Anshen on Bakhtin: serious laughter

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two: Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO CATEGORISING MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

Anshen continues discussing some of the categories of critics Eagleton and Milne introduce in their anthology Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996).

Here he touches upon Bakhtin:

     Another great work of 'anthropological' Marxism that illuminates Eagleton's concept is Mikhail Bakhtin's study Rabelais and His World (1965). In this work Bakhtin, whom we encountered earlier in relation to Dostoevsky, provides an impressive analysis of the Renaissance and the function and role of laughter, carnival, the grotesque and the 'lower body'. Bakhtin argues that in the repressive climate of the feudal period 'Medieval laughter is directed at the same object as Medieval seriousness'. He goes on to argue that 'One might say that it [laughter] builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state' (88).

....Bakhtin points out that the laughter had an 'indissoluble and essential relation to freedom' and that it particularly developed during the 'feast' and periods of carnival. 'The comic rituals of the feasts of fools, the feast of the ass, and the various comic processions and ceremonies of other feasts enjoyed a certain legality' although 'the legalization was forced, incomplete, led to struggles and new prohibitions' that in turn led to a situation where 'the Church and state were obliged to make concessions'.

....This spirit of rebellion against authority, religious dictates, dismissal of the body, and denigration of the popular masses, were captured in the novels of Rabelais, according to Bakhtin. Such a spirit, however, does not only exist in Rabelais. Bakhtin could have expanded his analysis

and considered Boccaccio's Decameron or even Chaucer to find similar processes. Indeed, the Marxist-influenced critic and anthropologist Georges Batailles writes about similar carnivalesque or Dionysian ceremonies elsewhere, stressing their link with death more than rebellion but observing similar phenomena as an almost universal process.

....multiple voices compete, which makes discourse into something between a symbolic form of class struggle and literally the voices and elements of rival ideologies clashing.

....When we combine this analysis with Bakhtin's treatment of medieval laughter, we get a class struggle of the body, the parody, the dirty joke and flatulence. The only danger with this kind of analysis is that if the class struggle is everywhere, critics might argue, it effectively is nowhere.

....there have been centuries of avant-garde provocations, whether Dadaist or more political, like the Surrealists or the later French group, the Situationists, that have disrupted cultural/political events in the name of rebellion, living 'authentic lives' or forming alternative lifestyles. At times this leads to various utopian communes and collectives setting up to withdraw from capitalist society, usually for short periods of time, and these gestures seem easily absorbed by mainstream culture and even become commodified.

....Slavoj Žižek has often ridiculed such pretensions, claiming that the surplus we get when buying these products, the 'moral' surplus of contemporary 'responsible' capitalism, already gets figured into the price, and in the case of 'healthy' alternatives such as caffeine-free coffee, actually just diminishes pleasure. So from the vantage point of the present, ideas of cultural resistance to capitalism from within capitalism seem doomed to failure except as minor gestures more designed to assuage guilt more than to change anything (The Pervert's Guide to Ideology).

....Bakhtin's attention to the subversive qualities of laughter, satire, popular theatre and Dionysian revelries in the medieval period play a different function than the prevalence of pseudo-cultural rebellion offered for sale in our contemporary state of capitalism as a world system.

....these gestures meant something specific. The ruling class attempted complete control, not only over society but also over the souls of the common people. The rulers functioned as both the state and the dominant 'ideological apparatus' (to borrow the term from Louis Althusser). The tone they attempted to impose on daily life saturated daily life with the strains of sombre, bitter, 'nasty, short and brutish' (to paraphrase Hobbes) existence that, not surprisingly, required some cathartic relief....

     What we get from Bakhtin's analysis is....  that no matter how oppressive, bleak and fearful existence was, the oppressed masses found methods of expressing their discontent and hostility to a social order that tried to control not just their lives but impose itself on their dreams, in the form of nightmarish visions of hell, demons, monsters and worse lives to come in an afterlife dominated by fear, should they (the masses) act in ways that the authorities disapproved of and tried to suppress. Rather than submit to fear and a lifetime of misery, the popular masses found any excuse to poke fun at the authorities, challenge the official dogma, and assert that the lower body, meaning both the organs of reproduction and excretion, and the lower classes in the social body of society, had their say.

....What is important in Bakhtin's analysis, which, not coincidentally, developed in the darkest nights of Stalinist Russia, when Zhdanovism and 'socialist realism' maintained a puritanical attitude to sexuality as well as non-proscribed politics, remains the demonstration that the human spirit of rebellion was not squashed.

....no matter how authoritarian the conditions, something rebellious broke out, sporadically but reliably, to assert fundamental unhappiness with a social order that basically forbade happiness. Rather than looking to the past and seeing an unending succession of oppressive conditions, Bakhtin finds those moments, again probably somewhat fleeting, where rebellion and resistance, while hidden, eventually come to the surface of society.

Jay

4 November 2021