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Comment or Fielding’s use of humour and irony in Joseph Andrews.
Answer: Henry Fielding was among the more remarkable figures of his time, an innovator of genius as a dramatist and novelist. He was a great master of English novels. He is acclaimed as the first writer of an English comic epic in prose. He is a great humorist. After Chaucer, he is the first great humorist of English fiction. His humour is kind and genial. In his broad outlook and tolerance he is like Shakespeare. He finds humour in tragic situations also. There is a gentle mockery found in his works. Laughter is his handmaiden. In the words of George Saintsbury, Fielding “infused in it (the English novel) the refreshing and preserving element of humour.
We find several types of humour in Fielding’s novels. First, there is the crude type of humour known as horseplay full of jinks and practical jokes. This coarsely flavoured farcical humour is mainly confined to Joseph Andrews. In Tom Jones, there are very few instances of it, and in Amelia none at all. Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews is the first-rate comic character of Fielding. He is a funny scholar who lives on the bare subsistence of 23 pounds sterling per annum. He leaves for London and forgets to bring the very volumes which he desires to sell in London. He suffers from a kind of incongruous pedantry and makes unreasonable allusions to grammar and pronunciation which create funny situations. Like any other absurd character, he himself remains unaware of his own absurdities.
In Joseph Andrews, his humour takes the form of pure fun. It incorporates even the element of burlesque in its texture. Intended originally as a parody of Richardson and Colly Cibber, it widened into a broad creative work, retaining the burlesque element in the scenes of rough farce. The best example of the humorous struggle is found in Joseph Andrews. It is provided by the scene in Lady Booby’s house where Beau Didapper steals into Mrs Slipslop’s bed in mistake for Fanny’s, and Parson Adams, hearing a scream, rushes in the dark to the bedside, where misled by the feel of Beau’s delicate skin and of Mrs Slislop’s beard, he starts pinching the latter unmercifully. Elizabeth Jenkins says that it “is a scene on what we might venture to call a Homeric scale.” There is a good example of irony in Joseph Andrews when the hero of the novel having been robbed and stripped by a highwayman is left unconscious by the roadside. A coach comes by. But Joseph is unwilling to enter it until he is “furnished with sufficient protection.”
There follows a magnificently mock epic simile to convey Lady Booby’s own incomprehension, her astonishment, which produces a ‘silence of two minutes at Joseph’s use of this phrase (which is of course a leitmotiv in Pamela). The style of this is button-holing and colloquial, a compact parody, with its contemporary references, of true epic simile. Then comes Lady Booby’s rage, Joseph’s citation of Pamela and finally the first of Lady Booby’s soliloquies, artificially phrased so as to guy both its speaker and the literary genre it derives from.
It is not suggested that Fielding moves jerkily from one style to another; rather he modulates easily in the manner appropriate to his subject matter. His continual shifts of viewpoint, to the tone of voice, add both variety and vivacity to this episode, they help to carry the narrative forward and also retain the reader’s interest.
In all this irony is so much the dominant mood that it merits separate consideration, and perhaps, since it is often employed loosely, the word may be defined. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of 1747 defines irony as ‘expressing one thing and meaning another’ but, to be effective, the author must somehow ensure that the reader catches on to the covert meaning, and does not simply accept the surface sense. This call for a reasonably alert reader sometimes, though, in its more elementary forms, Fielding’s irony can easily be recognised. So, when Fielding remarks that Mrs Two-wouse’s perception of her husband’s dalliance with Betty, ‘added very little to the natural sweetness of her temper’ we at once understand what her temper is really like. But the irony may have lawyers like an onion. When Fielding writes (of Joseph’s defence of his virtue), ‘Man should rejoice that he cannot, like poor weak woman, he ravished against his will’ there is, uppermost, simple irony (how often do woman ‘ravish’ unwilling men?) next, mockery of Pamela, and last, not at all funny, the bitter under the layer of truth.
Then there is what might be called cumulative irony. Thus, the two lawyer’s conflicting adulation and vilification of the squire (in Book II, CH 3) merely Puzzles Adams, and us, until the landlord blows the whistle on the pair of them. A more sustained and complex instance still is found in Book II, Chapter 8, where Adams, with perfect innocence and some naive pride, relates his adventures among politicians, whom he praises with entire sincerity for other generosity and good intentions, though all of them have let him down and none has even attempted to keep his promises to the electors. More examples of Fielding’s irony will be found in the commentary. Sometimes, no doubt, he overdoes it. Where he makes fun of Adams’s sermonizing he runs the risk, as A.E. Dyson has said, of ‘sabotaging has its own effect’. But, by and large, the irony is the device to which he devotes his mastery of style, above all others. There are hints that he could do other things well the idyllic vignette of Book III, chapter 5 for example. But there is no doubt that the controlling tone of Joseph Andrews, for all its frequent explosions of farce, and moments of high seriousness, is ironic. After all, hypocrisy, which affects virtues it does not possess, is best exposed by irony which strips away the verbiage from the truth.
The centrality of irony in Joseph Andrews should not blind us to the presence of other qualities in Fielding’s prose, of which another prime constituent is what I can best describe as his vivacity. He was exceptionally responsive to the infinite oddities and absurdities of life which go to make man, in Pope’s famous phrase, ‘The glory, jest and riddle of the world’. Individuality, eccentricity, and whimsicality are all relished by a man whose experiences as a magistrate gave him unrivalled opportunities for observing them. The Italian traveller (of Book II, Ch. 5) and the incognito priest (of Book III, Ch. 8), the cynical bookseller, the landlord who has been a sailor, the disputing poet and player, even Miss Grave are all, strictly speaking, extraneous to the plot. But they all add to the rich, pulsating life of the novel, they are all pictured in vivid thumbnail sketches.
To sum up, then, the three major constituents of Fielding’s style are its variety, its irony and its vivacity. It has been said Le style, c’est I’ homme meme’ (style is the men himself), then Fieldings conveys his wide-ranging, tolerant insight into the follies and graces of mankind, his delight in their vagaries and absurdities, and his sceptical, but never finally a despairing assessment of their aspirations.
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