Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties

"A Hint of the Basic Brimstone": The Humour of Robertson Davies

"A Hint of the Basic Brimstone": TheHumour of RobertsonDavies FAITH BALISCH The comic mode is inseparable from Robertson Davies' way of viewing the world; it is the illuminating medium,that "light that plays on the writer's mind, in which all aspects of his work live and take their being."1 Nevertheless, amidstthe considerable body of criticism of his writing, one finds little or no examination of his humour.2 In his interviews, essays, speeches, plays, andworksoffiction, Davies repeatedly reiterates his belief that humour is not incompatible with serious purpose, and that comedy "does not mean simply making people laugh. It is not the art of the stand-up comedian, the wise-cracker. It is a way of looking at life which explores some of the noblest aspects ofthehumanspirit" (The Merry Heart 134). Davies has suggested that, initially at least, Canadiancritics had difficulty with his idea "of humour as an element inseparable from writing evenonserious subjects," andthathumour was "not understood and rebuked in my early work. But it was out of the question for me to change" (MH 56). Davies says his fictional world is neither a foolish nor a lighthearted one: My world is not the cosy nursery retreat of Winnie-the-Pooh. It is a toughworld,and itonly seems irrational orunreal tothosewho have not grasped some hints of its remorseless, irreversible and often cruel logic. It is a world in which God is not mocked and in which a man reaps-only too obviously-what he has sown.3 This is not to deny the irreverent, irrepressible and perhaps even shocking 34 characterofhis humour,for it explores thegreat contradictions and incongruities that are an essential part ofhuman experience. Definition ofhumour is difficult.4 In the late 1950s, Davies-as Samuel Marchbanks writing to Mervyn Noseigh, a Ph.D. student studying Marchbanks-says in exasperation: Don't you know what humour is? Universities re-define wit and satire every fewyears; surely it is time they nailed down humour for us? I don't know what it is, although I suspect it is an attribute of everything, and the substance ofnothing, so ifIhad to define a sense of humour I would say it lay in the perception of shadows.5 The links between humourand shadows, shadows andthe devil, and the daemonic andhumour are significant to Davies' concept ofhumour. Underneath the comic, there is always an awareness of the horrid, the evil, the tragic. He notes this quality in the humour of Stephen Leacock, describing it as "violent as Charlie Chaplin is violent; underthe clowningworks avigorous turbulent spirit, whose mellowest productions leave always on the palate a hint of the basic brimstone."6 Davies' own humour is not lacking in brimstone, stemming as it doesfromaconfrontation between Canada'sostensibly Calvinist gloom, cultural stagnation, utilitarianism, andVictorian prudery, andDavies' own effervescent, determinedly Renaissance spirit. I say "Renaissance" quite deliberately, for Davies devotes much of his work to perplexing twentieth-century readers, broughtup in autilitarianageof scientific scepticism andempiricistmaterialism, by his insistence upon the significance of the world of "wonders"-the world of the spirit, the imagination, the irrational.He does this most often through yoking together the mundaneworld of "now" and long-forgotten or dismissed modes of knowing that insist that the world of the spirit is every bit as real and significant as the world of the flesh-all of the flesh, not just the public, visible bits. In Davies' fiction, ambiguity is the essence of humour, and its vehicle is often ideas, actions, or individuals conventionallycondemnedasworthless or evil. His humour, which begins as relatively straightforward social satire, increasingly relies on the arcane and the symbolic. Throughout his life, Davies professed himself the enemy of Puritan repressiveness and of the concept of evil as the absence of good. He was a great admirer of the comic genius of the great Renaissance writers Rabelais and Shakespeare, especially of their exuberance and lack of hypocritical restraint -particularly in matters of the body and the appetites. Great comedies, Davies says, make"us feel,whenwehaveseen themwell presented onthe stage, 35 that life isgreat, andthat thehumanspirit is unconquerable. Shakespeare's most splendid scenes of comedy are very often those in which nobody makes ajoke" (MH 134). And ribald Rabelais? He, even more than Shakespeare, is the inheritor of the medieval confidencein the truth of outrageous laughter. Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us that in the Middle Ages festive laughter, often associated with carnival andparody, was necessary to the maintenance...