WITS END

WITS END

LAUGHTER AMID BLEAKNESS

BY CHRIS THURMAN

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” observes a character in Samuel Beckett’s play "Endgame", “I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

Beckett was a master of grim humour, of finding laughter amid bleakness – or should that be laughter "at" bleakness? It’s an important distinction. One implies compassion, optimism, comfort and camaraderie; the other suggests indifference, vindictiveness, meanness and the end of hope.

"Endgame" and its better-known precursor, "Waiting for Godot", were products of a particular historical moment: the decade after the World War II, in the shadow of the Cold War and the atomic bomb, when the middle-aged Beckett (never the most sanguine of Irishmen) saw little in humanity’s future that encouraged him. I wonder what he would have made of our current global context. Nothing is funnier than unhappiness – but only because Beckett died before the advent of viral cat videos.

It was almost inevitable that one of the defining images of our digitally-driven COVID era would be a cat on a Zoom call. Or rather, a lawyer on a Zoom call in a virtual court room, unable to turn off a filter and finding himself uttering those immortal words: “I’m not a cat.”

It’s the plea that spawned a thousand memes. "Notting Hill" fans chuckled at Julia Roberts’ lines reconfigured: “I’m just a lawyer, standing in front of a judge, asking him to believe that I’m not a cat.” Art aficionados congratulated themselves for getting a joke based on René Magritte’s famous painting "La Trahison Des Images", in which a picture of a pipe is undermined by the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”); this time round, it was a case of Ceci n’est pas un chat.

There is actually something profound in all this. Magritte’s painting, whose French title is commonly translated into English as "The Treachery of Images", conveys one of the core dilemmas of being human. We make images of the world we live in – the world as we see it, or would like it to be seen – and we share these with others. But those images are not themselves the world we live in; they neither replace it nor fully represent it.

We knew this before the Great Pause of 2020-21. Pictures on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are not the real thing. Half of them are fabrications, and the other half are either recollections or projections: the way we thought things were or the way we want things to be. Yet Magritte’s lesson has only really hit home for most of us over the past year – a year of seeing faces and places on screens but not in person.

In the Age of Zoom (insert your preferred platform here: MS Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime, WhatsApp video call or ... a name uttered with dread by tech-phobic Wits staff and students in the early months of 2021 ... Canvas Conferences) we have to accept displacement as the working premise of our online interactions. I’m there where I am, but I’m not there; I’m here with you, but I’m not here.

A digital meeting makes the miraculous mundane, connecting people around the world without contributing to their carbon footprints. As any teacher will tell you, however, a virtual classroom just ain’t the same as a physical one. Sometimes it feels like you spend a lot of energy trying to persuade your students that you’re not a cat – useful if you’re lecturing on art history, or trying to make a point about American jurisprudence, but otherwise a distraction from the matter at hand.

Okay, I’m muddying the analogy here. You know what I mean:

“I think you’re on mute. Yes, you’re on mute.” “Can you see my screen? I’m trying to share my screen.” “Sorry, I had to leave and come back again.” “You’re breaking up. You’ve frozen.” “Can you hear me, judge? I’m not a cat.”

This is the stuff of tragicomedy. Beckett would have loved it; the funny side of unhappiness. The challenge for all of us is to ensure that we never confuse laughing despite our frustration (which is really a form of laughing at ourselves) with laughing at others’ misery.

When you’re in a cynical mood, there is something absurd about human beings and our attempts to communicate. It’s laughable. And yet, precisely because we can’t ever know about the inner life of another person – whether they are in the room with us or on the screen in front of us – maybe we should err on the side of earnestness.

Chris Thurman is Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (School of Literature, Language and Media) at Wits

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