Humour as Survival Strategy in Walter Scott’s Waverley, Rob Roy and Redgauntlet

Humour will be shown to be present in a selection of novels by Walter Scott, as a strategy to temper hot spirits on the brink of violence and pre-empt conflict in the fictional societies. Despite the contagious effect spreading to the reader himself, this type of humour relies on paralogical hints, language inadequacy or language gaps, which the fictional audience as well as the reader has to fill in. In the process of solving the linguistic inaccuracies, the audience (both fictional and the reader) is forced to notice the deliberate violation of communication and look for meaning elsewhere. The distance between expected and discovered meaning is so great that a bout of laughter is the result, and fictional tensions are depleted of power. It is my claim that the humorous effect constantly brings the intuitive paralogic collapse of a logic which previously fostered conflict by coagulating opposing factions around powerful feelings and pathos.