Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad

2. Comedy and Class Struggle

53 Comedy and Class Struggle T he Iliad begins with anger, but Book 1 ends with “Homeric laughter .” As Zeus and Hera embark on a quarrel that mirrors the one between Achilles and Agamemnon, Hephaestus intervenes. He counsels his mother to yield to his father, and then busies himself serving wine to the gods. Presumably the clumsiness with which the lame Hephaestus performs this task makes it funny. But among the blessed immortals uncontrollable laughter went up as they saw Hephaistos bustling about the place. (Il. 1.599–600) ἄσβεστος δ’ ἄρ’ ἐνῶρτο γέλως µακάρεσσι θεοῖσιν, ὡς ἴδον Ἥφαιστον διὰ δώµατα ποιπνύοντα. The contrast between the proliferating tears of the mortal world and the laughter of the gods is a critical commonplace. Mortals inhabit a tragic space, whereas the laughter of the gods suggests a frivolous and comic existence. The portrait of divine beings free from mortal concerns, mere spectators of the struggles of heroes, becomes a protracted, melancholy commentary on the human world and its constant backdr op of death. The gods seem to live in a world of a plenitude of pleasur e, where laughter is in never-ending supply. But there is something amiss her e. For one thing, the gods ar e capable of far less pleasant emotions. Zeus accuses Hera of desiring to eat the Trojans raw, and her hatred is linked to the pettiest feelings of jealousy and amour propre. Zeus himself will make the sky rain down blood in response to the death of his son Sarpedon. Humans also laugh at crucial times in the poem. So we need to consider in mor e detail the kinds of laughter each world produces. 2 54 Comedy and Class Struggle We can use as a guide the most influential modern tract on laughter, Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud’s book is structured in the form of an anti -joke. Freud leads us through a discussion of the technique of jokes and the r elationship of their technique to the mechanisms of the unconscious; he then offers a final attempt to relate jokes to the wider categories of the comic and the humorous. But nothing quite prepares us for the brutal brevity of the last paragraph. For the euphoria we endeavour to r each by these means [jokes, the comic, humour] is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we wer e accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy—the mood of our childhood, when we wer e ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes, and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life.1 Jokes, for Freud, have a tragic context. The pleasur es of the laughter only help us regain a small measure of a far greater source of pleasure that is lost for ever. Humor provides just enough pleasur e to give us something less than happiness and r emind us of the pittance of pleasur e that is our human, mortal lot. All humor becomes a form of gallows humor, as Freud drives a wedge between laughter and happiness. True happiness would have no need of laughter to pr op it up. We can conjure up a lost utopian time when we simply wer e happy, effortlessly, whereas even humor is caught up in a process of effort, the day-to-day struggle of living up to cultural norms that exhaust us, the discontent of civilization itself. Laughter, for Freud, occurs when we unexpectedly get back a quota of mental ener gy that we normally expend, without knowing it, on this cultural work. In the case of jokes, wor dplay releases us momentarily from the duty to make sense. Now, one way of conceiving this utopia would be to exaggerate the pleasure of our laughter. We could think of laughter without pause, fr ee from the kind of temporal constraints of human laughter , the temporary discharge of pleasurable energy that punctuates a mor e generalized sadness, before returning to silence and the absence of pleasur e once more. And, as it happens, in theIliad the major examples of human laughter are broken, as the momentary feeling of joy fails to over come the poem’s general feeling of doom, wher eas the laughter of the gods is described as “unquenchable,” with at least the suggestion of something unbroken and unending, an infinity of pleasure. The laughter of the gods goes on and on, wher eas...