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Download File Literary Laughter in Augustan Poetry: Vergil, Horace, and Ovid Caleb Michael Xavier Dance Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Caleb Michael Xavier Dance All rights reserved ABSTRACT Literary Laughter in Augustan Poetry: Vergil, Horace, and Ovid Caleb Michael Xavier Dance This dissertation examines literary laughter in Latin poetry and, specifically, the ways in which textually-witnessed laughter functions as a guide to reader response and as a genre marker in select Vergilian, Horatian, and Ovidian poems. The introduction first describes the Latin vocabulary of laughter and the risible and then introduces the texts of Augustan poetry to be examined. The remainder of the introduction surveys theoretical treatments of laughter that appear in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero and underlie three prevailing modern explanations of laughter: the superiority, relief, and incongruity theories. My inquiry is divided into two complementary parts, to each of which I devote three chapters. Part I (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) explores laughter's function as text-directed literary criticism—what I call a textual laugh track. My approach emphasizes that the vocabulary of laughter and the risible as used by Vergil, Horace, and Ovid often functions metacommunicatively, offering to the reader a set of directions for how to respond to particular texts. Part 2 (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) considers laughter's role as a conspicuous piece in the assembling of specific generic puzzles. Horace's Satires, Vergil's Eclogues, and Ovid's Amores all feature the vocabulary of laughter and the risible in their verses, and they utilize this vocabulary to various genre-determined—and genre-determining—ends. My objective throughout the dissertation is to present laughter as a dynamic human behavior that, through its appearance in Augustan literature, not only offers inroads to a specific “cultural psychology” but also proves itself an illuminating point of contact between the ancient and modern world. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii DEDICATION iii INTRODUCTION 1 The Vocabulary of Laughter and the Risible 4 Explanation of a Method 8 Laughter Theories in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero 12 Plato's Scattered Laughs 16 Aristotle's Superiority Theory Relieved 32 Cicero's Proliferation of Theories 42 PART I: RIDERE RESPONSE 63 Chapter 1: Laughing Matters 66 Laughter and Negative Criticism in Horace's Literary Epistles Chapter 2: Laughing at Laughter 85 Metacommunicative Laughter in Eclogue 3 Chapter 3: Laughter through the Looking Glass 112 Horace's Epistle to Augustus and Ovid's Ars Amatoria PART II: JOCULAR GENRES 142 Chapter 4: Surrounded by Laughter in Satire 169 Horace's Satires 1 Chapter 5: Gelastic Sympathy 219 Vergil's Eclogues Chapter 6: Laughter in Love 288 Ovid's Amores CONCLUSION 312 BIBLIOGRAPHY 316 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To thank Katharina Volk as my dissertation advisor, while accurate, fails to do justice to the many ways in which she has shaped this dissertation and my thoughts on literary laughter. She has offered unfailing guidance, support, and good humor, asking all of the right questions at all of the right times. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee—Jim Zetzel, Gareth Williams, Kristina Milnor, and Joy Connolly—as well as Liz Irwin and Marco Fantuzzi for their valuable suggestions at different stages of this project. Thanks are also due to Colin Webster and Mathias Hanses, both of whom offered helpful comments over coffees, beers, and in the course of our far-too-infrequent dissertation writing group meetings. Lily van Diepen read several chapters and generously shared her thoughts, encouragement, and love in my last months of writing. Charley McNamara was a boundless source of friendship and scholarly support during many years of laughter in Morningside. I thank my fellow graduate students and friends at Columbia University. Joe, Zoë, James, Kate, Sarah, Molly, Selina, and Gerry are some of the many folks who made me consistently look forward to walking into Hamilton Hall and Butler Library each day. I gratefully acknowledge my siblings Zachary, Gabriel, Catherine, and Smruti who have in their own ways made this dissertation possible, but in no way more than by living in close proximity and by sharing their friendship and love throughout these past years. My parents Frank and Carol have modeled many different ways of being successful professors, and I thank them for encouraging me to wander down this happy path many years ago. And special thanks to New York City for making this dissertation—and countless occasions of laughter—a reality. ii To my father and mother— parents and professors, but always parents first. iii INTRODUCTION In Book 2 of Cicero's De oratore, during a discussion about the place of laughter and humor in oratory, the character Julius Caesar Strabo sets forth several questions: “Concerning laughter, there are five things which are to be asked: 1) what it is; 2) from where it comes; 3) whether it befits an orator to want to provoke it; 4) to what extent; and 5) what the classes of the laughable are.”1 His response to the first question (the one concerning the nature of laughter) immediately follows, but it is more teasing disclaimer than proper answer: upon raising supplemental questions about laughter's essence and power and unique physical manifestations, Caesar concludes that such topics have no bearing on the current discussion. “And even if they were pertinent, I would nevertheless be fine not knowing what even those who claim to know don't know.”2 I offer a similar disclaimer: I do not know why humans laugh, especially when those explanations offered by expert thinkers and scholars for thousands of years have been found unsatisfactory enough to warrant new or revised accounts of laughter from subsequent generations of expert thinkers and scholars. There exist numerous hypotheses from a variety of disciplines that attempt to explain human laughter (offering evolutionary, psychological, physiological, and sociological accounts), but a general consensus is nevertheless lacking. To appreciate the depth of the “mystery” of laughter, one need only consider that the reasons people laugh are sometimes unknown to the “laughers” themselves, not to mention the outside observers of laughter. Should we expect to be able to explain laughter as a human behavior when we cannot even account for our own individual experience of the phenomenon? 1 De or. 2.235: de risu quinque sunt, quae quaerantur: unum, quid sit; alterum, unde sit; tertium, sitne oratoris uelle risum movere; quartum, quatenus; quintum, quae sint genera ridiculi. 2 De or. 2.235: et, si pertineret, nescire me tamen id non puderet, quod ne illi quidem scirent, qui pollicerentur. 1 I am reminded of a friend who is (and, by his own admission, always has been) particularly susceptible to inexplicable laughter. As a child, he would realize that he was often the only person laughing on any given occasion, and when asked why he was laughing, he would offer the reply, “Oh, it's an inside joke.” It was not until some time later that he learned that an “inside joke” is not simply a joke inside one's own head. He had no idea that an inside joke includes other people and relies upon “insiders” to appreciate it. Nevertheless, he offered his explanation simply because it was an explanation, and it was satisfactory enough to those asking; my friend, by his own recollection, was never asked to articulate additional explanations for his inexplicable bouts of laughter. People desire, and even demand, explanations for human behavior, seeking a cause for most any effect. When that “effect” is laughter—a predominantly social behavior with often- paradoxical, simultaneous, and instantaneous repercussions, such as inclusion and exclusion, flattery and insult, sympathy and anger—the desire for a “causal” account is all the greater. And so it is perhaps surprising that the broadest, least “scientific” explanation is often one of the most persuasive: if one asks a friend why she laughed at something, a common (and remarkably acceptable) response will be, “Because it was funny.” The psychologist Edmund Bergler formulates this explanation as the “popular theory” of laughter: “[O]ne laughs when and because something is funny, and something is funny because and when one laughs.”3 The deliberate circularity of the “theory” simply shifts the question to what “funny” means. Is “funny” a synonym for “humorous”? What about the difference between “funny ha- ha” and “funny peculiar”? Those who study laughter agree that laughter and humor do not overlap cleanly, despite the fact that the two words are often used interchangeably. Consider the laughter that may accompany indignation (a “scoff”) or the wide variety of things that one deems 3 Bergler (1956) vii. 2 humorous without recognizing them with laughter. The two topics (laughter and humor) are nevertheless often conflated, even to the extent that some common “laughter theories” are also referred to as “humor theories.” The explorations contained in the chapters that follow, although they concern laughter and humor and, by necessity, draw upon several hypotheses about laughter, are not about laughter per se but about the use of laughter in literary texts. Here a parallel with Cicero's excursus on laughter in De oratore proves illustrative. In Cicero's work, the topic of the dialogue is the nature of oratory and so laughter's role and proper deployment in oratory are foregrounded in the passage on laughter in Book 2. Though one might wish that Cicero had made his characters discuss the philosophy of laughter, such a discussion would have fallen outside the scope of the work and, as Caesar suggests in De oratore 2.235, would likely have been inconclusive.
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