Eyolf Østrem, Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals
Humour, memory, and the Transformation of Discourse
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When I saw Spartacus for the first time, I was struck by how ridiculous many of the scenes were, even though it was clear that it was seriously meant – very seriously – and that what made it ridiculous was not so much the costumes, the hairstyles, or the acting, but something less tangible. In this paper, I will use this feeling of amusement as a point of departure for a presentation of some thoughts about historical understanding, specifically connected to the notion of ‘transformation of discourse’.
If we regard ‘discourse’ as a term denoting the over-arching system of interpretation which determines the understanding of a phrase and which sets the ‘limits of possible truth’ (Foucault; Butler), this comes close to narrative historiography in some form. Paired with ‘transformation’ – which implies continuity just as much as change – we get a concept denoting not the transition of a certain contents from one setting to another, but the transition from one narrative to another: the switch from one framework of understanding to another.
This comes close to humour, which according to one of the most widespread definitions arises from the double association of an item in respect of two different and incompatible reference frames or interpretive matrices at once, just as ‘transformation of discourse’ implies two distinct discourses and some element, motif, or historical object which can be perceived within both.
This is exemplified through the movie Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Ustinov. Spartacus becomes inadevertently funny because of its relation to history: in the technical means to tell the story, in the implicit gaze at the past which forms the way it is told, and in the explicit references to itself as a historical movie, it ends up parading its own presentness in relation to the past, which was obvious when it was made, but which, when we see it today when 1960 is a thing of the past and not a present, appears as a mock-present.
This mixing up of the roles of the now vs. the past, will then be used to outline a model in which the historian’s task is seen not as bringing the (objective) past to our ‘now’, but to allow us, through the historian’s narratives, to extend our ‘Present’ – regarded as the totality of that which is present to the individual, i.e. the ‘now’ of raw sensual stimuli, as processed through language, and the traces of previous nows in memory – by incorporating history – regarded as the story which is unrelated to the ‘now’, of which one does not oneself have direct knowledge – in the form of ‘as if’-memories.
The humoristic aspect of a film like Spartacus can be used as a heuristic tool to discover where there are possible ‘transformations of discourse’ which are worth studying. But the continuity between the various historical narratives is what constitutes the major difference between humour and transformation of discourse, and which makes historical writing a meaningful and not a ridiculous exercise.