Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 139

A Use of Humor in William Faulkner Literature of serious purpose often uses humor. In Elizabethan tragedy, for example, William Shakespeare uses humor in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet and the porter scene in Macbeth, and Christopher Marlowe uses humor in the clown scenes of Doctor Faustus. Within the tragedies in which they appear, such comic scenes appear to have a very definite purpose and have led to an elaborate theory of comic relief, a theory based on the belief that intense emotional states cannot long be sustained and that comedy can serve to reduce the intensity of emotion so that it can later be raised again, perhaps to an even more intense level. The theory of comic relief provides one way of justifying a mixture of comic and serious matter as long as the comic does not detract from the theme of the serious. Since Elizabethan times, at least, comic relief has served as an acceptable justification for the mixture of the comic with the serious or tragic. The question of whether there can be other justifications for mixing the comic with the serious remains largely unexamined. Yet, many of the works of William Faulkner suggest that Faulkner knew of another justification and exploited it in much of his best work. Walter Slatoff s Quest for Failure suggests the possibility of such a use. According to Slatoff, Faulkner uses many techniques to prevent resolution in his novels. Among these techniques Slatoff includes antithesis and oxymoron.^ Slatoff believes that through the use of such techniques Faulkner produces a sense of emptiness or blankness in the minds of his readers, a blankness that, as a Zen koan is intended to do, empties the emotional and logical content of the mind so that it is later capable of paying more attention. Humor, according to its earliest theoreticians, including Aristotle, depends on the incongruous for its effects. The incongruous is that which is out of keeping or place, inappropriate, inconstant or lacking harmony of parts. Antithesis and oxymoron, which are techniques depending on opposition or contradiction represent, of course, the extreme of