the perfection of fruits grown under glass

“ The bear is the emblem and commencement of a general unloosing both of narrative stringency and of tragic emotion insofar as its appearance must always be, for the audience, a moment of intense self-consciousness coupled with laughter - a laughter that, as Andrew Gurr has pointed out, looses the audience by its very staginess from too literal-minded and, following Barthes, “hysterical” a bondage to tragic fiction. Gurr comments that the bear exploits [the] base level, the hysterical reaction, and then pushes the level of audience response higher up the scale by the blatant challenge to credulity which the bear offers,” and Nevill Coghill calls the bear, in its staginess, “a kind of hinge … passing from tears to laughter. ”