Abject Metamorphosis and Mirthless Laughter

Abstract

In On Humour, Simon Critchley suggests that ‘when the human becomes animal the effect is disgusting and if we laugh at all then it is what Beckett calls the “mirthless laugh”’ (Critchley 2002:33). In this article, I take seriously Critchley's suggestion that human-to-animal transitions are disgusting, and I seek to critically examine the nature of this disgust and its interplay with this ‘mirthless laughter’. I suggest that there are two fundamental aspects to this phenomenon that need to be disentangled. The first aspect relates to what John Limon (2000) calls the ‘not quite alienable’ aspects of ourselves – feces, urine, corpses, etc. – that social propriety demands that we hide, which can be understood in terms of Kristeva's account of the abject. (Kristeva 1982) The second aspect, I will argue, is the way in which human-animal metamorphoses act as a metaphor for disease. Drawing on Havi Carel's reading of The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986) to make this argument, I suggest that what one finds in both The Fly and Kafka's Metamorphosis (2000 [1915]) is a disease-like transition in which the protagonists find themselves in a position of fundamental incongruity. They remain ontologically humanlike whilst becoming factically limited by both the physical changes to their body and their social abjection. Importantly, I suggest that this experience of illness and impairment grounds the sort of ‘mirthless’ humour that Critchley identifies. In doing so I will draw out more explicitly Critchley's connection between this type of humour and the tragicomic experience of the impaired characters in Beckett's Endgame (2002 [1957]).

Notes

¹The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is notable for two things: Heidegger's account of animality and his phenomenology of boredom. Whilst these two projects might seem completely unrelated, Katherine Withy (2013) argues that they are in fact intimately connected, which might suggest that an account of boredom is necessary for this preliminary sketch. However, I intend to bracket it out. Heidegger differentiates between three distinct modes of boredom, and, in my view, this discussion is often misinterpreted. As such, I feel the issue requires more detailed exegesis than is possible within the scope of the present article.

²Here I am using a more literal etymological sense of the word ‘asinine’, along the vein of ‘like an ass’.

³Fear of contamination is another important aspect of this phenomenon, which I will not discuss here. For a compelling account of this, see Douglas (1985).

⁴Importantly, for Heidegger, Dasein could relate to a non-human creature that was in the world in the relevant sense, for example an alien species, a robot or a non-human animal that evolved in a similar way to Homo sapiens. It just happens that, as far as we know, humans are the only Dasein on earth.

⁵Although the character is called John Merrick in the film, the name of the person he was based upon was Joseph Merrick. This discrepancy seems to be due to an error which occurred in the first account of Merrick's life, which was reproduced in subsequent biographical materials including the script for this biopic.

⁶Of course, this is far from a novel suggestion, as there have been countless ‘existential’ readings of Beckett (e.g., Esslin 1970) and quite a few Heideggerean ones (e.g., Butler 1984). Whilst my view on this diverges a little from those, it is not something I will pursue further here.

⁷For a historical overview of incongruity theory, alongside the other two main humour theories, see Morreall (1987).