Bathos
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Bathos is unintended humor caused by an incongruous combination of high and low. For example, in the assertion
- "The essentials of a judge are integrity, learning, and an ermine robe"
the culminating requirement is so vividly not essential that it has the intended effect of reducing the listed moral requirements, effectively subverting the judiciary. This succeeds.
But when The Moody Blues insert a serious spoken section in "Late Lament"—
- Breathe deep the gathering gloom
- Watch lights fade from every room...
- Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,
- Lonely man cries for love and has none.
- New mother picks up and suckles her son,
- Senior citizens wish they were young.
— the "senior citizens" deflate the poetic, elegiac tone to the wording of a town council press release. This is bathos, perhaps intentional.
Bathos as Pope described it may be found in a grandly rising thought that punctures itself: in bathos Homer Simpson often excels his London forerunner, Pope's "Master of a Show in Smithfield, who writ in large Letters, over the Picture of his Elephant;
- This is the greatest Elephant in the World, except Himself."
Bathos is Greek for depth. As used in English it originally referred to a particular type of bad poetry, but it is now used more broadly to cover any ridiculous artwork or performance. Travesty and burlesque employ bathos; it is the essence of the mock-heroic.
As the combination of the very high with the very low, the term was introduced by Alexander Pope in his essay Peri Bathous of 1727. Pope's work is a parody in prose of Longinus' On the Sublime (Peri Hupsos), in that he imitates Longinus's style for the purpose of ridiculing contemporary poets. An even more immediate source of the parody was Boileau's 1712 Treatise on the Sublime. Where Boileau had offered a detailed discussion of all the ways in which the sublime effect had been achieved in poetry, Pope offers a lengthy schematic of the ways in which authors might "sink" in poetry. Pope satirizes many of his contemporaries in the work, plucking lines of poetry out of their works to highlight their absurdity, with his most consistent victim being Ambrose Philips (whom he would attack repeatedly through his career).
In the hierarchic ranking of pictorial genres, which was an assumption in Pope's Augustan culture, still life ranked the lowest. Even it too could fail in depicting naturalism, as Pope suggests with one devastating word:
- Many Painters who could never hit a Nose or an Eye, have with Felicity copied a Small-Pox, or been admirable at a Toad or a Red-Herring. And seldom are we without Genius's for Still Life, which they can work up and stiffen with incredible Accuracy. (Peri Bathous vi)
"Stiffen" evokes the unnatural deadness that is a mark of failure even in this "low" genre.
Although Pope's manual of bad verse offers numerous methods for writing poorly, of all these ways to "sink," the method that is most remembered now is the act of combining very serious matters with very trivial ones. (For example, he mentions a line of verse where God sweeps the clouds from the sky as being ridiculous for making the Creator a housemaid.) When something great or sublime is mixed with something ridiculous, the effect is comic or "bathetic" (e.g. children performing Macbeth or a Garden Club passion play). The radical juxtaposition of the serious with the frivolous destroys the serious meaning of the verse and creates humor. Since Pope's day, the term "bathos," perhaps because of confusion with "pathos," has been used for any artform, and sometimes any event, where something is so pathetic as to be humorous.
When artists consciously mix the very serious with the very trivial, the effect is the absurd and absurd humor. However, when an artist is unconscious of the juxtaposition (e.g. when a film maker means for a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet to be frightening), the result is bathos.
A tolerant but detached enjoyment of the esthetic failure that is inherent in naive, unconscious and honest bathos is an element of the camp sensibility, as first analyzed by Susan Sontag, in an essay "Notes on camp" (http://pages.zoom.co.uk/leveridge/sontag.html) that first appeared in Partisan Review, 1960 .
Arguably, some forms of kitsch (notably the replication of serious or sublime subjects in a trivial context, like tea-towels with prints of Titian's Last Supper on them or handguns that are actually cigarette lighters) express bathos in the concrete arts.