Bashō's Laughter and Saikaku's Tears

Like literature, criticism crosses many boundaries.Some boundaries lie between literatures, others lie within literatures and yet others in ourselves.One such boundary divides serious and saintly Basho from Saikaku, the chonin jokester with his mammoth Danrin halkal productions and his most famous hero, Yonosuke, in Koshoku Ichidai Otoko.It is that border which I choose to violate, even to deny.Basho will concern me most, and we may therefore first consider langhter and tears in many kinds of writing.Then Saikaku will require some attention before we settle on Basho.It is notorious (or perhaps a joke?) that nobody has succeeded in defining comedy, humor, laughter.The negative reason is the fallacy of the single explanation: there is no single, double, or even triple explanation that is adequate.In the theater we may expect good comic characters to end in smiles and comic villains in tears.But in kyogen surely Tarokaja and Jirokaja are the heroes and the daimyo (or aruji) a solemn "straight man," given neither to laughter nor tears.In some places laughter is illegal.No is an example.'In other places we laugh out of sheer joy, laugh to hide our embarrassment before others, or laugh with what Thomas Hobbes called the "sudden glory" of our personal superiority.2We may laugh at excess, as when, in Hizaku7ige when Yaji and Kita find themselves in Kyoto with a ladder they do not want.We laugh at deficiency, as when Simple Simon wants a pie but has no penny.As we say in English, too many words (as at academic meetings) bore us to tears.But many words spoken quickly bring laughter in manzal.There is also contradiction: nobody wishes to be tickled to death.And there may be a conflict of laughter and tears.In the plays of Chekhov and Beckett, the failure of one character's speech to connect with its predecessor brings comedy -and pain in the excess of conversation and deficiency of meaning.Sometimes we laugh only because it is better to laugh than to cry, as with "gallows humor."There is also human limitation, for as Shelley says, "Our sincerest lAughter/With some pain is fraught.113 The comic may issue from of into pain, as in the senryu:With his hand towel Tenuguide the whor~-buyer dusts a place hataite zegen and sits down to business.koshi o kake.Clowns are funny because of their sad looks and air of defeat.The greatest humorists -a Gogol or a Twain -are apt to be the profoundest pessimists.In fact, although studies of 1-255