Bakhtin

Bakhtin August 8, 2003

I’ve been reading a good bit of Mikhail Bakhtin this summer, and have come across some pretty mind-blowing passages in his Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World . The following quotations have to do with the role of humor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The laughing, parodic-travestying literature of the Middle Ages was extremely rich. In the wealth and variety of its parodic forms, the Middle Ages was akin to Rome. It must in fact be said that in a whole series of ways the medieval literature of laughter appears to be the direct heir of Rome, and the Saturnalia tradition in particular to live in altered form throughout the Middle Ages ( DI , 68).

Though what he calls the “laughing culture” is mainly folk culture, it penetrated medieval high culture as well. Bakhtin comments on the

rights and liberties enjoyed by the school festivals, which played a large role in the cultural and literary life of the Middle Ages. Works created for these festivals were predominantly parodies and travestie. The medieval monastic pupil (and in later times the university student) ridiculed with a clear conscience during the festival everything that had been the subject of reverent study during the course of the year — everything from Sacred Writ to his school grammar. The Middle Ages produced a whole series of variants on the parodic-travestying Latin grammar. Case inflection, verbal forms and all grammatical categories in general were reinterpreted either in an indecent erotic context, in a context of eating and drunkenness or in a context ridiculing church and monastic principle of hierarchy and subordination.

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus is one of these. His work

is an extraordinarily learned work, stuffed with an incredible quantity of references, quotations from all possible autorities of the ancient world including some that had never existed; in a number of cases even the quotations themselves are parodic. Interwoven with serious and rather subtle grammatical analysis is a sharp parodic exaggeration of this very subtlety, and of the scrupulousness of scholarly analysies; there is a description, for example, of a scholarly discussion lasting two weeks on the question of the vocative case of ego ( DI , 72-73).

Laughter invaded the liturgy on certain feast days.

Medieval laughter is holiday laughter. The parodic-travestying “Holiday of Fools” and “Holiday of the Ass” are well known, and were even celebrated in the churches themselves by the lower clergy. Highly characteristic of this tendency is risus paschalis , or paschal laughter. During the paschal days laughter was traditionally permitted in church. The preacher permitted himself risque jokes and gay-hearted anecdotes from the church pulpit in order to encourage laughter in the congregation — this was conceived as a cheerful rebirth after days of melancholy and fasting. No less productive was “Christmas laughter” ( risus natalis ); as distinct from the risus paschalis it expressed itself not in stories but in songs. Serious church hymns were sung to the tunes of street ditties and were thus given a new twist ( DI , 72).

Bakhtin sees that this represented a particular perspective on the world. Two elements stand out. One was the idea that comedy and laughter was able to penetrate truth about the world that was not accessible to any other mode: Speaking of the Renaissance view of the comic, he says

Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint . . . . Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.

Similar perspectives are evident in medieval parodies:

For the medieval parodist everything without exception was comic. Laughter was as universal as seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology. It was the world’s second truth extended to everything and from which nothing is taken away. It was, as it were, the festive aspect of the whole world in all its elements, the second revelation of the world in play and laughter ( RAHW , 84).

The other important element is the relationship between laughter and fear, laughter and death:

the serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritatarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. These elements prevailed in the Middle Ages. Laughter on the contrary overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority. It is the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man. It was not only a victory over mystic terror of God, but also a victory over the awe inspired by the forces of nature, and most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden (“manna” and “taboo”). It was the defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment after death, hell and all that is more terrifying than earth itself . . . . This feeling is expressed in a number of characteristic medieval comic images. We always find in them the defeat of fear presented in a droll and monstrous form, the symbols of power and violence turned inside out, the comic images of death and bodies rent asunder. All that was terrifying becomes grotesque ( RAHW , 90-91).

There are two implications of this to notice. One is that this view of the role of laughter and comic that arose during the Renaissance was quickly suppressed. The move here is similar to the post-Renaissance move described by Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity , where Toulmin argues that the Renaissance spirit of inquiry and freedom was seen as something dangerous that had to be controlled. Modernity, beginning philosophically with Descartes, is an effort to harness and control the vitality of the Renaissance. Bakhtin sees something similar with the comic.

Second, this has vast implications for theology. Today, people can read Luther and even Calvin with enjoyment, because they were punchy, humorous, sometimes bawdy writers. Would anyone pick up Turretin if he were not already a theological wonk? Something drastic happened to the comedy of theology after the Reformation, something that needs to be discovered and recovered.


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