In literature and the arts, bathos ( ; , <small></small> "depth") is the use of a lofty, elegant, or elevated style to present silly, vulgar, or trivial subject-matter, or a sudden transition from the former to the latter, thereby creating a ludicrous or comedic effect. Nowadays, bathos can refer to such usage occurring either accidentally (through artistic ineptitude) or intentionally as a rhetorical device (usually for the sake of comedy). Originally, it referred to an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness and was first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay "Peri Bathous".
Although Pope's manual of bad verse offers numerous methods for writing poorly, of all these ways to "sink", the method that is most remembered now is the act of combining very serious matters with very trivial ones. The radical juxtaposition of the serious with the frivolous does two things. First, it violates decorum, or the fittingness of the subject, and, second, it creates humor with an unexpected and improper juxtaposition.
Subsequent evolution
Since Pope's day, the term "bathos", perhaps because of confusion with "pathos", has been used for art forms, and sometimes events, where something is so pathetic as to be humorous.
When artists consciously mix the very serious with the very trivial, the effect is of surreal humour and the absurd. However, when an artist is unconscious of the juxtaposition (e.g., when a film maker means for a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet to be frightening), the result is bathos.
Arguably, some forms of kitsch (notably the replication of serious or sublime subjects in a trivial context, like tea-towels with prints of DaVinci's Last Supper on them or hand guns that are actually cigarette lighters) express bathos in the concrete arts.
A tolerant but detached enjoyment of the aesthetic characteristics that are inherent in naïve, unconscious and honest bathos is an element of the camp sensibility, as first analyzed by Susan Sontag, in a 1964 essay "Notes on camp".
17th and 18th centuries
thumb|upright=1.5|right|Hogarth's The Bathos
Bathos as Pope described it may be found in a grandly rising thought that punctures itself: Pope offers one "Master of a Show in Smithfield, who wrote in large Letters, over the Picture of his Elephant:
Several decades before Pope coined the term, John Dryden had described one of the breath-taking and magically extravagant settings for his Restoration spectacular, Albion and Albanius (1684–85):
Pope himself employed this type of figure intentionally for humor in his mock-heroic Rape of the Lock, where a lady would be upset at the death of a lover "or lapdog". Søren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, did the same thing, when he suggested that the "self" is easy to lose and that the loss of "an arm, a leg, a dog, or a wife" would be more grievous. When intended, this is a form of satire or the literary figure of undercutting. When the context demands a lofty, serious, or grand interpretation, however, the effect is bathos.
In 1764, William Hogarth published his last engraving, The Bathos, or the Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings inscribed to Dealers in Dark Pictures, depicting Father Time lying exhausted in a scene of destruction, parodying the fashion at that time for "sublime" works of art, and satirising criticisms made of Hogarth's own works. It may also be seen as a vanitas or memento mori, foreshadowing Hogarth's death six months later. Headed Tail Piece, was intended as the tailpiece for a bound edition of Hogarth's engravings.
See also
- Anti-climax
- Black comedy (gallows humor)