(Apparently this got published somehow before I was actually finished with it yesterday. Apologies to anyone who read it and found it a bit abrupt and confusing.)
"Bathos" is one of those words that I kind of think I understand without really ever having checked to see if I do. It's a word that you can usually kind of fill in from context. Or think you can. Recently, I was in an exchange about whether something was bad writing or not. I wasn't sure, but the person I was having the conversation with said that, among other things, the writing was full of bathos. I must confess that the actual word almost immediately brings to mind the Three Musketeers--Bathos, Porthos and Aramis, right? (No, that's Athos, Porthos and Aramis.) I also think of it as being the name of one of those theater masks, although there are really only two, one associated with tragedy and one with comedy. I always think of bathos as having something false about it, perhaps sentimental. But I really can't entirely define it. Here are a couple of examples from WordsinaSentence.com
With a great deal of bathos, Lenny went from proclaiming his innocence to confessing he'd eaten the last slice of pumpkin pie.
Bathos will change the play’s tone as soon as the audience realizes the corpse is nothing more than a big dog in a dress.
It was pure bathos onstage when the singer switched from singing a classic aria to crooning nursery rhymes.
It seems that bathos has something to do with an inappropriate mixture of tone, possibly that of descending from a more exalted or grave one to a more juvenile or comic one. So what is bathos?
You know the idea of "from the sublime to the ridiculous"? Well, that's bathos. It's the unintended movement from an exalted vision or language to the trite, trivial or silly. I liked this example from About Education:
"The director had clearly decided to confront us with the gruesome detail of the massacre, but the sight of artificial dismembered limbs, human torsos dangling in trees, and blood-stained cavalry men riding about brandishing human legs and heads, that all clearly had the weight of polystyrene, made his intentions ridiculous. The entire cinema burst out laughing as the film descended into bathos. We expected the gruesome and got the bizarre instead."
(John Wright, Why Is That So Funny? Limelight, 2007)
"Bathos" comes from the Greek and means depth but we owe its existence in English, at least in this sense, to a much more modern source. According to Wikipedia, In 1727, the British poet Alexander Pope published an essay called Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. It was a parody of a work by the classical writer Longinus called Peri Hupsous or On the Sublime-- "hupsos" meaning height. Peri Bathous gives many examples of how to write bad verse, or to "sink" rather than to rise to the sublime. Here is an example from the essay that Wikipedia offers:
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).
Sounds quite lively. In the end, bathos seems like it must be pretty much in the eye of the beholder. This is Hogarth's conception.
"Bathos" is one of those words that I kind of think I understand without really ever having checked to see if I do. It's a word that you can usually kind of fill in from context. Or think you can. Recently, I was in an exchange about whether something was bad writing or not. I wasn't sure, but the person I was having the conversation with said that, among other things, the writing was full of bathos. I must confess that the actual word almost immediately brings to mind the Three Musketeers--Bathos, Porthos and Aramis, right? (No, that's Athos, Porthos and Aramis.) I also think of it as being the name of one of those theater masks, although there are really only two, one associated with tragedy and one with comedy. I always think of bathos as having something false about it, perhaps sentimental. But I really can't entirely define it. Here are a couple of examples from WordsinaSentence.com
With a great deal of bathos, Lenny went from proclaiming his innocence to confessing he'd eaten the last slice of pumpkin pie.
Bathos will change the play’s tone as soon as the audience realizes the corpse is nothing more than a big dog in a dress.
It was pure bathos onstage when the singer switched from singing a classic aria to crooning nursery rhymes.
It seems that bathos has something to do with an inappropriate mixture of tone, possibly that of descending from a more exalted or grave one to a more juvenile or comic one. So what is bathos?
You know the idea of "from the sublime to the ridiculous"? Well, that's bathos. It's the unintended movement from an exalted vision or language to the trite, trivial or silly. I liked this example from About Education:
"The director had clearly decided to confront us with the gruesome detail of the massacre, but the sight of artificial dismembered limbs, human torsos dangling in trees, and blood-stained cavalry men riding about brandishing human legs and heads, that all clearly had the weight of polystyrene, made his intentions ridiculous. The entire cinema burst out laughing as the film descended into bathos. We expected the gruesome and got the bizarre instead."
(John Wright, Why Is That So Funny? Limelight, 2007)
 |
| Alexander Pope--Michael Dahl, National Portrait Gallery |
"Bathos" comes from the Greek and means depth but we owe its existence in English, at least in this sense, to a much more modern source. According to Wikipedia, In 1727, the British poet Alexander Pope published an essay called Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. It was a parody of a work by the classical writer Longinus called Peri Hupsous or On the Sublime-- "hupsos" meaning height. Peri Bathous gives many examples of how to write bad verse, or to "sink" rather than to rise to the sublime. Here is an example from the essay that Wikipedia offers:
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).
Sounds quite lively. In the end, bathos seems like it must be pretty much in the eye of the beholder. This is Hogarth's conception.
 |
| The Bathos--William Hogarth |
.jpg)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment