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Title: The Meaning of the Wild Body
   [The ninth story in Lewis's 1927 collection The Wild Body:
   A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories]
Author: Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928
Date first posted: 19 January 2011
Date last updated: 19 January 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #703

This ebook was produced by Barbara Watson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This ebook was produced from images generously made
available by the Internet Archive






THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY

by Wyndham Lewis



  'From man, who is acknowledged to be intelligent, non-intelligent
  things such as hair and nails originate, and . . . on the other
  hand, from avowedly non-intelligent matter (such as cow-dung),
  scorpions and similar animals are produced. But . . . the real
  cause of the non-intelligent hair and nails is the human body,
  which is itself non-intelligent, and the non-intelligent dung. Even
  there there remains a difference . . . in so far as non-intelligent
  matter (the body) is the abode of an intelligent principle (the
  scorpion's soul) while other unintelligent matter (the dung) is
  not.'
                                         _Vednta-Stras._
                                      _II Adhyya. I Pda_, 6.


1. THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY

First, to assume the dichotomy of mind and body is necessary here,
without arguing it; for it is upon that essential separation that the
theory of laughter here proposed is based. The essential us, that is the
laughter, is as distinct from the Wild Body as in the Upanisadic account
of the souls returned from the paradise of the Moon, which, entering
into plants, are yet distinct from them. Or to take the symbolic vedic
figure of the two birds, the one watching and passive, the other
enjoying its activity, we similarly have to postulate _two_ creatures,
one that never enters into life, but that travels about in a vessel to
whose destiny it is momentarily attached. That is, of course, the
laughing observer, and the other is the Wild Body.

To begin to understand the totality of _the absurd_, at all, you have to
assume much more than belongs to a social differentiation. There is
nothing that is animal (and we as bodies are animals) that is not
absurd. This sense of the absurdity, or, if you like, the madness of our
life, is at the root of every true philosophy. William James delivers
himself on this subject as follows:--

   'One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the
   fact of one's being there, of one's queer bodily shape in the
   darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Stevenson says),
   of one's fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over
   the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see
   that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that
   _anything_ should be, but that _this_ very thing should be, is
   mysterious. Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for
   from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.'

It is the chasm lying between non-being, over which it is impossible for
logic to throw any bridge, that, in certain forms of laughter, we leap.
We land plumb in the centre of Nothing. It is easy for us to see, if we
are french, that the German is 'absurd,' or if german, that the French
is 'ludicrous,' for we are _outside_ in that case. But it was
Schopenhauer (whom James quotes so aptly in front of the above passage),
who also said: 'He who is proud of being "a German," "a Frenchman," "a
Jew," can have very little else to be proud of.' (In this connection it
may be recalled that his father named him 'Arthur,' because 'Arthur' was
the same in all languages. Its possession would not attach him to any
country.) So, again, if we have been at Oxford or Cambridge, it is easy
to appreciate, from the standpoint acquired at a great university, the
absurdity of many manners not purified or intellectualized by such a
training. What it is far more difficult to appreciate, with any
constancy, is that, whatever his relative social advantages or
particular national virtues may be, every man is profoundly open to the
same criticism or ridicule from any opponent who is only different
enough. Again, it is comparatively easy to see that another man, as an
animal, is absurd; but it is far more difficult to observe oneself in
that hard and exquisite light. But no man has ever continued to live who
has observed himself in that manner for longer than a flash. Such
consciousness must be of the nature of a thunderbolt. Laughter is only
summer-lightning. But it occasionally takes on the dangerous form of
absolute revelation.

This fundamental self-observation, then, can never on the whole be
absolute. We are not constructed to be _absolute observers_. Where it
does not exist at all, men sink to the level of insects. That does not
matter: the 'lord of the past and the future, he who is the same today
and tomorrow'--that 'person of the size of a thumb that stands in the
middle of the Self'--departs. So the 'Self' ceases, necessarily. The
conditions of an insect communism are achieved. There would then no
longer be any occasion, once that was completely established, to argue
for or against such a dichotomy as we have assumed, for then it could no
longer exist.


2. THE ROOT OF THE COMIC

The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from
the observations of a _thing_ behaving like a person. But from that
point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all _things_,
or physical bodies, behaving as _persons_. It is only when you come to
deny that they are 'persons,' or that there is any 'mind' or 'person'
there at all, that the world of appearance is accepted as quite natural,
and not at all ridiculous. Then, with a denial of 'the person,' life
becomes immediately both 'real' and very serious.

To bring vividly to our mind what we mean by 'absurd,' let us turn to
the plant, and enquire how the plant could be absurd. Suppose you came
upon an orchid or a cabbage reading Flaubert's _Salammb_, or Plutarch's
_Moralia_, you would be very much surprised. But if you found a man or a
woman reading it, you would _not_ be surprised.

Now in one sense you ought to be just as much surprised at finding a man
occupied in this way as if you had found an orchid or a cabbage, or a
tomcat, to include the animal world. There is the same physical anomaly.
It is just as absurd externally, that is what I mean.--The deepest root
of the Comic is to be sought in this anomaly.

The movement or intelligent behaviour of matter, any autonomous movement
of matter, is essentially comic. That is what we mean by comic or
ludicrous. And we all, as human beings, answer to this description. We
are all autonomously and intelligently moving matter. The reason we do
not laugh when we observe a man reading a newspaper or trimming a lamp,
or smoking a pipe, is because we suppose he 'has a mind,' as we call it,
because we are accustomed to this strange sight, and because we do it
ourselves. But because when you see a man walking down the street you
know why he is doing that (for instance, because he is on his way to
lunch, just as the stone rolling down the hillside, you say, is
responding to the law of gravitation), that does not make him less
ridiculous. But there is nothing essentially ridiculous about the
stone. The man is ridiculous fundamentally, he is ridiculous _because he
is a man_, instead of a thing.

If you saw (to give another example of intelligence or movement in the
'dead') a sack of potatoes suddenly get up and trundle off down the
street (unless you were at once so sceptical as to think that it was
some one who had got inside the sack), you would laugh. A couple of
trees suddenly tearing themselves free from their roots, and beginning
to waltz: a 'cello softly rubbing itself against a kettle-drum: a
lamp-post unexpectedly lighting up of its own accord, and then
immediately hopping away down to the next lamp-post, which it proceeded
to attack: all these things would appear very 'ridiculous,' although
your alarm, instead of whetting your humour, might overcome it. These
are instances of miraculous absurdities, they do not happen; I have only
enumerated them, to enlighten us as regards the things that do happen.

The other day in the underground, as the train was moving out of the
station, I and those around me saw a fat but active man run along, and
deftly project himself between the sliding doors, which he pushed to
behind him. Then he stood leaning against them, as the carriage was
full. There was nothing especially funny about his face or general
appearance. Yet his running, neat, deliberate, but clumsy embarkation,
_combined with the coolness of his eye_, had a ludicrous effect, to
which several of us responded. His _eye_ I decided was the key to the
absurdity of the effect. It was its detachment that was responsible for
this. It seemed to say, as he propelled his sack of potatoes--that is
himself--along the platform, and as he successfully landed the sack in
the carriage:--'I've not much "power," I may just manage it:--yes,
_just_!' Then in response to our gazing eyes, 'Yes, that's me! That was
not so bad, was it? When you run a line of potatoes like ME, you get the
knack of them: but they take a bit of moving.'

It was the detachment, in any case, that gave the episode a comic
quality, that his otherwise very usual appearance would not have
possessed. I have sometimes seen the same look of whimsical detachment
on the face of a taxi-driver when he has taken me somewhere, in a very
slow and ineffective conveyance. _His taxi for him stood for his body._
He was quite aware of its shortcomings, but did not associate himself
with them. He knew quite well what a taxi ought to be. He did not
identify himself with his machine.

Many cases of the comic are caused by the reverse of this--by the
_unawareness_ of the object of our mirth: though awareness (as in the
case of comic actors) is no hindrance to our enjoyment of the ludicrous.
But the case described above, of the man catching the train,
illustrates my point as to the root of the sensation of the comic. It is
because the man's body was not him.

These few notes, coming at the end of my stories, may help to make the
angle from which they are written a little clearer, in giving a general
rough definition of what 'Comic' means for their author.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Other than the addition of a missing single quote mark, minor variations
in spelling and punctuation have been preserved.



[End of The Meaning of the Wild Body, by Wyndham Lewis]
