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