From Dread to Humor: Encounters with Death in Romanian Folklore

Abstract

From Dread to Humor:Encounters with Death in Romanian Folklore Gabriela Vlahovici-Jones (bio) A gray face with deep eye sockets but no eyes, no gaze, and no glimmer of light—just a deep abyss of terrifying mystery; a mouth but no tongue—just an unhinged jaw with skeletal teeth; broken shards of glass reflecting the last screams of lives shattered in terror: This is how the movie poster for The Final Destination terrified audiences with its depiction of Death (“The Final Destination”). Dark, unsettling, and frightful, this image and its many avatars are familiar tropes of Western lore and the driving force of the horror genre. Romanian folklore, on the other hand, places personified Death in humorous—not scary—contexts. This does not mean that in this culture death is not frightening, sad, or difficult. Nevertheless, stories featuring personified Death do not belong to the horror genre but to a type of low-key humor that dramatizes the human being’s complex relationship with the horizons of existence. A famous material expression of the humor that accompanies discourse on death is the Merry Cemetery of Săpân¸a in Maramure¸, where the artfully carved crosses include humorous funerary plaques. One reads, for example, “Sub această cruce grea / Zace biata soacră mea / Trei zile de mai traia / Zăceam eu ¸i citea ea” ‘Under this heavy Cross lies my poor mother-in-law; had she lived three more days, I would have been lying here and she would have been reading this’ (“Fotografii”). In spite of the satirical nature of the funerary inscriptions in the Merry Cemetery, this humor does not make light of death or poke fun at the dead. Instead, it generates a type of play that creates space for a reality both simple and ineffable. Traditional folk tales about death are infused with the same type of humor as the plaques in the Merry Cemetery: playful yet serious, resourceful yet reflective. What exactly can be funny, however, about a human being’s encounter with Death or Moartea (personified as an old woman in Romanian folklore)? We might know from personal experience that nothing can ruin a joke like an attempt to explain it. We might even agree with E. B. White, who quipped, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it” (qtd. in Mankoff 1). Yet, have we not experienced the joy of “getting” humor—that “Aha!” moment, when the pieces of the narrative puzzle realign, revealing a surprising new picture? Have we not often paused to contemplate this picture even after [End Page 293] we stopped laughing? Romanian folk tales on death are worth dissecting, even at the risk of killing their humor, because their “innards” are not offputting to all but the inquisitive academic; quite on the contrary, they offer a warm place of meditation to anyone inclined to gaze at the mysterious horizons of existence. Four traditional theories on humor, anthologized by John Morreall in the Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, can serve as dissection tools: the superiority theory, articulated primarily by Hobbes and Descartes, views laughter as an expression of superiority over its subject; the relief theory, developed by Herbert Spencer and consolidated by Freud, compares laughter to a pressure valve for psychological tension; the incongruity theory, advocated by Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, holds that humor violates our mental patterns; and the play theory, formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, represents laughter as joyful rest for the soul if practiced in moderation. Applied to encounters with Death in Romanian folklore, these theories capture the various facets of humor generated by humans who invite or trick Death. Humans Who Invite Death Documented by nineteenth-century folklorist Tudor Pamfilie, the story of an old woman with two adult sons captures the dilemmas of humans who invite Death. This woman, ninety-nine years of age, her body bent from many cares, constantly prays to God that Death might come and deliver her from suffering. One day, while the old woman is sitting by the fire, her sons Luca and Ispas decide to test her resolve to die. They hide an ugly owl in a basket and then...