enter, announces, “There’s a body in the library.” What a delicious send-up, I thought, of the artificiality of the upper-class countryside world in which Christie’s murder mysteries take place.

My delight in Christie’s self-parody (for such is what I thought it) continued with the reaction of the master of the house to the news of the corpse:

(Quoting the novel itself here) “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Colonel Bantry, “that there’s a dead body in my library—my library!”

The butler coughed.

“Perhaps, sir, you would like to see for yourself.”

*

“It’s frightfully awkward, Mater, but I’m afraid there’s a

dead body in the library.”

“Not now, Blotto. We have guests.”

Such is the beginning of Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter, Simon Brett’s spoof of the Christie-esque genre of British gentry murder and adventure novels. The scene ends with aristocratic twit Blotto addressing the butler:

“Bit of bother in the library.”

“What kind of bother?”

“Dead body.”

“I will deal with it at once, milord.”

*

In a previous blog entry, “In Character” (February, 2011), I discussed the rigidity of character that allows others to type us and to laugh at us. Not just a rigidity of character, but also a rigidity of style is open to the laughter of others. And since as the 18th Century French author Georges Leclerc, Comte De Buffon declared, “Le style est l'homme même” (“The style is the man himself”), the laughter directed at a rigidity of style is ultimately laughter against the person himself.

Simon Brett’s parody of Christie interests me less than what I took to be Christie’s self-parody. That is because deliberate self-parody implies self-knowledge. Engraved on a pillar at the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi was the admonition “Know Thyself.” And perhaps there is no greater way of demonstrating self-knowledge than deliberate self-parody.

As time has moved on, I have had increasing doubts that the self-parody was deliberate. But I really hope that it was, and that Christie had the self-awareness (at least in one novel) to laugh at herself.

***

*Avoid the more recent dramatic version of the novel starring Geraldine McEwan, who is totally miscast as Jane Marple. To see McEwan at her best, check out The Barchester Chronicles, which also features great acting by Donald Pleasance, Clive Swift, and especially Alan Rickman as the shifty-eyed Mr. Slope.

Drop the Puck

On Wednesday evening for the third time in the forty-year history of their National Hockey League franchise, the Vancouver Canucks were defeated (this time by the Boston Bruins) in the finals of the Stanley Cup playoff (they have never won the Cup, the ultimate prize in ice hockey). And for the second time in the Canucks’ Stanley Cup playoff history, after the defeat a riot ensued in downtown Vancouver. According to The Canadian Press, “Rioters burned cars, smashed windows and looted stores in the city centre for several hours on Wednesday. . . .The riot caused millions of dollars in damage, left at least 150 injured, including nine police officers.”

Who was to blame for the riot?

Again quoting The Canadian Press (via tsn.ca):

Goaltender Roberto Luongo said it was disturbing to watch images of Wednesday's riot.

"It was disappointing. Those were not the real Vancouver fans that were doing that," said Luongo.

"I think it was isolated groups. It was tough to watch that something like that happened to the city."

Other players echoed Luongo's comments that the team's devoted fans couldn't have had anything to do with the riot.

The responses of the Canucks players were following the line set down by the team’s management. General Manager Mike Gillis claimed, "Those aren't our fans who were doing that."

***

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."

Antony Flew, Thinking about Thinking (1975)

*

Flew has given the name “No-true-Scotsman move” to the attempts by debaters to shift the boundaries of evidence to exclude from one’s side all examples that would reflect negatively on one’s argument. And it is a very popular ploy. As the philosopher Julian Baggini has stated:

One reason why the no-true-Scotsman move is so tempting is because none of us likes to think that we keep company with people we find abhorrent.

Why "normalvision"?

George Bernard Shaw relates to the readers of the Preface to his first collection of plays (Plays Unpleasant) an anecdote about a visit to his physician. His physician was pleased to inform Shaw that his eyesight was “normal.”

I naturally took this to mean that it was like every­body else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly fortunate person optically, normal sight conferring the power of seeing things accurately and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent of the population, the remaining ninety per cent being abnormal. I immediately perceived the explana­tion of my want of success in fiction. My mind's eye, like my body's, was “normal”: it saw things differently from other people's eyes, and saw them better.

Shaw’s ironic stance is the opposite of another great ironist, Socrates. The latter did not claim the knowledge that “normal” vision granted; just the opposite—he insisted that he knew nothing, an assertion that allowed him to question (and prove wrong) those who laid claim to knowledge.

The problem for Shaw (which he alludes to in the above quotation, “my want of success in fiction”) is that if the overwhelming majority of people (having blurred vision) do not see things as clearly as you do, they are not going to believe you, but their own vision. Shaw said that in order to get a hearing, he tricked his audience by donning the cap and bells of a court jester, thereby following the example of the great Roman satirist Horace, ridentam dicere verum—to tell the truth laughing.

***

I am too vain, even for the purposes of satire, to adopt the pose of a Socratic ironist, pretending that I know nothing. I have, however, appropriated Shaw's idea of a "mind's eye [that sees] things differently from other people's eyes, and [sees] them better" and become "normalvision." But being particularly myopic in actual fact, when I see the truth, it is all rather blurred. So, when I don the attire of a court jester, think "fool."

Be Prepared

“You must have been a Boy Scout,” said the nurse, “because you came prepared." No, I was never a Scout, but if I’m going to have to wait (say, at a doctor’s office), I always have a book with me. And if I’m going to have a lot of down time, then I not only have a book but also my Discman and headphones. Sometimes, however, I am fooled--when I think I’m going to be taken care of quickly and leave my stuff behind. Last year, for example, because I trusted the words “You will be the first patient,” without anything to read, I was forced to endure an endless infomercial about a toothbrush on a waiting room TV.

The other day at the local hospital I was, as the nurse observed, prepared. I had to undergo a five-minute procedure that, because of the prior paperwork and subsequent recovery/observation period, took from six in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon. But I had my book and my music. It was while I was resting after the procedure, listening to Bach through my headphones, that I noticed that someone had sneaked up beside my bed and delivered a tray of food, very welcome as I hadn’t eaten since seven the previous evening. And what was the delicacy underneath the black plastic cover? French toast. I hate French toast, and I don’t drink coffee, which was in the Styrofoam cup beside it.

French toast and coffee! Clearly, the hospital had adopted the Halloween Diet*.

*If you haven't already, read the previous blog entry..

Take It Off

Although it’s half a year away, Halloween has been on my mind recently. Certainly more on my mind than it generally is along about the end of October. And that is because in my neck of the woods Halloween has been a non-event. No little ghosts or witches have rung my doorbell for at least a decade. Back in the days when, though, I developed the perfect (for me at least) idea of how to prepare for the costumed crowd. I would not purchase Mars bars or M&Ms to distribute—because they would never make it to the door; I would, quite naturally, eat them all before the 31st. Instead, I loaded up on packs of Fruit Stripe gum. There was no way that that product, which never passed my yuck test, would ever pass my lips. So I could unbegrudgingly distribute it at my door.
Which brings me back to why I have been thinking about Halloween so out of season. The reasoning behind my former Halloween purchases of that icky gum has led me to develop the perfect diet—the Halloween Diet. Simply put: if you bring into your house only foods that you would never (short of an absolute famine in the land) let enter your mouth (in my case, mussels, sushi, macaroni-and-cheese, and rice pudding), you would be bound to lose weight.

*

Alas, I can’t help visualizing how good a container of chocolate chip ice cream, a Hebrew National salami, an Entenmann’s cheese strudel, and a couple of bagels look in my shopping cart.

Remote Controlled

A question I liked to pose to incoming freshmen when I was a member of the committee concocting topics for a writing sample was:

“Soon our television will be offering us 500 channels of broadcasting. Will that result in an Eden of cultural quality or a great cultural wasteland?” 

I was reminded of that question when my cable company obligingly sent me their latest channel lineup,. It seems I underestimated the number of channels we were going to be allowed to choose from. What with music channels and high definition duplications, I can access over 900 channels with a flick of my remote. I have to admit, though, that I am not the right person to definitively answer the question I posed above, for I watch barely a handful of the available channels and, thus, have no idea if what lies beyond my little patch of viewing is a lush land or a desert.

One channel that I do watch a lot is Fox Soccer Channel, which I like for two reasons: it broadcasts matches of the English Premier League (the top level of that nation’s game) and FSC’s California-based hosts have to get up pre-dawn to introduce the shows. Now, it must be admitted that FSC is not one of this nation’s prime sports broadcasters. And that is borne out by the fact that the major advertisers on other sports networks—the greasemeister hamburger and chicken mega-corporations and what Harry Pearson (in The Guardian) called “the gassy I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Piss excuse for beer” purveyors—are mostly absent. Instead, the commercials on FSC seem to be aimed at three distinct groups: the credit-challenged, who are enticed to pay for reports that they entitled to get for free; immigrants, who are invited to phone overseas by a small-print-loving telephone company (which at one point had—and perhaps still has—as an executive a former New Jersey Republican politician one wouldn’t touch with a barge pole); and the dermatologically-flawed, represented in the commercials by young women (all seemingly named Pam or Dawn) who slather on white gook that we can have shipped to us free thanks to an apparently never-ending limited-time offer. Recently, the Pams and Dawns were joined in the gook commercials by another young woman, one who looked as if she was created by Pixar. This unreal personage is apparently a non-celebrity celebrity (you know, one who has to be identified, so we know it’s a “celebrity” hawking the product), identified as “singer/songwriter Katy Perry.” Now, I must admit here was a true non-celebrity for me. I had never heard her name before, much less heard her sing. But the other day that all changed. I was trapped in a medical waiting room that had a “light rock” radio station piped in (the kind of offensively inoffensive noise that makes your gums bleed), when the announcer proclaimed that the next number would be by the above-cited K. Perry. Who sounded like nothing other than a skinned cat.

There are a few things in life I understand, but one of them isn’t the thinking of advertisers. Oh, I get it that the credit-challenged probably have no jobs and are glued to the TV all day watching whatever and that immigrants (more than us native-borns) love what the rest of the world calls “football”—but what I can’t figure out is how many acned young women would spend a Wednesday afternoon watching the replay of a game between Wigan Athletic and Stoke City.

In Character

What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.

*

We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen. In Moliere's plays how many comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type: A CHARACTER FOLLOWING UP HIS ONE IDEA, and continually recurring to it in spite of incessant interruptions! The transition seems to take place imperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing to the one who will see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what he wants to see. A stubborn spirit ends by adjusting things to its own way of thinking, instead of accommodating its thoughts to the things.

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic

**

We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons.

Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture

**

Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

Who could hang a name on you?

When you change with every new day . . . .

The Rolling Stones

***

Thumbing my way recently through the pages of DVDs that Amazon.com has generously offered as recommendations for my taste (I Wake Up Screaming, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, et al), I instantly glommed onto a cover that I didn’t have to read to know the contents of the DVD: in profile, a figure with a sharp, down-pointing nose, prominent chin, smoking a curved pipe, and wearing a deerstalker’s cap. Sherlock Holmes. But what if the profile on the cover had been that of Holmes’ associate, Dr. Watson? I think I can speak for everyone in saying that none of us would have the least notion of what awaited us in the DVD box.

Holmes, not just because of his appearance, but because of his nature, is one of the most recognizable characters in literature: rational, arrogant, dismissive of others, unemotional. But Dr Watson? Is his the bumbling persona of Nigel Bruce’s portrayals or the level-headed persona of Edward Hardwicke’s?

In life as in art, one achieves character by being consistent. In fact, the more consistent one becomes, the more one becomes a “character,” someone whose described actions evoke one’s name and whose name calls up one’s actions and reactions. That is because we turn loose, in the words of Bergson, the “ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically.” Think of Alceste (of The Misanthrope). Think of his friend Philinte standing by, raising his eyebrows, silently acknowledging, “There he goes again!”

The consistency of character is also a good thing. “He showed great character”—what a phrase of praise! When the mechanical element refuses to depart from its path under the influence of dubious, dangerous or evil pressures, one can become heroic. Even poor muddled Alceste, whom we have been giving a hard time to over several blogs, had his noble side. The estimable Eliante asserted:

“The honesty in which he takes such pride

Has—to my mind—its noble, heroic side.”

That “honesty,” which he mechanically (and foolishly) applied against the molehills of court manners, was noble in his refusal to capitulate to the mountainous corruption of the legal system.

The essence of character is not split between the noble and the foolish, the heroic and the comic. It is of one piece. To have a name—to be able to be named by others—one must be consistent up to the borderlands of the comic. And must not be surprised when one steps over the edge and becomes laughable.