Humor jako mobilizace psychiky, potencialita, zmarňowání, přesah a nebezpečí (Sedmý životopis Oty Filipa a jeho předchůdci)

Ivo Pospíšil

Abstract

The author of the present study deals with the wider understanding of humour going back to Hippocrates ‘conception of four humours in human body and to its English Renaissance interpretation (Ben Jonson’s humoral theory). Humour was understood as the phenomenon leading to the mobilisation of psychic qualities of man which could demonstrate either joy and laughter or pain, spleen and tears, both comic and tragic aspects of human life; this conception was, therefore, much wider than that of comism and caricature.
The author of the study seeks this wider conception of humour in Shakespeare’s “bitter comedies” and in some plays written by the 19th-century Russian dramatists {A. S.Griboyedov, A. V. Suchovo-Kobylin, M. Ye. Saltykov-Shchedrin} reflecting similar approaches in Gogol’s short storie and in his Dead Souls; later it appeared in the short stories of F. M. Dostoevsky and F. Kafka. This kind of humour arises from the confrontation of the usual and tolerable and the unusual and intolerable; it always means ambiguity and uncertainty. Humour has two faces like fire: it can be a good servant, but a bad master, as well as medicine has a double substance (the means leading to health or a poison leading to death). Such paradoxical and surprising features of humour can be found in Kafka’s novels, especially in The Castle (“inverted romance”) or in the Czech émigré writer Egon Hostovsky.

The author of the study presents the case of the latest novel written by the Czech- German novelist Ota Filip (bom 1930), a sort of a confession interopreting his collaboration with the Czechoslovak communist secret police (the revelation of this fact led Ota Filip’s son to suicide in Germany). The novel called The Seventh Curriculum Vitae represents a special kind of a confessional chronicle in which the traces of a wider conception of humour as the means of the mobilisation of human psychology were being liquidated by the general skeptical understanding of the history of mankind. The author of the study manifests Filip’s “humour” by several passages concerning his favourite reading (Camus’ novels), the contrast of sex and politics reminding us of Yu. Bondarev and of M. Kundera’s Joke, and the ridiculous introduction of the Russian game “gorodki” into communist Czechoslovakia after 1948.
The theoretical aspect of the present study reveals the fact that humour and its manifestations are closely associated with the general generic frame of the artifact, in this case with the confessional chronicle evoking the tragedy of the individual under the impact of history.