CORAL is delighted to announce 'Fielding's Farcical Accidents,'
with Dr. Rebecca Tierney-Hynes (University of Waterloo),
on April 16th, at 2 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811).
Dr. Tierney-Hynes is the author of Novel Minds, published by Palgrave Macmillan:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/novel-minds-rebecca-tierneyhynes/?K=9780230369375
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| "Clearing A Five-Bar Gate," by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, 1805 Courtesy of the British Museum. |
Dr. Tierney-Hynes has been kind enough to give us a sneak preview!
When Henry Fielding seeks to explain and justify laughter in his Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men(1743), he begins with an accident: the risible object slips and falls in the dirt. This classic banana-peel scenario is followed by an examination of the affective process experienced by the spectator. The unfortunate slip cues the spectator’s involuntary laughter, a “convulsive Extasy.” But if the accident should happen to have a serious and painful outcome, the spectator’s laughter ought to “begin to change itself into Compassion.” Fielding explains that the spectator’s accidental response is fundamentally unconnected with his or her moral essence: laughter is “one of those first … spontaneous Motions of the Soul, which few … attend to, and none can prevent; so it doth not properly constitute the Character” (Miscellanies, ed. Amory, II.160). The farcical accident opens a momentary breach between the emotional essence, the “Good-Nature” of the spectator, and his convulsive physical response.
To what extent does the form of farce marry accidents in the sense of errors, slips, tumbles, “Kicks in the B---ch, &c. … and infinite other Dexterities, too tedious to particularize” (II.161), to accidents – inessential parts – of the self? And what might the one have to do with the other? Fielding insists, in the same essay, that “the Passions of Men do commonly imprint sufficient Marks on the Countenance” (II.157) to enable the discerning viewer to read a person’s character on his face. The physiological signs of temperament are here simply a code for the essence of a person, a view that is very much in line with established seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models of emotion. This paper will therefore ask: What is it about sudden events, unexpected turns, and novel circumstances that seem to invoke an affective system in which body becomes accidental to character, where elsewhere the two are the same? And is it possible that there exists a peculiar and unexpected resonance between accidents that provoke laughter and laughter as a momentary accident of the temper?
