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Revealing and Subversive Laughter in Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories

Mária Bartal

This essay is an attempt to explore the multiple narrative-dramaturgical function of laughter in the novel of Péter Nádas, to emphasize its doubleness of manipulating the interlocutors and allowing the readers access to the sphere of the unknown and of the unforeseeable through the characters. The temporal structure of laughter oscillates between a point and a continuum, the humorous pleasure is produced by the disjunction between duration and instantaneity.1 The situations penetrated by laughter are approximately five hundred in this novel, their network is coordinated by the accurate, quasi-theoretical interpretations of the narrator highlighting the convergence of similar motivations and reactions and the residue in laughter that leaves the characters feeling troubled. As Alfie Bown rightly explored, the two dominant ways of thinking about laughter, either as liberating or as controlling, can be negotiated by a third hypothesis, as an event in the Žižekian sense2: laughter is never merely an effect or a pre-existing cause but instead has a power to modify and change the very things which cause it, and brings the person involved into new ideological structures which are produced, entrenched, naturalized and enforced by the process of laughter.3 Georges Bataille, left unsatisfied by Bergson’s simplistic, moral conception of the comic, and developing the Bergsonian idea that the basic cell of all humor is the broken schema,4 pointed out, that the sudden invasion of laughter was a conversion into a world where our assurance is suddenly overthrown and unveiled as deceptive.5

I would like to underline the humor in Paralell Stories as a tool surpassing irony, and in making this assumption I will cast a critical eye over a cliché in the novel’s Hungarian reception, that denies the presence of humor in the novel6, and I also intend to challenge the statement that the pleasure principle, the joy and the liberating laughter is totally absent in this novel, and the narrator doesn’t use humor or irony at all, moreover, the characters laugh very rarely.7 In my view, the laughter and the numerous comical situations and their complex interpretation in the narrative discourse are unavoidable components of this book. Laughter as a highlighted textual event, as the readers’ re-action, produces and transforms the characters, provides for them a break from their “self-sameness” in the paradox of recognizing themselves in the other8, of placing or displacing abjection and of exceeding dialectics and the dialectician. Laughing implies, according to Charles Eubé, the refusal to accept our well-known beliefs9, we rejoice in something that puts the equilibrium of life in danger, and that’s why, for Bataille it is comparable to negative theology.10 As Derrida argues, laughter bursts out only based on the absolute renunciation of meaning, the absolute risking of death.11 In the following I will focus on one scene of the third volume in the chapter ‘Only Inches from Each Other’ and on its textual correlations.

This flirtation scene in the third volume is a self-narrated monologue in the first person,12 a retrospective narration of the Klára and Kristóf’s date, which is thematically, structurally and dynamically connected to several similar episodes in the novel (for example to the dialog between Szemző and the architect, and that between Gyöngyvér and Ágost or Erna and Gyöngyvér). The elaborated descriptions of the face-to-face interactions are constructed by dialogs in free indirect discourse, the characters’ banal conversation is dominated and contrasted by the narrator’s evaluation of the verbal and corporal interactions and his accurate self-reflections. The characters are created in and through couples’ interaction as a process of exchange of impressions or self-presentations between ritually enacted selves, where each participant relies on others to complete their picture of their own self. Repeatedly, having collapsed the free indirect discourse and the overcontrolled narration, the text passes to a tense quoted dialogue without any description or annotation of the characters’ behavior. The personal, intimate nature of this chapter is signaled by shifting the narration in third person to the self-narrated monologue, and by its contrast with the extended dialogue speech, and even by the alternated subject of the focalization and their closed, limited, incongruous points of view in the subsequent chapters. The careful and restrained verbal communications quickly become more intensive when the narrator’s furrier uncle is mentioned:

She interrupted to say that my uncle must have been a Jew.

Indeed he was, I said. Actually, he still is, but that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t stand him.

We both laughed hard at this and our mingling laughs echoed for a while, but that did not please me much.

My jocular mood began to dissipate. It seemed we were offending this miserable dark building with our echoing laughter.

Our laughter probably disturbed her a little too. Hurt a little.13

From the above-cited passage on, laughter gradually plays a more and more decisive part in this scene; laughing and interpreting it are crucial in the outcome of the characters’ flirting strategies. Is laughter a response only, a retrospective reflection of an already existing tension, or a process which qualifies the interlocutor? Before interpreting the dynamic changes of laughter’s contextual significance, it is useful to summarize the three main traditional theories of humor, with much overlap among them. The oldest, and probably still the most widespread theory of laughter is that laughter is an expression of a person’s feelings of superiority over others. The superiority theory goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, and was given its classic statement in Hobbes, who said that laughter expresses “a sudden glory arising from some conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly”.14 In the 20th century many adopted some versions of the superiority theory. Albert Rapp, for example, claims that all laughter developed from one primitive behavior in early humans, “the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel”. Konrad Lorenz and others treat laughter as a controlled form of aggression; for them the baring of the teeth in laughing is a way of asserting one’s bravery. The second one, the incongruity or resolution theory has its beginnings in some scattered comments in Aristotle but did not come into its own until Kant and Schopenhauer. When we experience something that doesn’t fit our patterns, that violates our expectations, we laugh. As Pascal said, “Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees” or in Kant’s terminology, “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing”. Schopenhauer explained the incongruity behind laughter as a mismatch between our concepts and the real things that are supposed to be instantiations of these concepts.15 In fact, with proper refinement it can account for all cases of humorous laughter. The Relief Theory is an hydraulic explanation according to which laughter is the equivalent in the nervous system of a pressure-relief valve in a steam boiler. The theory was sketched in Lord Shaftesbury’s 1709 essay “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor”, the first publication in which humor is used in its modern sense of funniness. Spencer’s explanation in his essay “On the Physiology of Laughter” (1911) is based on the idea that emotions take the physical form of nervous energy. Unlike emotions, laughter does not involve the motivation to do anything. The movements of laughter, Spencer says, “have no object”: they are merely a release of nervous energy. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious Freud distinguishes three kinds of laughter situations, which he calls “jokes”, “the comic”, and “humor”. The core of the theory is that in all laughter situations we save a certain quantity of psychic energy, energy that is usually employed for some psychic purpose, but which turns out not to be needed. In joking, the energy saved is that which is normally used to repress aggressive and sexual feelings. In the comic, the energy saved is for some cognitive processing that is perceived to be unnecessary. In humor, the energy saved is that of an emotion like anger or fear, which we realize is no longer required. The discharge of this superfluous energy is laughter.16 In joking, he says, we save energy that is normally used to suppress forbidden feelings and thoughts; in reacting to the comic we save an expenditure of energy in thought; and in humor we save an expenditure of energy in emotion. For Freud, humor has a “heroic function in the sense of liberation it achieves in allowing us to stand aloof from the trials and tribulations of life.” As John Morreall notes17 a comparison of these theories suggests two general features of situations producing laughter which can form the basis for a comprehensive theory. The first one is the change of psychological state involved in laughter situations that may be primarily cognitive, as the incongruity theory shows from a serious state of perceiving and thinking about things that fit into our conceptual patterns, to a non-serious state of being amused by some incongruity. The change may be primarily affective too, as in certain cases described by the superiority and relief theories in which laughter accompanies a boost in positive feelings, a cessation of negative feelings, or the release of suppressed feelings. Or the change may be both cognitive and affective, as in cases of hostile humor.

Freud’s account of jokes builds on the foundations of a straightforward distinction between innocent jokes and tendentious ones. We normally cannot be overly aggressive or sexual due to social constraints, but in the tendentious joke we can express such intent in a socially acceptable way.18 The narrator’s mechanical laughing and joking-together is a kind of cooperation in treating his uncle as abject, and the admission of his own motivation his jocular mood begins to dissipate. As Kristeva argues, the abject one is “thus a deject, who places himself, separates himself, situates himself, and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.”19 He is becoming a situationist in a sense, and not without laughter since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection.

In the scene quoted above from Nádas’s novel the feminine laughter of superiority is interpreted by the narrator as a kind of lure and manipulation connected to her animal costume (she is wearing black antelope shoes with incredibly high heels and a fur coat20) that reinforces her predatory aspect and his role of victim: “Between her sparkling wet, beautiful teeth I would have crawled into the dark hollow of her mouth. She had teeth like a wild animal’s.”21 But this situation is more complex, because the fur coat isn’t hers, instead borrowed from his ex-piano teacher, and rather annoying to him. In the narration the fur coat results in a mixed sensation of familiarity, sexual affection and repugnance, becoming the metaphor of the complexity of their feelings and of their laughter (“…actually we were looking out, searching for whatever it was in each other that was causing our inability to endure each other’s words for another moment. This was something neither she nor I could give up, let alone terminate.”22). But a few moments later the fur coat is interpreted as a prop of her perpetual metamorphosis23, and the text underlines the metonymical connection between the laughing mouth and the woman in fur and the carnivalesque aspects of both:

It was straining forth from the opened shell of animality. I couldn’t tell how many transformations she had gone through that night.

The wind blew her fragrance into me with renewed strength, her new indecipherable fragrance.

Almost nothing kept me from slipping my arms under the shiny lining of the shiny fur coat and pulling her body against mine. Now she was flirting with me, inviting me, luring me, opening herself up like a seashell, like a deep-brown chestnut.

We were shouting and screaming in the wind, which felt especially good because it was as if we were throwing sounds into each other’s laughing mouth. Not to let the wind blow them away.

She asked, actually she screamed whether I’d dare trust her with my life.24

This passage is a variation of the Lucianic image of the laughing Menippus, it stresses the relation of laughter to the underworld and to death, to the freedom of the spirit, and to the freedom of speech.25, and it presents the contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. As Bakhtin notes, in the essence of the grotesque the negation and destruction (death of the old) are included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The material, bodily lower stratum of this grotesque image bears a deeply positive character, but the final result is abundance, increase.26 The wild and inordinate wind-pressures in this scene cause and enhance the mixture of their loud laughing and screaming, moreover, the force of their laughter homogenizes the representation and demonstrates the universal character of laughter explored by Bakhtin in the parodies of the Middle Ages.27 Like many social signals, laughter and sobbing have evolved as a contrasted pair: laughter is produced by exhalation, which we also use in producing speech, and sobbing, by inhalation. Laughter makes the most of the relaxed effortlessness of our vocalizing while exhaling.28 Reason is rendered powerless in the face of these polymorphously perverse “rhythms,” which echo from the “noise” of physis (nonrational) rather than the melodies of nomos (rational), the (saving) power of rationality and, therefore, human agency becomes suspect. To be possessed by this movement of energy,29 overriding rational self-control is dangerous, it can provoke a violent reaction. The laughter that Aristotle attributes to Gorgias opposes meaninglessness to meaning (On Rhetoric 3.18). It’s a laughter that shatters what Jacques Derrida calls the very “fabric of meaning”.30 Such meaninglessness comes to operate as the dirty underside (the negated) of meaning, in Foucault’s words laughter is an ex-plo-sion of the border zones of thought.

She turned the words back toward me, yelling them into my open mouth; yes, she too would be happy to die, in bed, among pillows, but not on the street.

Her fragrance I caught not with my nose, her screaming not with my ears; they assaulted my groin directly. I had nothing to defend myself with. Because now it turned limp, now it hardened a little, sperm kept dripping from the constant pulsing.

Don’t, please don’t talk like that, I beg you, and my screams no longer vibrated in my vocal cords or touched my throat but burst straight from the rising and falling depth of my chest, from the throbbing flesh of my heart.31

The complexity and humor of her pun (“happy to die, in bed, among pillows”) is built on a twisted quote from an iconic poetry of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.32 Sándor Petőfi’s The Thought Torments Me has a coherent metaphorical system for the power of transformative revolution and for mass mobilization that is consistently and ironically reinterpreted in this scene for intensifying the ambiguous sexual fantasies of the narrator.33 In Freud’s words, “nothing distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech”.34 Freud assumed that there were three psychical processes that take place in our unconscious, which dreams share with jokes, namely, condensation, displacement, and representation. Much like in the case of dreams, the displacement in jokes involves the censorship of ideas that are not allowed to enter into consciousness. Compared to dreams, in jokes displacement does not involve replacing one idea with another; rather it consists of creating ambiguities through the use of play upon words and multiplicities of meanings. The novel’s pun correlating with her increasingly pervasive bodily presence and the fantasy of threatening incorporation result in the onset of an intolerable convulsion of his thought and the unarticulated statement of the speaking body, shaken with no way, thought35: “‘I am scared’, I screamed. And that put an end to the laughter”.36 The ping-pong strategy of their previous conversation rapidly escalates into a continuous interchange of screaming and laughter when they exit.

In certain cases, laughter is used by the characters as a ritualized behavior that does not emerge simply as an expression of some internal state, but as a well-defined and learned social signal.37 The laughing of superiority waggles as a seesaw in the communication of the characters. The superiority of the partly borrowed beauty yields to the hidden lie of the narrator. His simile for the situation (“it was as if we’d both stumbled and fallen over each other”38) stresses the incongruity and comic nature of misunderstanding, the humorous oscillation between two frames of reference and the shift of his satisfying advantage because of his deferred and unpleasant admission. The mechanical behavior that Bergson suggests is at the heart of much comic performance, but according to the above-mentioned examples, laughter can be mechanical too and therefore loses its superiority. Humor can also be used at the group level to promote cooperation — by its self-rewarding nature and by reinforcing the recognition of shared expectations39, but in this scene laughter, repeatedly, only prepares and facilitates an insight into the characters’ mirrored positions.

‘I am scared’, I screamed.

And that put an end to the laughter; she nodded that of course she was scared also. […] She could see everything, both my future and past. […] I saw everything too; it made me dizzy. I saw how forlorn I had been for close to twenty years without her, and now this would end. […] I didn’t want to, I did not understand why I was remembering an experience that did not belong here at all. And why is it interfering now. Why did I go limp because of it. She too needed to lean on something, and that made everything even more improbable. What I felt inside I could see on her.40

The recognized fusion of the erotic and death drive creates the borders of common laughter in the above quotation. The description and the self-interpretation of Kristóf’s reactions are built on the central concept of Freud’s metapsychology, namely, on the narcissistic libido. Progressing his previous study on sadomasochism (On Narcissism: An Introduction), Freud restricts the erotic element, opposed to the instincts of life represented by the Ego, to only an aspect of libidinal current, the self-preserving narcissistic libido. In order to subjugate the libido, the Ego supports the urges of the death drive within the Id and therefore narcissism is charged with the mission to resist the death drive. Herbert Marcuse’s interpretation on Freud’s metapsychology bridges the Freudian dual and the Jungian nondualistic concepts of libido, and demonstrates that, the individual psyche as an embodied being, it is subject to dynamic mental and environmental processes, and is not considered a cut-off entity restricted to several inherent tendencies.41 The illusion of Kristóf’s transparency (“She could see everything, both my future and past.”) is provoked by the reflection of their defenselessness and corporal, mental and psychic instability, uncertainty and serves to intensify his overwhelming fear to leave desolation. The narration connects his death drive, highlighted by the joke, to his infant anxiety created by the sense of being replaced or disposable, and it is presented as a process from being initially unavailable then gradually revealing. Klára’s joke turns on the uninterpretable “long-ago moment” (910.) retrievable from the previous, repeated, increasingly specified passages. The story of the relationship with Ilonka Weisz and the circumstances and causes of Kristóf’s faint are intimately related in the previous chapter (This Sunny Summer Afternoon). His enthusiasm for the chanteuse, the maids’ dismissal and his desire for identification with them, establish the context of his collapse. From the systematic visit of his childhood’s places three main destinations are emphasized by the narration: the restaurant garden where Hedda Hiller used to sing and the scenes of his mother’s then his father’s loss. The accelerated rhythm and the dynamics of their periodic laughter, becoming more conspicuous for this point, introduce the temporary revealing, and then the separated, even more reserved narrated monologues.

Amid the busy pointing, their faces touched, perhaps accidentally, and there was her scent, her shoulders and her breasts. The contact was so light and accidental, their bodies taut as bows, that they both burst into laughter and then laughed in each other’s face. In which act there was enough death-defying courage to make them recoil. Their future became heavy and their past threatening; they said nothing.42

Laughing in each other’s face is enacted like one of the central metaphors of the whole chapter In Full Swing, condenses their communication mixed by involuntary self-revelations and concealments, manipulations. The narrator’s strategy consists in this constantly shifting the focalization of the narrative and the relevant context of their polyvalent metaphors and phrases. “The stormy events of the city’s living history and […] the story of its compulsive destructions and compulsive reconstructions”43 becomes the cause and at the same time the medium of their limits and limitations, laughter in this scene is functioning like the “light barrier”: threatens, reveals and demarcates. The venue of his father’s deportation provokes the sentences which he would have taken back later, and which are in the place of the current real question: “why a new love if everything ends like this, if everything is so brittle and every story is destruction and devastation”. They are standing “in the middle of the deserted, glimmering roadway” (956.) and the father’s former room is illuminated but curtained off. The tension and the contrast between their stories, between her tone, borrowed from the chatty dramas featured in boulevard theaters, and the selling out of his family’s stories are balanced by the releasing laughter at his great-grandfather.

Anyway, he ruined everything at the right time, when everything was still in its heyday. At least they could have a laugh at something: that the great-grandfather had managed to ruin things. There was no inheritance. As if they were saying that nothing could be more uplifting than penury, when one is free of the dread of ownership. And one has to have a certain talent for ruining things, a sense of rhythm.

They too will become worthy of their own doom, they too will squander and ruin everything in good time.

He has nobody and never has had anybody.

And why does he lie so shamelessly.44

This scene presents a further variation of their superior, released laughter at the male family members. The focus here is on possession and property, shifting between their different forms, meanings and connotations, where ownership inspires fear while “penury is uplifting” (958.). Their apparently liberating laughter is secretly controlling, its reterritorializing aspect is targeted for dissipating the inheritance, erasing his dividing history and partly, their ancestry. Their laughter together is creating a sense of community, denying their hidden and irreplaceable lovers whose existence becomes evident for the readers by the second part of the chapter. It develops and manages the strategy to babbling about cover stories, reciting a pseudo-saga of heroes and reversing the former victims of laughter to his death-drive (962.), namely to the third male members of his family. The literal translation of the last word of the quote above would be “facelessly”. The sense of rhythm for ruining things in these chapters is connected to laughter, which makes faces.