This was originally written for The Story Club a community which lives on as The Story Ark.
“Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.”
~ Brave New World
If you are unfamiliar with the story in question, the character Helmholtz is a writer, and one of the top producers of propaganda/entertainment for his country. His is a great talent, and in this scene, he’s being introduced to Shakespeare. However, he’s not laughing at a comedy, or even a comedic scene. He is laughing at Juliet’s plight, at her being forced to marry another. It is not even the hastiness of Romeo and Juliet falling in love which sends him guffawing, but he loses it because she is pleading with her father and mother, a concept he, as the product of a test tube, cannot take seriously. He is laughing that she or her parents should care much about who she sleeps with, for he has hardly any idea what love is beyond a physical sensation.
“Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.”
~ The Abolition of Man
Helmholtz seeks to be a better writer. His whole character arc is driven by him breaking the “unwritten” rules of his society to search for something he hardly knows. As an aspiring author, I sympathize, but as a child of my own age, I read this passage and feel a shiver running up my spine. I too, I know, have laughed at what was once, in some forgotten age, not laughed at. Most recently, an episode of Omnibus called, Whistle and I’ll Come for You, sent me into a guffaw. I cannot even pretend it was a nervous laugh. I found it a comedy, not a ghost story. (The concluding scene had me in stitches.)
A few weeks later, one of my heroes, Andrew Klavan, brings up this very episode on his show as a good ensample of a televised ghost story. Knowing Klavan to be inerrant, or at least to have greater skill, knowledge, wisdom, and experience than myself, I conclude that something is wrong with me.
“If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.”
~ The Everlasting Man
I remember in High School a beloved teacher going on a tirade because we could not take Homer seriously. To us, the Iliad seemed like a joke without a punch line. It had all the buildup of a joke: Overly serious people highly invested in a meaningless war. Mr. R had to set us straight. This was not a joke. It was so long ago now that I cannot remember any detail, but the point I seem to recall was this: American culture forced us to expect a joke whenever something was serious. Helmholtz could not take parentage seriously, and we could not take seriousness seriously.
“[There is] a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,”
~ Ecclesiastes 3:4
I do not begrudge the American humor of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” but it seems to me that the joke is not just on Arthurian legend but also pokes fun at Americans who cannot appreciate it. I, like Helmholtz, am desperately seeking the ineffable all artists desire, but I cannot help fearing that my own upbringing was unbalanced, that there are large swaths of the human condition to which I have a conditioned blindness. How can I write, how can I tell the truth, if I am hardly even a man?
Related:
Tale Told 