Humor in Tragedy

Despite the serious nature that “The Charterhouse of Parma” by Stendhal and “Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy take on the matters of love and social structure, both novels have comedic undertones to them. These comedic undertones help to disarm the readers and make them understand that life is messy and isn’t just one way at any given moment, which is why humor can be found even in the most serious situations. Stendhal’s novel accomplishes this point with notes of comedic irony due to his assertion of Fabrizio being the hero of the novel. Tolstoy’s novel achieves this goal in a different manner by taking a more psychological approach to its comedic undertones.

Although you won’t find side splitting humor in the serious tone that “The Charterhouse of Parma” takes, Stendhal allows for plenty of laughs afforded through the irony in setting up the main character Fabrizio as a hero. Classic heroes are ones that come from noble birth, perform extraordinary feats, have noble characters with only one flaw and usually suffer from an unusual death. While reading through the novel we are frequently reminded that Fabrizio is a hero while at the same time seeing the above characteristics buffed at every opportunity which can’t help but make us laugh not only because Fabrizio is very un-heroic but also because it reminds us that not everything can be so neatly packaged and labeled.

The first opportunity that allows us a good laugh is the question of Fabrizio’s birth. Although he is raised in a Nobel and influential family Stendhal hints in the beginning that his birth father is a military officer by alluding to the time of occupation and again when Fabrizio meets him in the battlefield and Stendhal points out “How happy he would have been to see Fabrizio del Dongo” (47). The next opportunity for a few laughs is the idea of Fabrizio performing extraordinary feats. Through out the entire novel Fabrizio gets himself into situations where he is able to perform extraordinary feats but Stendhal has Fabrizio naively unaware or gives the execution of those feats to others. This can be seen when Fabrizio is finally able to make it to the battlefield but because it’s not the way that he pictured it, he just keeps asking “is this a real battle?” (44).

It can also be seen through Fabrizio’s capture and imprisonment where he again shows naivety asking “But is this really a prison?” (301). Also, rather than trying to find ways to escape while those around him, like the Count and the Duchess, make all of the efforts for him, Fabrizio realizes that he “owe(s) eternal gratitude to the Count and the Duchess [and that] they may believe that I am afraid, but I shall not try to escape” (346) which just thwarts their efforts. Also, throughout his hero’s journey, he is able to escape situations that are perilous but instead of it being due to his own hard work it is due to the help of strangers such as the jailer’s wife and the cart-woman and because he has money. His reliance on money is particularly funny, especially when rather than trying to forge his own way in battle, he expects that he can just use money to buy food from other hungry soldiers.

Perhaps the best opportunity to find humor is in the concept that a hero is ideal in his characteristic aside from one major flaw. Stendhal repeatedly points out to us numerous character flaws in Fabrizio that doesn’t help us want to be like him but instead makes us chuckle and wonder about the charmed life he seems to lead. One of Fabrizio’s biggest flaws is pride which is expressed even in wartime when more concern should be shown for his life. “Fabrizio was deeply wounded by the insult. ‘Can I demand an apology?’ he wondered” (41). We also see this pride again when he is courting a girl on a whim and that “whim turned into wounded pride” (146) just because he was told not to. This part is particularly funny because it was something that he wasn’t even really interested in until he was told he couldn’t be.

Another flaw that Stendhal allows us to see in Fabrizio is vanity. We see this when his “vanity took him to the performance” (146) of the aforementioned girl and again in a later situation this provoked when Fabrizio was dueling the girl’s manager Giletti and instead of being concerned for his life, he instead expressed concern for his appearance by asking Mariette “‘Do you have a mirror’” (183). The last laugh to be had at our hero is that rather than dying an unusual death, which is what allows characters around the hero to reap the benefits of his actions, it is the ones around him that die or suffer and Fabrizio himself just moves to the Charterhouse of Parma where he won’t be bothered.

While providing comedic relief, all of this leads to the notion that perhaps the society in which Fabrizio was reared, was not the best for breeding heroes and that those who lived outside of the societal set such as the Duchess and Ferrante Palla were more likely to embody heroic qualities.

Due to the psychological depth awarded to Tolstoy’s characters in “Anna Karenina,” we are often able to see the irrational thought process that characters go through. Although their situations are often serious in nature, when we encounter characters that are being irrational and we see parts of ourselves in them, it forces us to chuckle because we so often distance ourselves from those behaviors out of feelings of pride over being completely rational human beings. This is similar to when somebody tells an embarrassing story and we remember a similar situation that happened to ourselves and we chuckle because it’s funny and we’re comfortable that there is a safe distance from the shame that we would feel if it was our story being publicized rather than someone else’s.

Some of the characteristics that Tolstoy shows in his characters that allow them to be human to us -and award us humor- include jealousy, changing opinions, being passive aggressive, pride, vanity, epiphanies, duality, poor circumstances and irrationality. Some of these require the internal nature of a character which can be seen in Metrov talking to Levin and how “it flattered [Levin’s] vanity that such a learned man was telling him his thoughts so eagerly”(680). This is particularly amusing because we find out that Metrov has that same reaction when talking to anyone but Levin’s pride of course tells him that Metrov only showed him such interest and this is a problem that we’ve all had. Another such incidence is when “All the cruelest words a course man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her” (751). Because Anna becomes enraged at Vronsky for things that he said to her only in her imagination, we are able to chuckle because all of us at times have had a conversation in our heads so vividly that we’ve have difficulty separating it from reality.

The senselessness of inner thoughts also comes when Levin “immediately thought how senseless his request was that they should not be killed by an oak that had already fallen”(811). Often we find ourselves guiltily asking for favorable outcomes of things that have already occurred and seeing others do it reminds us of just how irrational and humorous it is. Tolstoy also shows that irrational type of humor in the vanity of Mikhailov who becomes upset when he learns that Vronsky, that he figures is too well off in other areas to be a good painter, is actually a good painter. This vanity lead him to think that “it was impossible to forbid a man to make a big was doll and kiss it. But if this man with the doll came and sat in front of a man in love and began to caress his doll the way the man in love caressed his beloved, the man in love would find it unpleasant”(479). Not only is the visual for this funny but at some time or another we’ve felt that we were entitled to something due to circumstance and we’ve become upset when someone else encroaches upon that.

Tolstoy uses this circumstantial humor to also amuse us throughout “Anna Karenina.” This circumstantial humor can be situational such as when Levin is at a conference that he is trying to pay attention to and is placed between a “nobleman who was wheezing and breathing heavily and another whose thick shoes creaked, preventing him from hearing well” (650) or it can unintentional such as when Stepan smiles to Dolly’s questioning of his affair and it occurs to him that, “‘that stupid smile is to blame for it all’”(3) no matter how unintentional it may have been.

The most important thing that Tolstoy wants us to figure out through the use of his humor, is that Alexei Alexandrovich is wrong when he says “‘rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain their unnoticed’” (147). When we do this we act like Vronsky where we “fear it, but..wish so much to avoid a scene that [we] pretend to believe, and in part sincerely believe, in what [we] would have liked to believe in…reasonableness” (644). Tolstoy wants us to dig up these emotions because they drive our lives and we wants us to see that those emotions are constantly changing and are rarely reasonable. The point is that “gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and triumph appear without justification, like a madman’s feelings. And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly” (685) and whereas feelings do sometimes make us feel like madmen, it’s vital to be able to see the humor that lies in this madness so that we aren’t run over by our feelings.


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