Eisenstein on the comic (5)

November 27, 1943

The Comic

Literalization—literalization of metaphors or anything else—as a “technique of the comic”.

Wonderful! And what, in its essence, is this “literalization”?

What is it if not the appearance of something static where we rely on something essentially dynamic?

For what confronts, for instance, the “letter of the law”?

Its spirit.

But what is this “spirit”? Above all else, it is movement (see what was Wotan in “The Embodiment of Myth” d’après Simrock, etc.)

And “letter”—“dead” letter. Motionless.

So there we have it. [English in the original]

We can therefore speak sometimes, without reservations, about literalization as something that belongs to the very basis of our formula.

A lovely example of this occurs “as the unity of opposites” in the form of a simple reversal of what is typically acceptable. This already gives us a funny effect ([for instance, in the anecdote—text of a telegram:] “Start worrying! I will send details in the letter later”).  Or, for instance, directly, in a shot in a film chronicle that moves in “the opposite direction” (an effect which was among the first effects of comedy!). A literalized concept of reversibility appears as backward movement.

Such is the name of a satanic-tragic novel [Huysmans’ À rebours (Against Nature)] where à rebours in a dynamic reversal of a progressive process [implies] a return to chaos.

A comic equivalent of this would be a novel reversed not “in spirit,” but with a “literal” reversal; that is, a novel written backwards. For instance, with a reversed course of action. “Literally,” that is, in its narrative statements.

And precisely this we can find in one of the most immortal novels—Tristram Shandy: “According to Horace Walpole, the novelty of Tristram Shandy lay in ‘The whole narrative going backwards’.” (Introduction by Wilbur L. Cross to Tristram Shandy, Horace Liveright edition, 1925). [English in the original]

However, a purely mechanical reversal is not enough for a genuine comic effect. It should be enough in a true order of things, but there it is dynamically-processual and not statically-material, amorphous, immobile, literal, as is the case with the comic.

And what? That is precisely what happens here. The backwards [English in the original] account of the course of events (i.e. the objective order) is the literalization of the truth of the method of constructing a novel.

Remember: Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846. Beginning with:

“Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of "Barnaby Rudge," says: ‘By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.’

“I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin—and indeed what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in accordance with Mr. Dickens' idea—but the author of "Caleb Williams" was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” Etc. (In Regis Messac “Le ‘Detective Novel’”, Paris, 1929—all the details about this. The first article on “Barnaby” was an analysis by Edgar Allan Poe: how does it end—who turns out to be the killer—the novel when it was not yet completed for publication, etc. The script of “Barnaby,” quotations from Poe, etc., etc.)

[From: Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 381-3.]