Kabanata Kabanata 4 · 第4章

“Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next,” you cry,

with a laugh.

“Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment,” I answer. I had toothache

for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people

are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans,

they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The

enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did

not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example,

gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first

place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your

consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit

disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while

she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to

punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all

possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if

someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does

not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if

you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for

your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with

your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these

mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last

in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of

voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of

an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on

the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,

not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has

toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by

progress and European civilisation, a man who is “divorced from the

soil and the national elements,” as they express it now-a-days. His

moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days

and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no

sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is

only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows

that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his

whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha’porth of

faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,

more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing

himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these

recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.

As though he would say: “I am worrying you, I am lacerating your

hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake

then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a

hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,

an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through

me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be

nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a minute....” You

do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems our development and

our consciousness must go further to understand all the intricacies of

this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My jests, gentlemen, are of course

in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking self-confidence. But of course

that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception

respect himself at all?