(noun) a literary term coined by Alexander Pope to describe to describe amusingly failed attempts at sublimity (an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous); adj is "bathetic"
The horror has passed, and what remains is the slow, lingering bathos as people shuffle into the future.
Bathos flutters over this later novel like a pennant: tragedy has been abolished.