by Mary Beard
The book originated in Bakhtin’s doctoral dissertation. Written in the 1930s and defended amid controversy in the late 1940s (several of the examiners wished to fail it32), it was first published in Russian in 1965 and in English in 1968. Although—or perhaps because—Bakhtin had been consistently marginalized by the Soviet authorities, Rabelais quickly became influential among historians and critics in the West.33 In truth, the book is complicated and in places—unless the English translation, on which most Western readers have relied, is very misleading—allusive, epigrammatic, and arguably self-contradictory.34 It is also wide-ranging, making theoretical contributions to a number of very different fields. But historians have nevertheless extracted from it a powerful view of the development in the uses of laughter in the West, which forms the essential background to Bakhtin’s exploration of Rabelais’s extravagant satire and its later reception. In very broad terms, it runs along the following lines.
Bakhtin identified a clear distinction in the High Middle Ages between the popular culture of carnival—with its stress on the unbridled, all-embracing, life-giving force of laughter, often mediated through “the lower bodily stratum” (or “bums, farts and other transgressions,” as Vic Gatrell glossed it35)—and the decidedly nonlaughing, agelastic culture of the state and the church. These two spheres were brought together in Rabelais and other sixteenth-century writers when, for a brief period, high literary culture embraced vernacular, popular humor—“laughter in its most radical, universal and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture” to take its place in the “sphere of great literature and high ideology.” From the seventeenth century on, however, the “people’s festive laughter” was diluted. Partly under the influence of early modern absolute monarchy, the true culture of carnival disintegrated, to be replaced by mere mockery, “erotic frivolity,” and an attenuated, ironic, bourgeois version of the earlier lusty festivities. It became, in other words, light entertainment, not liberation.36
These ideas have been inspirational, exercising a powerful influence on many leading critics and historians. “Bakhtin’s concepts of ‘carnivalization’ . . . ‘grotesque realism’ and the like are so frequently employed that it is difficult to remember how we managed without them.”37 Yet at the same time—in whole or in detail—they raise a series of well-known, and much-discussed, problems. His characterization of the honest, earthy, incorporating laughter of carnival has certainly appealed to the nostalgia and the dreams of many decidedly unearthy, deskbound scholars, but in its simplest form it hardly stands up to historical scrutiny. Indeed, establishment apparatchiks though they may have been, several of Bakhtin’s doctoral examiners were rightly skeptical of his hard-line views on the popular character of medieval laughter (“I am afraid that when we evaluate the popular or non-popular nature of a movement only from the perspective of laughter, then we will diminish any notion of popular character,” as one, not unreasonably, put it38).
Many later critics have had equally severe reservations about Bakhtin’s notion that carnivalesque laughter was a wholly positive and liberating force. For, of course, carnival could be a site of conflict, fear, contestation, and violence too. Or alternatively, the temporary, licensed transgression that carnival allowed could be seen as a defense of the orthodox social and political hierarchy rather than a challenge to it (the price that the people paid for a few days of inversionary fun was knowing their place for the remaining 360-something days of the year).39 There is also the question of whether the culture of church and state was quite as agelastic as Bakhtin claimed (courtiers and clerics laughed too) or whether the laughter associated with the lower bodily stratum was in general restricted to the common people. Whatever their expressions of disapproval, the elite too have often found (and still find) that farts and phalluses can prompt laughter. In the eighteenth century, for example, as Gatrell has insisted, saucy comic prints were often “unmitigatedly ‘low’ by polite standards” but nonetheless aimed at an elite audience (“Indicators of low manners in high places multiply as this book progresses,” he sharply observes).40
There are, however, two other problems with Bakhtin’s approach that are particularly relevant to my project.
SATURNALIAN FUN
The first problem is a specifically classical one: namely, Bakhtin’s reconstruction of the Roman festival of Saturnalia as an ancient ancestor of carnival, and so a key component in the “laughterhood” of ancient Rome. This rather flimsy idea is, for classicists, one of Bakhtin’s most misleading legacies and deserves more challenge than it usually receives. I need to explain why the fun, games, and laughter of the Saturnalia are not at center stage in this book.
The Roman religious festival of the god Saturn took place over a number of days in December.41 Involving both civic and domestic celebrations, it is one of the least understood but most confidently talked about of all Roman rituals—partly because of the easy assumption that it somehow represents the Roman origin of “our” Christmas (parties and presents in midwinter) and partly because it has been cast as a popular inversionary ritual, standing, conceptually at least, at the head of the whole Western tradition of carnival (a temporary topsy-turvy world, full of popular laughter and of the lower bodily stratum). This model of the festival was not entirely Bakhtin’s creation. You can find superficially similar approaches in James Frazer’s Golden Bough, as well as in Nietzsche42—and in any case, many modern specialists in ancient ritual may never have read Rabelais and His World. But the trickle-down effect has been strong, and the continuing popularity of this approach must largely be a consequence of the powerful impact (direct or indirect) of Bakhtin, who wrote of the “essence of carnival . . . most clearly expressed and experienced in the Roman Saturnalias [sic]” and of the inversionary “crowning and uncrowning of a clown” and the “tradition of freedom of laughter” during the festival—of which “faraway echoes” were still to be detected, he claimed, in later carnivalesque ceremonies.43
Indeed, classicists often present the festival itself, along with a range of associated “Saturnalian literature,” in even more strongly carnivalesque terms. It is commonly said, for example, that a whole series of hierarchical role reversals defined the Saturnalia: that slaves were waited on at dinner by their masters; that anyone (from slave to clown) could be chosen by lot to be the master of ceremonies, or “king,” of the festival; that the festal dress for the free population was the pilleus, which was the distinctive headdress of the ex-slave; and even that the slaves actually took charge of their households while the festivities lasted. What is more, the occasion is supposed to have featured the kind of “exuberant gorgings and even more excessive drinking bouts” that we associate with carnival, as well as the general license to gamble (strictly controlled for the rest of the year), to party, to speak your mind (no matter what your station in life)—and to laugh.44 Against this background have been set all kinds of well-known literary manifestations of the topsy-turvy Saturnalian spirit: from the satiric free speech of Seneca’s skit on the deification of the emperor Claudius, the Apocolocyntosis (often imagined to have been written for the Saturnalia of 54 CE),45 to Horace’s clever characterization of his slave Davus (who is given a chance to expose his master’s vices in a poem explicitly set at the Saturnalia),46 not to mention the whole world of Roman comedy, where the (temporary) victories of the clever slave over the dim master, and the laughter they provoke, can seem reminiscent of the (temporarily) inversionary world of Saturnalian carnival.47
The trouble is that there is much less ancient evidence for this proto-carnival than is usually assumed. It is true that the Romans wrote up the Saturnalia in ludic terms: we certainly have evidence for its sense of play, its parade of freedom (which Horace’s Davus is imagined to exploit when he points up the failings of his master), and its suspension of normal social rules (togas off, gaming boards out).48 But some of the most distinctive features of the Bakhtinian carnival—the gross overconsumption, the emphasis on inversion, on t
he lower bodily stratum, and even the laughter—are much harder to document. The references we have to increased wine allowances or special food are neither restricted to the Saturnalia nor treated by Roman writers as particularly gross.49 And beyond the fantasy of the poor old emperor Claudius shitting himself in the Apocolocyntosis50 (which may or may not be a strictly Saturnalian work), there is little hint of carnivalesque scatology: most Saturnalian wit comes across as rather refined, or at least verbal, and even the role of laughter is relatively subdued. In fact, the elite literary jesting that we witness in Macrobius’ late-antique literary celebration Saturnalia may not be as untypical (or as “late”) as is often imagined.51
More significant, though, the idea of role reversal, so characteristic of carnival, is a much flimsier construction than is usually allowed. There are, it is true, a couple of (late) references in ancient literature to slaves being served by their masters at the Saturnalian dinner.52 Even so, some of the apparently key passages disappear on closer examination: the notion, for example, that the slaves ruled the household at the Saturnalia is the result of some imaginative repunctuation of a sentence of the philosopher Seneca, while other passages have been no less imaginatively (mis)translated.53 And—whether the drawing of lots was rigged or not—the most famous “Saturnalian king” to have come down to us, indeed the only one we know by name, turns out to have been the emperor Nero.54
In fact, the emphasis in most ancient writing is not on reversal as such but on the social equality that apparently ruled during the festival. As Bakhtin himself acknowledged, ancient accounts stress that the Saturnalia represented not so much an overturning of social distinctions but rather a return to a primitive world in which such distinctions did not yet exist. In line with this, we find repeated emphasis on the fact that masters and slaves sat down together at dinner and that anyone was allowed to speak freely to anyone else across social boundaries. It is significant too that in their pillei, free Romans wore the costume not of slaves but of ex-slaves—a mediating category, which leveled rather than reversed social distinctions.55
Of course, the real-life Saturnalia must have come in many very different forms, and the views of the slaves and the poor (which we don’t have) were unlikely to have been the same as those of the rich (which we do). But it is hard to resist the conclusion that in casting the festival in the mold of an inversionary carnival, Bakhtin and others have misrepresented, or highly selectively presented, what was for the most part a rather prim—or at least paternalistic56—occasion as a raucous festival of belly laughs and the lower bodily stratum. For this reason, though laughter may have been one element at a good Saturnalia, I shall not put much emphasis on the festival.
NARRATIVES OF CHANGE
The second problem with Bakhtin’s approach—also raised by Thomas’s essay—is far broader. It is the question of the very nature and status of a historical account of laughter. What kind of history are we telling when we try to tell “the history of laughter”? What is it a history of?
However we choose to contest many of the details of Bakhtin’s account, from his interpretation of an ancient festival to his reading of Rabelais, there is one underlying principle that guides his work and that he shares with—or has bequeathed to—Thomas and many other scholars: namely, the idea that it is possible, not merely that “it would be interesting,” in Herzen’s famous phrase, to write a diachronic history of laughter as a social phenomenon. There is, of course, a compelling logic here. If laughter—its practice, customs, and objects—is found in different forms, according to context, place, or period, then it follows that laughter must necessarily be capable of change. If it can change, then surely we should be able to write a developmental history that delineates and even attempts to account for the transformation.
True. But the process is much trickier, in both theory and practice, than any such simple logic makes it seem. For the attempt to write a diachronic history raises once more, and in yet more acute form, all those questions about the relationship between laughter and the cultural discourse of laughter that I have already touched on (see pp. 7–8, 24, 45–46). To put this at its simplest, what is it that changes over time? Is it the practice of laughter as it was seen and heard? Or the rules, protocols, and discursive conventions that surrounded it? Or is it partly both? In which case, how can we now distinguish between those two aspects?
We certainly cannot assume that laughter was more restrained in a period when the rules governing its occurrence were more insistent. It is perfectly conceivable that raucous chuckles might ring out pretty much as before (though perhaps in tactically changed locations) in the face of new prohibitions. One critic has recently—and aptly—described the British eighteenth century as “an impolite world that talked much about politeness.”57 And it may well have been that the behavior of the unfortunate Chesterfield son remained more or less unaffected by the strictures against “audible laughter” laid down by his obsessive father—whose advice was regarded in some quarters as maverick as soon as it was published (and certainly not as the orthodoxy that it is often presented as today).58
Likewise, Thomas in his lecture repeatedly pointed to areas of continuity even where he wished to show drastic change: the feasts of misrule, with their raucous burlesques, gradually faded over the seventeenth century (except, as he concedes, “annual occasions of burlesque and misrule lingered in many small communities until the nineteenth century”); rough forms of ridicule were tempered (albeit “among the common people these new attitudes were slower to take root. . . . Rough music and charivari continued in the villages”); jokes in general became more delicate by 1700 (though “middle-class delicacy took time to triumph. . . . Jest-books were really not cleaned up until the early nineteenth century”).59
But that is only one side of the story. For we must also assume that over time, new rules and protocols could have a major impact on where and when and at what laughter erupted. Or alternatively, we might infer that some of those new protocols were developed precisely to reflect “changing sensibilities” in the practice of laughter. After all, we don’t now laugh at cuckolds, one of Thomas’s key examples of Tudor ribaldry (or do we?).
These problems are tricky enough, but they are only the start of the intriguing methodological and heuristic dilemmas entailed in laughter’s history. We might want to argue, for example, that his father’s rules necessarily made Chesterfield Junior’s laughter different, even if it continued in outwardly the same way (laughing in the face of prohibition is never the same as laughing with approval). We might also want to suggest that the attempt to separate laughter practice from laughter discourse is unhelpful or even actively misleading: “laughter” as an object of study is an inextricable combination of bodily disruption and discursive interrogation, explanation, and protocol. Or is that combination merely a useful alibi for our inability to “hear,” as Thomas would have it, the laughter of past times and its changing registers?
The closest comparison that I know—and one that helps us appreciate the perils and rewards of the history of laughter—is the history of sex and sexuality. We can track important changes in the discursive practices surrounding sex and in the regimes of policing and control that claimed to govern sexual conduct in the past. But it remains much less clear how these related to changes in what people actually did in bed and with whom, or the pleasure they derived: restrictive talk does not necessarily correlate with restrictive behavior, though it may do. It is also well known, of course, that the history we choose to tell of the sexual conduct of our predecessors is almost always deeply loaded and ideological, often as much an implicit judgment of ourselves as a scrutiny of the past—whether a celebration of our own “tolerance” or a lament for our “prudishness.”
Much the same is true in histories of laughter, which show a repeating pattern almost no matter what period or what culture is concerned. On the one hand we find commentators and critics focusing on, and indeed ridiculing, the occasional extreme agelas
ts of the past or particularly agelastic moments. It is to this tendency that Lord Chesterfield owes his fame, likewise that cliché of Victorian humorlessness “We are not amused.”60 Agelasts indeed, as the Romans also found, can be very laughable. On the other hand, the overall developmental story is almost invariably similar to that told by Thomas and, with significantly different nuances, by Bakhtin—a version (as Thomas himself saw) of “the civilizing process.”
Diachronic histories of laughter regularly tell of the taming of the crude, the bawdy, the cruel and lusty. They may look back in nostalgia to a time when laughter was more honestly earthy (as Roger Chartier observed of contemporary discussions of medieval carnival, they always sited the truly carnivalesque some time in the past61). Or they may take pride in the growing refinement that has outlawed the crudity of earlier forms of laughter or spared some innocent victims of ridicule. So far as I have been able to discover, there is no culture in the world that claims to laugh more coarsely or more cruelly than its predecessors. Earthy is only ever a retrospective designation. The modern history of laughter, in other words, is always bound up with a judgment (whether good or ill) on social and cultural progress.62
