By Alan Wall.

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Not a bundle of laughs, the New Testament, let’s be honest. And yet there is a subtle realignment constantly going on, which qualifies the texts for examination as the overall work of a humourist. That humourist is Jesus, and what he is up to is defamiliarizng morality. He cannot see a moral precept without turning it upside down. Like all humourists, he is a contrarian. He sees that if you reverse what a speaker says, you will often arrive at the truth of what they are really saying, as they unconsciously censor themselves. We justify ourselves in contradictions; we so loudly proclaim what we disavow, and thereby demonstrate our obsession with it, and all too frequently our secret indulgence in it.

He sees that if you reverse what a speaker says, you will often arrive at the truth of what they are really saying,…

The humourist does not have to tell gags. He can be a joker, but it’s not a necessity. Ben Jonson was a great humourist, and provides us with a literal meaning of the word. Jonson portrays all his characters as exhibiting humours, and acting accordingly. The four humours were thought to cast the human type into one of these categories: sanguinary, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. What was technically called humoralism could diagnose you according to this schema, and together with a detailed horoscope, tell you what you needed to get by in life. Like psychoanalysis, humoralism was better at describing you than changing you. Freud left many of his patients forever ensorcelled in their neurosis; and even Jesus couldn’t cure the rich young man—he was too much in love with his money to hand it over. So he left disconsolate. But disconsolate won’t do.

Thomas Randolph meets Ben Jonson at the Devil Tavern.

The release of the repressed in all of Jesus’s parables is the transcendent wish for a justice that is unhampered by rules.

Jesus represents a linguistic turn, long before that term was applied to the philosophical swerve at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jesus was addressed thus; but answered otherwise. He spoke in parables. In trying to find his way out of the confusion of familiarities which had become the Law and legalistic language, Jesus is frequently pressed into allegory. Allegory tells us that the truth is otherwise. The release of the repressed in all of Jesus’s parables is the transcendent wish for a justice that is unhampered by rules. The good Samaritan is a tale of how goodness can come from the despised stranger, rather than the holier-than-thou fellow who lives next door. Don’t tell goodness where and what it is; let it tell you. All allegories translate into other things. They defamiliarize the familiar.

Jesus is constantly othering morality. Morality can be lethal, unless it is expressing love. So often the function of morality is not to express love, but to protect the ego, which is a different enterprise altogether. The protection of the ego is ultimately a kind of death, since closure excludes new forms of life. Jesus sees the humours that make up the chemistry of the Pharisees. Their composition psychologically makes them treat a text not as a source of enlightenment and expansion, but as a closure. The big boys said it was thus, and therefore it is thus. What has been written is written. And we are now merely the post hoc of that law: post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The Supper in the House of Simon the Pharisee.

Added to the four humours, there should have been one other: echolalia. It is a cultural condition that consists of reading a text solely so that you can repeat it, rather than reading a text so that it might enlighten and enlarge you. What so infuriated Jesus about the Pharisees was that they read scripture so it might be used as a weapon to denounce the sinful, whereas Jesus could see the sin in the denouncers: it shone right through them. When you read words so as to denounce, not enlighten and develop, you are swimming in the devil’s pool.

The simplest of all jokes is a straight reversal.

Word-play foregrounds language as signifier. Jesus embodies his own linguistic turn. He shows how often language can become a carapace of Law. A shell left after the living animal has departed. And so he is fond of reversal. The simplest of all jokes is a straight reversal. When we conduct a thorough search we say ‘no stone unturned.’ So we can turn that on its head describing a theatre where the shows are always given a hard audience: ‘No turn unstoned.’ Jesus gets perilously close to this when he is told off for gathering food or healing the sick on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man, he says, not man for the Sabbath. He sees the reversal of meaning that the devotees of law produce, by putting law before love. Legalism is a kind of hatred. It wants to catch you out. Should you speak in any voicing but repetition, you are heretical.

All of Jesus’s responses to the scribes and Pharisees can be seen as humouristic—defamiliarized perception combined with the linguistic turn.

The Beatitudes are perhaps the greatest programme of reversal ever announced. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit. In what world? Not this one, that’s for sure. And yet Jesus thought the Kingdom was here and now, inside our hearts. You just had to turn yourself around, catch yourself arriving. All of Jesus’s responses to the scribes and Pharisees can be seen as humouristic—defamiliarized perception combined with the linguistic turn. He sees what their language, the language they live inside like a carapace, really means, and they do not. The language of their scripture, which they know so well, has become for them a transparent filament to reality. In reality it is an opaque rhetorical density, where the tropers cannot see their own tropes. Jesus can though, which is why he throws them back as questions, when the scribes and Pharisees imagine they are merely laws.

Allegory says this way of telling things has gone stale and doesn’t get through to you any more.

In trying to find his way out of the confusion of familiarities which has become the Law and legalistic language, Jesus is frequently pressed into allegory. He has to other the language and alienate the subject in order to get to the essence of the subject, and to clarify the language. Allegory says this way of telling things has gone stale and doesn’t get through to you any more. Let me come at things from a different direction, using different language. You have made yourself so other to the truth that I can only reach you at all through othering. Allegory is a form of alienation. It lights up the world by taking away the predicted lights. The humourist can often be very grave. Everything is most certainly not a laughing matter.

The people of the street swarm around him because they are eager for his words. His words seem to break open ancient caskets of custom and enforcement. And in one sense the whole nature of his life is humouristic. The Jews were awaiting a Messiah, who would arrive in glory and see off the Romans. But Jesus does not see off the Romans; the Romans see him off instead. His life, like his words, is characterised by inversion. He is everything that was not expected. He is tortured to death: some Messiah.

Jesus is a mobile intelligence unit, never in one place for long, talking on street corners, on the tops of little hills, by the door of the tavern. The people of the street swarm around him because they are eager for his words. His words seem to break open ancient caskets of custom and enforcement. Jesus sees the truth behind the rhetorical palaver; to that extent he embodies his own linguistic turn. He sees how language functions to manipulate and disguise. He sees how the figures in language shape apparently blameless truths into shapes of desire and disfigurement.

A work is philosophical not because it announces itself as philosophy, but because the words struggle articulately towards meaning.

A work is philosophical not because it announces itself as philosophy, but because the words struggle articulately towards meaning. Samuel Beckett made a crucial distinction. He easily identified true writing; the rest he said was just talk, however long you had spent writing it down. In Bulgakov’s The Master and Margherita, Jesus is portrayed as a healer—he heals Pontius Pilate’s dreadful migraines. At that moment Pilate understands that Jesus is telling the truth, with his body as well as his words, but he is vulnerable in a world full of viciousness. Even Pilate’s power cannot protect him in this vale of tears.

I can imagine one way of describing the arc of western thought, starting with the redemptive ending of Jesus, and ending with the articulate desolation of Samuel Beckett. Beckett struggled towards his own terminus; he was a very philosophical writer. He is genuinely probing, asking the big questions as well as the little ones. The best he can come up with is the echo of a cosmic laughter, very different from the echolalia of the Pharisees. Ontology and eschatology end up with a cognitive dissonance: you yearn for redemption, but you shan’t be receiving it. There is a genuine lament here. Maddie in All That Fall, so utterly exasperated with everything and everyone all around her, cries out: ‘Christ, what a planet.’ Beckett does not permit his characters to go around laughing all the time. Lucky in Waiting for Godot, despite his name, never laughs once in the whole of his theatrical career. So much for nominative determinism. No, Beckett does not allow his characters to laugh overmuch or overlong. There is a moment in All That Fall when Maddie and her husband Dan engage in wild laughter. This is in response to hearing the text to be preached on Sunday: ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.’ It’s all a question of expectations, of course. Jesus says that not even a sparrow falls from the sky, without his Father being aware of it. And when Jesus sees the future he sees the eschaton, hence the otherwise meaningless predictions of the Sermon on the Mount. He is here preaching an eschaton in which justice is forever restored, and those that were bowed down are forever raised up. But Beckett is announcing an eschaton in which the world will chaoticise itself into entropic fragments. Justice cannot be restored here, because there will be no order and no justice at all. This is the eschaton of modern physics.

We are still surrounded by those who, locked inside the gated communities of their certainties, recite the texts of infallibility at us. And we stare at the eschaton of Jesus versus the predictions of modern science. No one has reconciled them.

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ALAN WALL was born in Bradford, studied English at Oxford, and lives in North Wales. He has published six novels and three collections of poetry, including Doctor Placebo. Jacob, a book written in verse and prose, was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize. His work has been translated into ten languages. He has published essays and reviews in many different periodicals including the Guardian, Spectator, The Times, Jewish Quarterly, Leonardo, PN Review, London Magazine, The Reader and Agenda. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Writing at Warwick University and Liverpool John Moores and is currently Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester and a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. His book Endtimes was published by Shearsman in 2013, and Badmouth, a novel, was published by Harbour Books in 2014. A collection of his essays was issued by Odd Volumes, The Fortnightly Review’s publishing imprint, also in 2014. A second collection, of his Fortnightly reflections on Walter Benjamin, followed in 2018, and a third collection, Midnight of the Sublime, has just been published. An archive of Alan Wall’s Fortnightly work is here.