No, I haven’t spelled ‘pathetic’ wrong, honest. ‘Bathetic’ is an adjective describing an abrupt turn from something serious and poetic to something regular and silly, either on purpose or unintentionally. A great example of bathos (the noun) comes in the film Castaway, when Tom Hanks’ character gets incredibly upset over the loss of his only friend while stranded on a desert island: a Wilson brand volleyball: ‘Wilson, I’m sorry! WIIILLLSSSOOONNN!’ (That made me well up just writing about it.)
‘Bathos’, as you can probably guess from the ending, comes from Ancient Greek. Then it simply meant physical depth, like a valley, trench, the sea, etc (you know what ‘deep’ means, sorry). We have satirist and writer Alexander Pope to thank for turning it into a literary joke though, which he did back in 1792. For centuries, critics had used the Greek word ‘hypsos’ (meaning ‘height’ or ‘loftiness’) to describe grand and beautiful poetry. Pope argued that if great writing reaches the heights, then terrible writing does the exact opposite: it plunges into the depths, AKA bathos.
Jane Austen was a big fan of bathos which she used to mock the overly dramatic Gothic romance novels that everyone was reading at the time. In ‘Northanger Abbey’, Austen ratchets up the tension as our protagonist, Catherine Morley, creeps into a spooky room where she opens an ancient, mysterious cabinet expecting to discover dark family secrets. And she finds… ‘[a]n inventory of linen’.
Douglas Adams was another master of bathos, and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is full of it. For example, ‘The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t’. And, of course, Deep Thought (the second-greatest supercomputer in the universe) who, when tasked with finding the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything, takes 7.5 million years to reply with ‘42’.
Warning – will make you bawl over a ball