“A New Look at Rabelais and His World” | e-flux
'On its face, Rabelais and His World is ostensibly of a piece with mid-twentieth century historicist literary criticism. The compelling case that Bakhtin makes for laughter’s place in the lives of ordinary Renaissance peasants, laborers, and merchants makes his book as much a valuable contribution to the history of ideas as a work of literary criticism. In many ways, Bakhtin does for European folk history what Lucien Febvre does for religion in his own book on Rabelais, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Where Febvre charts the emergent strains of early evangelical Christianity, humanism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism to illustrate the ideological impossibility of irreligion for an educated European in the years following the Protestant Reformation, Bakhtin maps the topography of feasts, festivals, the public square, and grotesque images of the body to argue that in the world of Rabelais’s turbulent sixteenth century, laughter held “a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the most essential forms of truth about the world as a whole, about history, about the human being.”
This was laughter of wholly different order from the mocking, spiteful laughter dismissed by stoic philosophers and early Christians alike. It was also not a laughter unique to Rabelais. Bakhtin’s encyclopedic index of ribald humor among the peasantry, read alongside Febvre’s catalog of the period’s clerical jokes, should temper some of the apparent scandal that we might want to project onto the sensual representation of the body, the earthy folk wisdom, and the word-drunk linguistic revelry on display in Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Bakhtin identifies three distinguishing traits that set the “ritual” laughter of the Renaissance apart from the “corrective” laughter of satirical mockery: it was communal rather than individual; it was universally directed at “everything and everyone,” including its participants; and it was an ambivalent combination of jubilee and ridicule that celebrated the cycle of death and rebirth. The radical originality of Rabelais and His World lies in the central place that Bakhtin gives to this ambivalence. This is also where Bakhtin parts ways with Febvre, who suggests that it was Rabelais’s singular talent that distinguished him from other writers of sixteenth-century satire.'