COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 53unified two otherwise contradictory concepts in the structure ofunderstanding. In ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (1958), Lévi-Straussargues that in traditional cultures, two opposite and irreconcilableterms, such as life and death, are replaced by equivalent terms, such asagriculture and hunting, in order that a third term might be permitted asan intermediary. This is why carrion-eating animals like the coyote andthe raven are given the role of tricksters in Native American myths.These animals possess some of the elements of both terms: they are likehunters because they eat meat, but also like farmers because they do notkill what they eat. ‘The trickster’, he says, ‘is a mediator. Since hismediating function occupies a position halfway between two polarterms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguousand equivocal character’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 226). The comic mobilityof the trickster, therefore, is a means of bringing about reconciliationthrough the interpenetration of apparently irreconcilable realms ofexistence. By having a foot in both the sub- and super-lunary worldsand embodying a moral ambiguity, he acts as a signifier in whichopposites can come together: through the mediation of the trickster, lifeand death are reconciled.WIT, CAMP, AND BATHOS: CONGREVE,WILDE, HANCOCKThe versions of subjectivity we have seen so far have all been groundedin some sense of the truth of identity: whether it be the sanctifiedambiguity of fool or trickster, or the supposed universality of types. Inthis final section, we shall look at comic techniques that arose in the lateseventeenth century that demonstrate a different attitude towardsidentity, which we might think of as characteristically ironic,dramatically individualistic, and largely agnostic. These techniqueswould be ‘wit’, celebrated in Restoration and eighteenth-century literaryculture; ‘camp’, the knowing elevation of style and debonair dismissalof gravity; and ‘bathos’, the puncturing intrusion of reality that floorslofty aspirations. All three techniques are generally associated withurban and sophisticated comedies from the seventeenth centuryonwards, comedies permeated with a non-committal individualism anddefiance towards seriousness and orthodoxy. In Restoration comedy, thequality of wit, quick inventiveness in language, and taking pleasurableliberties with meanings, is a fashionable way of asserting socialsuperiority and individuality above the ordinary dullness of society.This idea is derived in part from earlier conduct books, such as Baldesar