Mock the Object Itself: Homophobia, the Songful, and the Grain in Dudley Moore's Britten Parody

What started as Roland Barthes’s ‘little parlour game’ (‘talk about a piece of music without using a single adjective’) has led to the coinage of a quality.[1] ‘Grain’—the presence of the body in a voice—is an uncountable noun (the voice cannot have ‘grains’, but it can have a ‘volume’ of grain) and an attribute that music can possess, and it has, as Jonathan Dunsby puts it, ‘been mythologized’.[2] The paper-trail in its wake has not only fruitfully extended the term, as Barthes suggests we should, to diverse genres of music and to the speaking voice, but pushed it into discussions about the written word (see Callahan 1988) and even parodied it (see Quack 2004).[3] This essay will hold the ‘grain’ up against part of that paper-trail which does not stray from the lied, the genre with which Barthes originally concerned himself, and instead of pushing Barthes’s term introduces an altogether different concept. The concept in question is Lawrence Kramer’s ‘songfulness’, an adjectival noun and another uncountable quality. Seeking to unpack some of the Barthesian ‘mythology’ along the way, this essay will discuss ‘songfulness’ and ‘grain’ in tandem, finding their interstices and divergences, before finally applying the two qualia in a context that may trouble both: Dudley Moore’s parody lieder from a 1961 television broadcast of comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. 

As Ed White points out, the object of Barthes’s ‘little parlour game’—to ‘change the musical object itself’ rather than to ‘change directly the language on music’—parrots the title of another of his essays.[4] In ‘Change the Object Itself’, he seeks to move Marxist discourse on from the discussion of the ideologies latent in language to sociolect, or in other words how ‘thick’ language is with the ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’ of ideology.[5] Like the ‘grain’, this deals in qualia; thickness is an attribute. But the ‘grain’, the explicit presence of the body, is yet more vividly material than this thickness, and consequently more ontological; Language can be more or less thick, but Barthes hears that grain can be in a voice. When Barthes seeks to ‘change the object itself’, he is seeking a new text. That text, the grain, is ‘the very precise space of the encounter between language and a voice’, or even more precisely, as White suggests, ‘where language systems meet bodies’.[6]

Barthes examines this language-voice encounter in relation to the voices of two singers, Charles Panzéra and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, using their voices as ‘ciphers’ for two terms that borrows from Julia Kristeva: the geno-song and the pheno-song.[7] Standing apart from the structural pheno-song, which is ‘everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression’—the concern of the adjectives from which Barthes seeks to escape—the geno-song is: 

the volume [as in substance and presence] of the singing and speaking voice […] that apex (or depth) of production where the melody really works at the language—not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers [….] It is, in a very simple word […], the diction of language.[8]

Here Barthes makes clear that grain is, in part, an event. The ‘encounter’ is an act of utterance. At this point, language begins to fail. The noun ‘grain’ is too material to capture the performativity of the event, and the ‘event’ too temporal to capture the body in the grain. In the end, Barthes settles for ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’.[9] The grain of the voice is in the active continuous: the grain of the voice as it utters. 

When Kramer defines his adjectival noun ‘songfulness’ towards the start of his essay, he first invokes a noun (an utterance), and he follows it with the present continuous (singing): 

Songfulness is a fusion of vocal and musical utterance judged to be both pleasurable and suitable independent of verbal content. It is the positive quality of singing in itself: just singing.[10]

While Barthes leaves space for the grain outside of singing (for example in the speaking voice or in instrumental music, or for some analogous presence of the body in writing or performing), Kramer remains specific to song.[11] Where both deal with an encounter between words and music in which ‘communication’ (Barthes) or ‘actual meaning’ (Kramer) is not an actor, Kramer fuses that encounter into the act of singing.[12] Songfulness only becomes a ‘positive quality’ if the voice can ‘envelop or suffuse both melody and text so that their independent existence is obscured’—an envelopment that, in the unavoidably material connotations of the metaphor, begins to feel analogous (it is a very full envelope) to the ‘volume’ of voice invoked by Barthes.[13] Nevertheless, as Kramer makes clear, the metaphor ends here; ‘the voice is more medium than object’.[14] What is important is not the envelope itself, but first the process of envelopment and then, crucially, ‘the condensation of this process into a quality, the conversion of the absence of textual and melodic distinctness into a positive presence’.[15] This is the only point at which Kramer cites Barthes, writing that ‘for [songfulness] to happen, the voice must neither be too ‘grainy’ nor too brilliant’, and ‘not show too much of […] the “grain”, that testifies to the singer’s material uniqueness’.[16] Kramer stills sees voice as a ‘corporeal medium’, but for him it is more importantly a conduit for songfulness, that ‘brings the music into a space of potential or virtual meaning’.[17]

Kramer may commit himself to it more exclusively, but both of these theorists are explicitly addressing song or, more specifically, the act of listening to it. Where Kramer seeks to define a ‘potential or virtual intersubjectivity that in some circumstances may be realised in the course of song’, Barthes strives for ‘the impossible account of an individual thrill that I constantly experience in listening to singing’.[18] But for the writer of ‘The Death of the Author’, Dunsby points out, David Headlam’s notion that ‘Barthes advocated space for the reader where no one interpretation can claim authority’ is troubling in light of Barthes’s application of the ‘grain’, through which he ‘insists’ that one singer, Panzéra, does in fact have ‘authority’ compared with his more popular counterpart Fischer-Dieskau.[19] As Dunsby reads Barthes, ‘if we fail to hear that, then the fault is ours, as “readers” who are simply in the wrong space at the wrong time’.[20] The ideological-contextual work that Dunsby does on ‘The Grain of the Voice’ highlights Barthes’s ‘actual human affection’ for Panzéra, his former teacher and deceased friend, asserting that ‘it seems to be persuasion that is on his mind, a kind of homage even, not scholarship’.[21] This individual motivation is aside from Lise Helmer Petersen’s suggestion that ‘Barthes is recycling well-known differences between a German and a French approach to singing’.[22] Nevertheless, Dunsby hears a ‘hard intellectual edge’ in Barthes’s ‘appeal to musicologists […] to re-examine the interface between language and music by asking better questions’ behind his seemingly ‘sentimental approach to song, to the voice and, above all, to the actual singer’.[23] The grain is, manifestly, more theoretically viable than just a means of ‘deifying’ or ‘attacking’ Barthes’s ‘cipher’-singers, regardless of his personal affection for one of them, or his latently nationally inflected listening preferences.[24] But nevertheless, the act of listening is explicitly his. Rather than Kramer’s more abstract appeal to intersubjectivity, Barthes writes of ‘the individual thrill that I constantly experience when I listen to singing’.[25]

All of Kramer’s singers are, to varying degrees, fictional, and neither sing in the languages of their listeners. The first is from George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876), in which Mirah, a Jewish runaway who ‘embodies the condition of diasporic wandering’, remembers her mother singing to her in Hebrew as a child’.[26] Another is a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime thriller Lifeboat (1944): a Nazi U-boat captain disguised as a ‘workaday sailor’, who sings Schubert’s lied ‘Heidenröslein’ as he rows the lifeboat that he shares with Allied shipwreck survivors.[27] In both cases, the ‘abundant provision of meaningfulness [or significance] depends for its effect on a lack of [semantic and hermeneutic] meaning’.[28] In Mirah’s case, while understanding the words of the Hebrew hymns ‘would have brought a consciousness only of the exilic suffering of the Jews’, the ‘meaningfulness’ of the ‘love and happiness’ in Mirah’s mother’s songs is a maternal one.[29] The intersubjective social work that the mother carries out here creates in Mirah a ‘musical memory that grounds her sense of self by symbolically both condensing and perpetuating her entire experience of maternal love’.[30] It is evidently much more than, as Kramer suggests, ‘just singing’.[31]

Conversely, the example of the U-boat captain does not (at least initially) concern the singer’s songfulness, but Schubert’s.[32] Kramer spends several pages demonstrating to what degree ‘Heidenröslein’ ‘“contains” and promotes a high degree of songfulness’, drawing attention to the ‘sonoric pleasures’ of repeating the word ‘Röslein’, the folkish ‘purity’ of its simplicity, and the ‘subordination of narrative to singing’ brought about by its strophic form.[33] He may be looking at it through the lens of songfulness, but Kramer’s text is Schubert’s musical work; Kramer has not ‘changed the object itself’, but has (at least temporarily) assigned agency directly to the information given by the score.[34] ‘Everything conduces to songfulness’, writes Kramer, ‘sing it right, and the song will seem to sing itself’.[35] To paraphrase Dunsby’s criticism of Barthes, ‘if we fail to [sing] that, then the fault is ours, as “readers” who are simply in the wrong space at the wrong time’.[36]

Nevertheless, Kramer identifies a ‘catch’ in the song that seemingly makes space for the body, and identifies it in carnal terms familiar to Barthes, writing that it is ‘almost literally a catch in the throat’.[37] This catch is a high G in bar 12, that ‘would give some amateur singers a bit of trouble’ and consequently puts the folk tone ‘under a certain pressure, almost […] in quotation marks’.[38] As Kramer points out, the ‘catch’ here—the extent to which one can hear a body—varies greatly between singers and performances, and ‘songfulness prevails’ when it is past.[39] This is Kramer’s structuralist deviation from Barthes: a point at which the grain, ‘a material realisation’, lies dormant, waiting to be realised.[40]

By pointing to a breach in songfulness, Kramer is keeping alive the ‘intricate dialectic between […] the poetic signified and the materiality of the vocal signifier’, here a contradiction.[41] A point which ‘makes restitution’ to the poetry as a ‘moment of regret or compassion’ is also a point at which a listener can expect to have their attention drawn away from the text and towards the ‘the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose’ that Barthes is always seeking to hear.[42] This essay is now approaching a working dialogue between the grain and the songful: if Barthes seeks to ‘displace the fringe of contact between words and music’ to the throat and Kramer wants the two to be indistinguishable, both are seeking to define a significance sometimes present in singing that will almost necessarily ‘lead to at least a partial loss of [semantic and hermeneutic] meaning’.[43] This meaning loss is, once again, a ‘positive presence’; its ‘higher carelessness’ in the face of semantic and hermeneutic meaning is a ‘power’ that song ‘harbours’ which ‘can take to the fore at any moment, either through the agency of a singer or by the invitation of a composer’.[44] By virtue of its ‘ideal ordinariness’, this cannot be the same as Barthes’s explicitly ‘erotic’ discourse around the grain.[45] The desire excited by the erotic necessitates an initial lack, something missing or lost to be desired, and not the ‘positive presence’ of the songful—or rather the song-full.[46] When Barthes writes, at the end of The Pleasure of the Text, of the body in the voice as ‘it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes’, this orgasmic jouissance (which Richard Miller translates as ‘bliss’) cannot ‘come’ if it is already present.[47]

It is from this position between the presence of songfulness and the desire for the grain that this essay will apply these two modes of listening to singing. That the object of the application is not a straightforward lied performance but the parody of one—specifically of Peter Pears singing a Benjamin Britten folk setting—puts pressure on both the grain and the songful because every aspect of the performance has been exaggerated. In his impersonation, Dudley Moore is seeking out the ‘diction’ of Pears as much as Britten’s ‘hand as it writes’ for the sake of mimesis.[48] For the joke to succeed, both must not only be recognisable but exaggerated as a gross double. Henri Bergson describes how ‘the caricaturist who alters the size of a nose, but respects its ground plan, lengthening it, for instance, in the very direction in which it was being lengthened by nature, is really making the nose indulge in a grin’.[49] Just as a caricaturist seeks out that which is distinctive in their subject’s face and expands it out of proportion, Moore uncannily reproduces Pears’s characteristically ‘clear, reedy voice’; his supposed ‘material uniqueness’ is reduced to another body’s soft palate pressed mockingly to the back of the throat, jaw exaggeratedly tensed, and tongue flatly compressed.[50] Kramer might describe this as ‘overvocalization’, songfulness’s complement, defined as ‘the purposeful effacement of text by voice’ which he associates with ‘emotional and metaphysical extremes, blurrings of ego boundaries, and [instability] of identity’.[51] It has none of songfulness’s ‘higher carelessness’, and is instead a ‘wrenching of song beyond the symbolising terrain of language’.[52] All of this would suggest that songfulness is nowhere to be found in Moore’s parody lieder, and that the excess of Moore’s singing fractures the ‘intricate dialectic between […] the poetic signified and the materiality of the vocal signifier’.[53] Bakhtin would call it ‘carnivalesque’, which he defines, in carnal terms familiar to both the grain and the grin, as ‘the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, [and] abstract […]; a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity’.[54] To repeat Kramer’s assertion, ‘for [songfulness] to happen, the voice must neither be too ‘grainy’ nor too brilliant’.[55] If it is unmistakeably Pears’s grain that can be heard via the medium of Moore’s throat, the ‘material uniqueness’ that Kramer excludes from songfulness is therefore distinctly denied.[56]

To refer once more to Kramer’s initial definition, the pleasure of songfulness is ‘independent of verbal content’.[57] The ‘actual meaning’ of the text, superfluous to songfulness and passively eschewed by it, is in turn passively eschewed by Moore; the text of his parody lied, the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’, is barely distinguishable amidst his slurred consonants (when he sings ‘Muffet’ his exaggeratedly English pronunciation sounds more like ‘muh-véd’), and these are often the points at which the television studio audience—familiar with Pears’s diction—laughs the most.[58] This is the significant ‘meaning’, analogous to the maternal love felt by Mirah in Kramer’s first example, in the place of semantic meaning.[59] If songfulness is ‘pleasurable […] independent of verbal content’, this audience’s laughter is arguably a base expression of that pleasure. Like jouissance, laughter ‘comes’; it is, in Roger Chambers’s terms, the positive presence of an ‘uproarious moment’ when the fabric of etiquette is fractured.[60]

Laughter is, in many ways, an appropriate response to the fulfilment of desire for the body in the voice. Not only is it, in this context, the sound of a body experiencing pleasure, of the spontaneous ejaculation of air as the lung ‘swells’ and, like the grain of the voice, gets its ‘erection’ in ‘the throat, the place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes’, but, as Bergson points out, a social utterance: 

you would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo [….] like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, nonetheless, a closed one. [61]

If, as Kramer writes, ‘the intersubjective bond’ of singing ‘is strongest when the voice is more medium than object’, there is something at least analogous, and potentially reciprocal to the songful, in this model of laughter as medium reverberating around a circle.[62] With the closedness comes the intimacy and intersubjectivity of the reciprocal exchange; Moore sings like Pears, his audience ‘gets’ the joke and laughs, and they all unfold the pleasurable encounter unanimously. But, conversely, this intimacy necessitates alienation. As Bergson stresses, the circle is closed. B. W. Young and Carrie J. Preston both conceive of Moore’s parody as an attack on Britten: ‘hurtful’, ‘hysterical’, and, above all, ‘homophobic’, the words ‘little miss’ warbled in imitation of Pears at a time when polari was still heard on the radio, and his partner was being interviewed by Scotland Yard during ‘David Maxwell Fyfe’s gay hunt’.[63] Powerful in his position as comic and safe in his heterosexuality, Moore is the arbiter of who is in the ‘circle’ and at whose expense. 

If the intersubjective ‘coming’ of laughter harbours this capacity for cruelty, is the presence of the songful, in turn, necessarily a benevolent one? As Kramer writes himself, songfulness is ‘power[ful]’, and can be part of a Bakhtinian ‘authoritative discourse’ which ‘may be both the object of desire and the source of rapture for those who receive it—which is not to say that the desire may not be suspect and the rapture dangerous’.[64] After all, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud calls laughter a bubbling up of repressed desire.[65] What Kramer has implied, and the example of Moore reveals, is that the songful is, albeit to varying degrees, political in its power relations. The question of whether the political can be found in a lied performance through the lens of the grain, however, remains. The ‘[homo]erotic’ desire with which Barthes listens to the deceased Panzéra comes from a place of affection, but the power dynamic of that relationship is bound up in authorship, spectatorship, and death. 

Like Bergson looking for the source of laughter, ‘we will exaggerate the problem, so to speak, by magnifying the effect to the point of making the cause visible’.[66] To Bergson, humour occurs in a way similar to the carnivalesque, when the perpetually fluid motion of living is interrupted by ‘matter’ which is ‘obstinate and resists’.[67] When the body is inelastic in such a way—when somebody trips and we laugh—we are ‘fascinated and hypnotised by the materiality of a simple action’.[68] When ‘the performer’s body […] forces’ Barthes ‘to evaluation’, and when he listens to the grain with ‘erotic’ desire, he is likewise ‘fascinated and hypnotised’ by materiality, and in turn privileging and celebrating that inelasticity.[69] Where Bergson sees the limited movement of a ‘hunchback’ whose body is laughed at because it ‘petrifies’ the ‘movements of the soul’ into ‘one vast grin’, Barthes hears the supple ‘soul’ from ‘the lung, a stupid organ’; when it is arrested by ‘the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose’, Barthes’s ‘bliss’ is not laughter and cannot be ‘echoed’.[70] He is ‘moved’.[71]

The grain is the celebration of the transgressive, whereas the songful’s intersubjectivity can either rally around it or against it. Where lied performance is perforated by ‘a little yelp’ or ‘an irrepressible-seeming cry’ that ‘freezes the musical action’, or where it ‘marks its singer as alien’, songfulness must ‘prevail’, and overpower.[72] But to ignore the ‘intimacy and community’ between singer and listener that powerfully ‘meaningful’ singing can create, and to focus instead on ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’, cannot (for better or for worse) make the former disappear.[73] The ‘socially grounded intimacy between the singer and the listener’, and the political power that it might exert, goes on regardless of our individual jouissance.[74] If ‘the intersubjective bond is strongest when the voice is more medium the object’, the critical interrogation of lied performance must move beyond the celebration of the ‘material uniqueness’ of the grain.[75] The grain, the transgressive body, is so vulnerable that to imitate it is to turn against it. Its locus of power, its own ‘voice’, must be found where its potential attackers lie—in the intersubjectivity, the significance, of its social event: ‘just singing’.[76]

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail M., trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Rabelais and His World. 1st Midland Book ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Barthes, Roland, trans. Stephen Heath. ‘Change the Object Itself’ in Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1977: 165-70.

———’The Grain of the Voice’ in Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1977: 179-89.

Barthes, Roland, trans. Richard Miller. The Pleasure of the Text. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Bergson, Henri, trans. Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred. Rothwell. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New Eversley Series. London: Macmillan, 1935.

Blyth, Alan and Heather Wiebe. ’Pears, Sir Peter.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed 1^st March 2017.

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/21147.

Brooks, Daphne A. ‘‘This Voice Which Is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture.’ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 37-60.

Callahan, John F. In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-century Black Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

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Video: ‘Dudley Moore Little Miss Britten.’. 2017. YouTube. Accessed 2^nd March 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmoxlqQQ4c.

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[1] Roland Barthes, trans. Stephen Heath. ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1977: 179.

[2] Jonathan Dunsby. ‘Roland Barthes and the Grain of Panzéra's Voice.’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134, no. 1 (2009): 113.

[3] Barthes 2009, 188.

[4] Barthes 1977, 180.

[5] White, Ed. How to Read Barthes' Image-music-text. London: Pluto, 2012: 152; Barthes 1977, 168.

[6] Ibid, 181, emphasis in original; White 2012, 153.

[7] Barthes 1977, 182.

[8] Bathes 1977, 182-83.

[9] Ibid, 188.

[10] Kramer, Lawrence. ‘Between Words and Music: An Essay on Songfulness’, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001: 53.

[11] Barthes 1977, 189.

[12] Ibid, 182; Kramer 2001, 54.

[13] Ibid, 54; Barthes 1977, 182.

[14] Kramer 2001, 54.

[15] Ibid, 54.

[16] Ibid, 54.

[17] Ibid, 54.

[18] Ibid, 54.

[19] David Headlam, ‘Does the Song Remain the Same? Questions of Authorship and Identification in the Music of Led Zeppelin’, Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, NY, 1995): 322.

[20] Dunsby 2009, 119.

[21] Ibid, 121; ibid 116.

[22] Lise Helmer Petersen, ‘Aspekter af Le grain de la voix: Stemmens krop’, Caecilia, 5 (2002), 149-62, cited in ibid, 120 fn. 17.

[23] Ibid, 117

[24] Barthes 1997, 181.

[25] Ibid, 181, emphasis my own.

[26] Kramer 2001, 51.

[27] Ibid, 61.

[28] Ibid, 51.

[29] Ibid, 52.

[30] Ibid, 51.

[31] Ibid, 52.

[32] Ibid, 61.

[33] Ibid, 54-58.

[34] Barthes 1977, 168.

[35] Kramer 2001, 58.

[36] Dunsby 2009, 119.

[37] Kramer 2001, 60.

[38] Ibid, 60.

[39] Ibid, 62.

[40] Barthes 1977, 153.

[41] Kramer 2001, 63.

[42] Barthes 1977, 183.

[43] Ibid, 181; Kramer 2001, 54; ibid, 63.

[44] Ibid, 53; ibid, 64; ibid, 63.

[45] Barthes 1977, 118.

[46] Kramer 2001, 53.

[47] Roland Barthes, ‘Voice’, in The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 67.

[48] Barthes 1977, 183; ibid, 188.

[49] Henri Bergson, trans. Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred. Rothwell. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New Eversley Series. London: Macmillan and, 1935: 21.

[50] Alan Blyth and Heather Wiebe. ‘Pears, Sir Peter.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/21147; Kramer 2001, 54.

[51] Lawrence Kramer. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and after. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984: 132. Cited in ibid, 63.

[52] Ibid, 63-64.

[53] Ibid, 63.

[54] Mikhail M. Bakhtin trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Rabelais and His World. 1st Midland Book ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984: 19-20

[55] Kramer 2001, 54.

[56] Ibid, 54.

[57] Ibid, 53.

[58] Ibid, 54.

[59] Kramer 2001, 54.

[60] Robert Chambers. Parody: The Art That Plays with Art. Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory ; v. 20. New York: Peter Lang, 2010: 4.

[61] Barthes 1977, 183, emphasis in original; Bergson 1935, 12.

[62] Kramer 2001, 54.

[63] B. W. Young. ‘‘Reading at Intervals’: Benjamin Britten's Romantic Poetry.’ Essays in Criticism 62, no. 2 (2012): 180; Carrie J. Preston. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching. University Press Scholarship Online. New York, 2017: 214.

[64] Kramer 2001, 64.

[65] Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Dover ed. Dover Books on Biology, Psychology, and Medicine. New York: Dover, 1993.

[66] Bergson 1935, 19.

[67] Ibid, 21.

[68] Ibid, 20.

[69] Barthes 1977, 188.

[70] Ibid, 183; Bergson 1935, 12.

[71] Barthes 1977, 187.

[72] Kramer 2001, 60-62.

[73] Ibid, 60; Barthes 1977, 188.

[74] Kramer 2001, 52.

[75] Ibid, 54.

[76] Ibid, 67.