Bathos
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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. More strictly speaking, bathos is unintended humor caused by an incongruous combination of high and low. If the contrast is intended, it may be described as Burlesque or mock-heroic.
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[edit] Definition
[edit] The Art of Sinking in Poetry
As the combination of the very high with the very low, the term was introduced by Alexander Pope in his essay Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727). Pope's work is a parody in prose of Longinus' Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), in that he imitates Longinus's style for the purpose of ridiculing contemporary poets.
An even more immediate source of the parody was the Treatise on the Sublime by Boileau (1712). Whereas Boileau had offered a detailed discussion of all the ways in which poetry could made to rise or be "awe-inspiring," 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, "stiffen", which evokes the unnatural deadness that is a mark of failure even in this "low" genre:
- 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).
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. The radical juxtaposition of the serious with the frivolous destroys the serious meaning of the verse and creates humor.
[edit] Subsequent evolution
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 [1]), the result is bathos.
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.
A tolerant but detached enjoyment of the aesthetic 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" that first appeared in Partisan Review, 1960 .
[edit] Examples
Bathos as Pope described it may be found in a grandly rising thought that punctures itself: Pope offers one "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."
Several decades before Pope coined the term, John Dryden had described one of the breath-taking and magically extravagant settings for his Restoration spectacular, Albion and Albanius (1684–85):
- "The cave of Proteus rises out of the sea, it consists of several arches of rock work, adorned with mother of pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the sea, and parts of Dover pier."
When The Moody Blues insert a serious spoken section in "Late Lament", declaiming—
- 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[citation needed]. This is bathos, unless it was perhaps intentional.
For an example of the intentional juxtaposition of high and trivial, 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. It is not bathos.
