Wodehouse Case

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release

future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than

our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

Evelyn Waugh

Introduction

As can be derived from the title, we are basing the analysis specifically on the stories written by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. The works of this author give us the key to the object our research, English humour. Firstly, we would like to explain why we consider English humour so essential to this study.

Humour is the topic of general interest, it has been examined for many years, but a clear definition of humour still remains to be found. Some of the critical minds say that "to analyse humour is the death of laughter", but they, being guilty of analysing humour themselves, have to specify: "Luckily, it is an exercise chiefly undertaken by the serious-minded who have nothing to lose"1.

Humour appeals to everyone, and English humour is usually seen as a

peculiar form of it. Humour is deeply rooted in the culture of a certain nation; that

is why, in order to understand English humour, we must examine the English.

If we look deeper into the subject, we will see that those theories, which

have been put forward through the years are of subjective and personal character for the most part, and rarely deal with linguistic aspects of the material provided, concentrating on the conceptual side.

For instance, when it comes to examining particular works of Wodehouse, Owen Dudley Edwards gives much consideration to the development of the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster, and virtually none to the way it is phrased. Similarly, Simon Critchley, despite mentioning some linguistically based theories, focuses on cultural aspects of humour, stating that it is "context- specific".

The "kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life" implies the existence of an attitude towards an object. It is natural to assume that the values held by a person predetermine this attitude. Therefore, in order to understand humour of a nation, it is imperative to understand the character of this nation, and the level of values must be taken into account.

PHumour is revealed through language, and linguistic axiology studies how values are expressed. English humour has not been thoroughly studied from that point of view, and linguistic axiology is going to be the basis of our approach. In order to comprehend humour, it is necessary to examine it from both linguistic and axiological points of view.

We have chosen stories by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse as our material,

because he is widely considered as an authentic representative of English humour

and English national character. One cannot gain a thorough understanding of either

Without using the knowledge of the humanities, it is impossible to penetrate such a complex culturological phenomenon as English humour. The overview of English humour pertaining to the English character and the humanities is going to be given in the first and second chapters of the present work.

The values of a human being, as has already been mentioned, are expressed with the help of semiotics and its signs. Consequently, in the third chapter we are going to turn to branches of science which observe the relation between culture and language - cognitive linguistics and linguistic axiology.

In the practical part of our research (Part II) we will give the description of our methodology and apply it to the stories by P.G. Wodehouse. By the end of our study, we hope to determine the degree of linguistic and culturological presence in a text of English humour and their correlation.

Etymology of humour

The Latin word humor is a medical term which has a translation in every "civilized" language after the 16th century. It refers to the humours' theory, inherited from the Greeks: Hippocrates of Cos spoke about four basic temperaments. Each temperament corresponded to the predominance of one humour in the human body. Later, Galien explained all the diseases with the imbalance of the humours, which became the foundation of the medicine of the middle- ages.

At the end of the middle-ages, lots of European scientists criticized Galien's theory. The controversies made the word humour so fashionable that, at the beginning of the 17th century, it became a word without precise meaning, usually used to say commonplaces, just like "climate" or "Kafkaesque" nowadays. A character of Shakespeare's Henry V, Nym, uses it as a hackneyed meaningless expression.

In the 18th century, the content of the word became so important that it reached the breaking point of its semantic resistance. A new concept appeared: the ancestor of what we call humour today. Since, an aesthetic of English humour would be constructed and theorized in English literature. Under the influence of England, most European languages adopted the modern signification of the word humour during the 18th century: however, the French Academy would not accept it until 1932.

The meaning of humour has been evolving in different ways according to the countries. This is why it is so difficult to give it a definition. English humour is unique to England, like endemic species, and its originality may be owed to the insularity of the country.

Ben Jonson, a contemporary writer of Shakespeare, uses the theory of humours to give a definition of humour very close to madness1. Jonson keeps the idea of temperament behind the word humour, but discovers a comical utilisation mode of humours. As Louis Cazamian said, Jonson has the merit of being behind the semantic association of comic and humour: "He destroyed any feeling which could always survive that the physical servitude implied by the medical meaning of humour is a tragic element, better adapted to the pathos than to the comedy. He gave to the word and to the notion a sharply funny atmosphere. The association so concluded between the humours and the laugh was full of consequences, much more than he could imagine."2 What Jonson means with humour can be found sometimes in Moliere's plays; yet nobody