Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the ComicBergson, Henri
Philosophy
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Bergson, Henri
Comedy; Laughter; Philosophy, French
This is indeed the impression we get after seeing a stirring drama.
What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told about
others as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves--a whole host of
ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into
real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as if
an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories
belonging to a far-away past--memories so deep-seated and so foreign to
our present life that this latter, for a moment, seems something unreal
and conventional, for which we shall have to serve a fresh
apprenticeship. So it is indeed a deeper reality that drama draws up
from beneath our superficial and utilitarian attainments, and this art
has the same end in view as all the others.
Hence it follows that art always aims at what is INDIVIDUAL. What the
artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot,
on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never
be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his,
and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds
before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings
and events--something, in short, which has once happened and can never
be repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but
they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are INDIVIDUALISED.
Thereby, and thereby only, do they belong to art; for generalities,
symbols or even types, form the current coin of our daily perception.
How, then, does a misunderstanding on this point arise?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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