Today's Bakhtin Quote: Laughter at the Grotesque

From Rabelais and His World:

The image of death in medieval and Renaissance grotesque is a more or less funny monstrosity. In the ages that followed, especially in the nineteenth century, the public at large almost completely forgot the principle of laughter presented in macabre images. They were interpreted in an unrelieved, serious aspect and became flat and distorted. The bourgeois nineteenth century respected only satirical laughter, which was actually not laughter but rhetoric. (No wonder it was compared to a whip or a scourge!) Merely amusing, meaningless, and harmless laughter was also tolerated, but the serious had to remain serious, that is, dull and monotonous.

So many things come to mind on re-reading this quote.

Bakhtin wrote this around 1930 in Stalinist Russia. Like so much political expression of that era, it is couched in Aesopian language: It all happened somewhere else, a long time ago. It's only an academic treatise about an obscure and difficult novelist from the Middle Ages, after all.

Direct criticism of Stalinist Russia could get you killed. Mere allegory would only get you banned. Rabelais and His World didn't get accepted as a dissertation, let alone published, until 1964.

In Rabelais's time, early 17th century France, there was no boundary between the sacred and the profane. Yes, state and church ceremonies and festivals were solemn, but they were accompanied by bawdy and sacrilegious carnivals. The boundary between the two worlds was vanishingly thin: Carnivals included parodies of religious ceremonies, up to and including parodies of high mass. Church members conducted religious services, then stepped out of the church to participate in the carnivals; some even wrote the parodic texts. Rabelais himself, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel is pure carnival in all its lusty, obscene, drunken glory, was a Franciscan friar and a priest.

This (mostly) easy co-existence between the sacred and the profane did not last, and much of Rabelais and His World traces the history of that loss. The loss proceeded in ways that are familiar and scary. Popular culture became "low" culture, treated with contempt by the church, by the state, and by intellectuals. Laughter, as Bakhtin notes, became sarcasm, and sarcasm in turn became rhetoric. He quotes A. I. Herzen, who wrote, "Voltaire's laughter was more destructive than Rousseau's weeping."

At first it seems bizarre that an academic dissertation on a 300-year-old French novel could be so threatening to the Soviet power structure that it would be rejected and banned. You don't have to read much of it, though, to understand. How much laughter and parody could the Soviet Union withstand? In Bakhtin's own time, the poet Osip Mandelstam referred to Stalin's moustache as "roach whiskers" and was exiled. How dare Bakhtin glorify a culture of laughing at the state?

Today, for the second day in a row, embassies are burning because someone dared to laugh at a sacred figure. Could it be that Stalin was more tolerant than the imams and mullahs who threaten Europe with war over a few cartoons?