Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 140

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incongruity. If Faulkner could use antithesis and oxymoron to prevent
or delay resolution, it seems reasonable to ask whether he also used
humor for the same purpose.
Both Max Eastman and Henri Bergson, two respected
theoreticians of humor, present ideas that seem to confirm that it is,
indeed, possible to use humor to prevent or delay resolution. Bergson
states, unfortunately without elaboration, that a lack of feeling
always accompanies laughter^ Slatoff, of course, suggests that
oxymoron and antithesis also lead to a lack of feeling. Comedy, like
the two other techniques, may seem to offer resolution, only to jerk it
away and substitute nothing. Eastman suggests something similar
when he repeats Kant's statement that comedy is "The sudden
transformation of a strained expectation into nothing."^ Eastman
claims that comedy is "the holding out of a meaning and snatching it
away, as when Groucho Marx says, 'When I came to this country I
hadn't a nickel in my pocket-now I have a nickel in my pocket.'"^
Eastman's definition adds to Bergson's by asserting that humor can be
used not only to block emotional resolution, but to block the resolution
of meaning and reason as well.
What about Faulkner's novels, then? Do they use humor as a
way of preventing or delaying resolution, and, if so, how do they do
it?
First, it is easy to see that not all of Faulkner's novels use
this technique as a way of delaying or preventing resolution. In many
of the novels, humor is of little or no importance. In others, such as
Mosquitoes, the humor is largely satiric and works to develop a
meaning, and The Reivers is so overwhelmingly comic that it cannot
be examined as a mixture of the comic and the non-comic.
The "Quentin" section of The Sound and the Fury, like
Elizabethan tragedy, does combine humor and seriousness, and in such
a way as to invite an examination of the purpose of the humor. The
spectacle of a young man, determined to commit suicide for the sake of
love and honor, but who, at the same time, is unable to get rid of a
little girl who follows him through some of the poorer sections of the
Boston area is comic. Similarly, the suspicion of the girl's relatives
and even of Quentin's rescuers is also comic, especially when
juxtaposed with his reasons for committing suicide.
The simple mixture of tragic and comic elements, of course, is
not new, but the presentation of the humor differs in two ways from