Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

delusions less plausibly, or accompanied him with a mocking andsardonic squire. Our laughter would have been quicker and sharper, but thin, and quickly automatic. Satire, as an attack upon an idea or set of ideas, quickly bores us, since the author, manipulating his puppets, makes the same statement over and over. Here, with Cervantes—himself as often battered and disappointed as his hero—our laughter is deepened by a certain ambiguous poetry in the narrative; the windmills are not merely mistaken for giants but somehow loom
as
giants. The wind, springing up opportunely to turn their giant arms, seems to join the fun; and the knight’s unshakable dignity in some sense argues for his delusions, and gives him that air of triumph which is, we noted above, an ancient tributary of laughter.…
    Dr. Pangloss, like Don Quixote, irrepressibly applies the mechanism of his
idée fixe
to the incongruous material of life. But here there is no mistaking the satiric edge, and the author performs his comedy on the edge of pain. We are anesthetized, and allowed therefore to laugh, by the flitting quickness and neatness of the narrative style. When the Lisbon earthquake occurs in
Candide
, we are told, as if the statistic had been gathered in an instant, that “Thirty thousand men, women and children were crushed to death.” The characters with mechanical promptness react in character: the pious and innocent Candide exclaims that the Day of Judgment is near, Dr. Pangloss poses himself a philosophical riddle amid the toppling ruins, and the sailor, cheerfully heartless, seizes the opportunity for theft and lechery. Such stylization preserves the earthquake as an item in an abstract argument and heightens our sense of play. In a sentence, we are told Candide is injured and half-buried, but are not asked to dwell upon his condition—Rozinante’s limp is more sensuously present. The central figure remains Dr. Pangloss, whose musing in such circumstances approaches heroic detachment and whose lack of pity for Candide is partially redeemed by his equal lack of self-pity. Pangloss’ preposterous conclusion of a vein of sulphur running halfway around the world, defended with the stoutness of a Quixote, makes us laugh; and if we look into our laughter we detect there:
    1. a sense of superiority to the scientific speculation of the 18th century;
    2. a certain pleasure in the image, gaudy and simple as a child’s crayon stroke;
    3. applause at the good doctor’s unfailing intellectual curiosity;
    4. a kind of hysteria at the frightful facts of calamity and heavenly indifference that Voltaire sets before us;
    5. a confession of pleasurable warmth, which the farcical tempo of the narrative has created in us, and which disposes us to laugh reflexively.
    Laughter, as we know from its social instances, is infectious and carries a curious momentum; an image, mixed of such incongruities as a man’s call for the oil and wine of the last rites mixed with another man’s meditations upon sulphur, trips the trigger of laughter and, recurring (as it does when Pangloss insists, “I maintain it’s proved!”), trips it again, harder. Here we touch upon the mystery, in presentation of the comic, of
timing;
in personal presentation, of timing and facial expression. A wrong twist of the face, betraying over-eagerness, like an excessive adjective in a sentence, will with mysterious thoroughness defuse a joke and frustrate a laugh. The moment of blank bewilderment that Freud describes has been sullied. There must be a headlong, clean, economical something, a swift and careless music perhaps descended from the rhythm of ticklings in infancy. No purer example of this comic music exists than
Candide
. Indeed, its example leads us to wonder if any efficient display of energy—an elegant mathematical proof, a well-made young woman briskly walking by—doesn’t dispose us to jubilation, to a smile or laugh that is a salute, a shout of greeting to the angels of