In fact, as Bakhtin notes, late-medieval laughter marked a victory, albeit temporary, not just over the sacred and even over death it also signalled ‘the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that represses and restricts’. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive.

Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. For medieval man, laughter was the great leveller. Laughter is no different than political systems, commercial relations or artistic practices: it evolves over time, the result and cause of material and social transformations. The possibility of reviving Rabelaisian laughter is as daunting as, say, reviving the Livonian language. It is a kind of laughter that, like any of the countless dialects or languages over the millennia, withered and died.

In his landmark Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin suggested that the laughter resounding through Rabelais’s work was particular, and practised at specific moments. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good – and right kind of – laugh.įifty years ago, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin presented Gargantua and Pantagruel as a unique and foreign world, at once beautiful and repulsive. For the good doctor, grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. No matter how you approach them, they are volcanic and titanic, immense and elemental.Īnd this is how Rabelais wanted it. Driven by an insatiable hunger for both food and knowledge, endowed with great intellectual as well as physical brawn, and prone to laughter as seismic as an earthquake, the eponymous father-and-son duo overwhelm. Several years, and several hundred pages later, he loosed Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64) on the world. In early 16th-century France, François Rabelais, who had already made his reputation as a doctor of theology and of medicine, a scholar and a scallywag, turned his hand to novel-writing.

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